Not sure if this is a bug or just me being a big dummy, but I’m noticing a really obvious visual deficiency in my game when playing launched vs in the editor (see pic attached).
The AnimTrail is drawn with a nice, smooth curve when playing in-editor, but when launched, it seems to want to redraw curves far more harshly, and the end result is long stretches of straight line with rounded corners.
I might have expected the opposite behavior, for the game to look worse in-editor as some sort of shortcut was being taken when running the game alongside all the editor functions. But it seems weird to me that the editor should produce these well-smoothed curves but for me to get ugly, irregular AnimTrails when the game is launched by itself.
I suspect it’s actually the opposite of what I think, that the AnimTrail particle system THINKS that making these tight, angular corners is the desired behavior and the wide arcs are a shortcut it’s taking to approximate that effect when playing in-editor but it’s not the behavior I’m after; I’m wondering if there’s a way to see what’s changing between in-editor and launched play so I can tune up the settings to get something closer to the desired effect.
Polite bump to say I solved this.
I have a 60Hz monitor, so what I didn’t realize was that the game was actually running in-editor at a steady 120 FPS! Since I had set the framerate cap for launch in the 60Hz range, the motion smoothness looked the same, but of course the trails were trying to interpolate based on half as many key positions since the game was only drawing half the number of positions for the sword during any given animation.
Regrettably that’s no ACTUAL fix, since there’s no way to get the launched game to run at 120 FPS (at a proper 1920 window size my machine is only getting 75-80 FPS, and my machine is more powerful than I’d expect the end user to have while playing). But it at least explains why the game is looking different in-editor and provides me with a way to rapidly test trail tessellation settings until I get something better.
Moral of the story, if your game looks different in-editor and launched, check your frame rates!
Bump to say I am COMPLETELY STUMPED.
I wish we had better documentation on AnimTrails because honestly I just cannot figure out how to get these to look round at 60FPS.
I’ve taken the tangent tessellation step size (and all other tessellation step sizes) down to freaking 0.1
0.1 degrees! It should be trying to tessellate like a jillion UV points in at this point, and it STILL produces that harsh, straight line unless the framerate is increased! And the thing is, I can set these values to pretty much whatever I want and the effect is completely the same. Nothing at all seems to change no matter what I do to this particle system. At a high framerate it’s round, at a lower framerate it’s not. That seems to be it. The options, as near as I can tell, don’t have ANY effect whatsoever.
Seriously, what am I missing here? The original pic was taken when the Tangent Tessellation Step Size was at 2.0. 2 DEGREES! Come on, that should be giving me better than a totally straight line, shouldn’t it? What do I need to do here?
I don’t know if this helps but somewhere I though I remember there being a way to enable sub step sampling. perhaps this could be enable for what you are doing. That being said does this mean that your sword there is hitting those 3 positions in 3 frames? if that is the case I think you animation is a little fast as an d arc like that I would image at 30fps should take around 15-16 frames minimum. Just my 2 cents.
The animation in the pic is a windmill swing (think Prop/Shredder from Devil May Cry) that goes around very fast, blurring into a circular shape.
At 120FPS it looks nice; at 60FPS it goes from circle to Hexagon.
What you’re saying about substepping is EXACTLY what I need (to sample the position of the sword more than once per frame for the particle system)… But do you have any idea how to do it? I know of physics sub-stepping but I’m not finding much beyond that.