Is there a way to make a particle emitter spawn with zero live particles and then spawn them at a constant rate thereafter?
Unfortunately the “spawn rate” parameter seems to want to fill particles out across an imaginary timeline in both directions; that is, the particle system spawns the particles at the rate that I want, but when I spawn the particle system in the level, it simply pops into existence with a full set of particles. What I want is for it to spawn with zero particles and then start adding them according to spawn rate.
EDIT: Wait, found a way to work around this. If you set the emitter delay to be >= the maximum potential lifetime of a particle, then the emitter can only come into existence after all of the “imagined prior” particles have died. In other words, it starts with zero particles and spawns from there.