Summary
Placing the VFX Spawner Device will not play. If it is set to Enabled On Phase:Always it will not play when the game starts. If it is set to Enabled On Phase: None it will not play when it is enabled during gameplay.
The current fix for this is to write verse code that teleports the VFX spawner somewhere. My fix was looping through every VFX spawner and teleporting it to its current location, then disabling the device after. The device immediately works when teleported and you are then freely available to enable and disable and it behaves as expected.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Devices
Steps to Reproduce
1: Place VFX Spawner in World
Expected Result
VFX Plays
Observed Result
VFX does not play, even if set to always enabled and or it is enabled by another device.
Teleporting the device at the start of the game however causes the device to play.
Platform(s)
PC
Additional Notes
The VFX Creator device works perfectly fine and has more options. However the VFX Spawner device has much better premade VFX. I suggest just being able to select the premade ones from the VFX spawner in the VFX creator device.
Hello,
I’m having trouble reproducing this.
I’ve enabled Physics (as mentioned in your other bug report)
I placed a VFX Spawner with Effect Type Continuous → Disco Balls and they appeared as expected.
Do you need to place the VFX Device a certain distance away from your spawn?
I also tried with Effect Type Burst → Explosion Large (Restart function referencing a button press) and that also worked.
Does this only happen when the VFX spawner is referenced with an @editable in Verse?
Hello,
I did some further testing and it seems like it is a rendering issue rather than the device being broken and not activating. In UEFN there is a full row of the VFX Spawner devices that are set always active (For testing purposes I just set them to always active, it is different than what I was originally trying to do but it shows the same bug clearly).
In edit mode I observed that none of the lazers were rendered, however as I got closer (a lot closer than expected, they were suddenly rendered in).
In game mode I observed only the middle lazers were rendered and the ones on the sides were not rendered, however as I got closer to the ones on the sides they suddenly rendered.
It makes sense that they would not be rendered from a certain distance but it seems very unpredictable and seems like the implementation is broken as sometimes it will not render at all or only some will (As seen in the game mode screenshots). I suspect the teleportation trick that is suggested to mitigate this issue works because the engine re renders the newly teleported object.
I placed the device in another island that did not have physics and I kinda observed the same thing, I did not see the VFX until I seemed to get really close to it where it suddenly rendered in for me. I have my graphics settings pretty high, Even if I was on the lowest settings however this seems a little aggregous of optimization if a vfx cannot be seen from 100 meters away. Which is why this seems more like a bug than anything.
Thanks for digging in.
Although the Epic-Created VFX ‘NS_Laserbeams’ is a black-box, there’s some switches and knobs still accessible on the VFX device. - Scroll down in the VFX Spawner Component list to find the NiagaraComponent
Try experimenting with things like ‘Allow Scalability’, Bounds Scale, and Most Importantly - the settings in the ‘LOD’ section. (‘Never Distance Cull’ sounds promising)
I just set up a quick test with a laser emitter and a cube 100m(10000cm) away and was not able to reproduce the culling. Maybe a certain number of VFX are required to reproduce this?
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Yeah I’ll try to play around with it but I ended up just teleporting them to their own position and it got them all working as expected. It’s not the end of the world thing, just small things like this that seemingly randomly happen, end up turning something that should take 10 mins to do into a couple hours of researching and troubleshooting. But I guess thats what beta is all about lol.
