SHP Railgun hack

[DCoder]

I've never understood the idea behind Gamemate's shp particles. I know it has to do with specifying BehavesLike= twice on a particle, but there is no code to actually do anything magic in that case. Can someone elaborate on what exactly this hack achieves and why it's not doable normally?

[Renegade]

Usually, the particles of a railgun are a generated field of dots. With the hack, the particles look like a specified SHP instead.

Why this reduces the lag I can't tell you, but if I had to guess, I'd assume it's because the normal particles are calculated at runtime, whereas the SHPs are basically just loaded. (Which would reduce the amount of CPU time per particle required.)

In addition, you of course have the benefit of customization - while normal particles are basically just colored dots, SHPs can look like anything.

I can confirm that the hack most definitely works, btw.

• Reference at DZ
  
• Reference at PPM
  

btw...you posted there as well.

[DCoder]

I don't doubt that it does work, what I doubt is that double-stating BehavesLike has the effect attributed to it. Thanks for the links.

[Beowulf]

It does. Seems they stack but I don't think it reduces lag in any way since it's still generating a particle effect regardless. I didn't notice any lag freedom. If anything, it seemed to be worse.

[Renegade]

I had the exact opposite experience - it worked completely as advertised. Where, usually, a single railgun would produce a noticeable moment of slowness, with the hack, I could have several of them fire at the same time without any lag.

[Beowulf]

Maybe I did it wrong. I followed exactly as Gamemate described and didn't notice a change. Maybe you had better hardware.

[Electro]

If Ren had better hardware it'd be slower. :xD: YR is like that, everything's inversely proportional to everything.