particles, how to make them look nice in game?

[Nuke]

its not hard to come up with spectacular particle effects in the unity editor. problem is you export them into the game and they end up turning into generic particle streams. i had fairly good looking particles before squad changed the system. so what am i doing wrong? its not exactly wysiwyg.

 

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did some research and it appears that not all of the shuriken features are supported. so all these numbers im tweaking do nothing. investigating use of plugins (smoke screen looks nice) but i still want fallback plumes in case the plugin is not installed. would be supported through a mod man patch. but if anyone has any tips on how to make the fallback plumes look good with stock features only, that would be great. some of my effects survived the particlepocalypse so i might retain them (my mpd plumes still look nice).

Edited January 23, 2019 by Nuke

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Hi you're not alone,  i think the new particle system, or more exactly the butchered version of what was one of the best particle systems you could get,  that we are offered with part tools is horrible beyond words.  As you say it takes many hours of loading ksp, testing closing ksp, adjusting the effect in unity, reloading ksp and on and on, to get anywhere, what you see in unity is DEFINITELY not what you get in KSP and  that sucks.

Despite early requests by modders for Squad to make a how to,  it never happened , and having done the round of  videos  on using the unity FX, it all turns out pretty useless, because half of what the videos will tell you to do and use has been disabled/crippled/%$£^ *& .  So as you may gather it's my current pet hate.

On a more positive note i've had some luck  using the old U5 part tools in U 2017  and remaking the fx ,  the results are not magnificent BUT they are better than imo  the fluffy cotton balls that take 5 times longer to make that you get out the 2017 version. Not sure how it works, all that i know is that it does (sometimes),  which right now I'll take

Edited January 23, 2019 by SpannerMonkey(smce)

[Nertea]

Like @SpannerMonkey(smce) says, the best option is currently to ignore the idiotic new tools and use the old ones. The new ones, if used perfectly, provide approximately zero increase in capability for a bunch more work. A fully usable Shuriken exporter would be great but I doubt we'll ever get that. 

I'd say it's very possible to make very nice plumes in the legacy system though. 

[Nuke]

ive put my particles on hold while i tend to more workable problems (mod is full of those). i still got some of my old particle effect mu files but i lost the scene i set them all up with (i actually tried to migrate to the new system and accidentally saved over my old version). maybe i got a copy on an old hard drive. setting up the old unity tools is probably my best bet. would be nice if the full shruiken system was supported because i made some really nice effects.

Edited January 24, 2019 by Nuke