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Emitters window

Emitters window

The Emitters window lists every emitter in the effect you are editing. Each row is one emitter, with the controls you use most often — enable/disable, visibility, and rename — right on the row.

Toolbar

The panel's buttons sit in its title bar, to the right of the tab. There are two of them:

  • Add new emitter — appends a new emitter to the effect.
  • Add folder — creates a folder. Folders are purely for organizing the list; they do not affect how the effect simulates or exports.

Particle counters

The last row of the list is a summary: two blue particle counters for the whole effect. The total is aligned with the per-emitter live counts above it, so the list reads like a table with its sum at the bottom. The counters read like this:

95 / max. 100
  • The first number is the total particle count across all emitters in the current preview frame — how many particles the effect is using right now.
  • The number after max. is the highest total reached over the simulated timeline so far.

Both numbers are compacted for readability once they get large: 1.5K means 1 500 particles, 2M means two million.

The counters stay hidden until the preview has actually simulated something, so a freshly opened effect shows no numbers rather than a misleading 0. Once the timeline has simulated, the counters appear even if the effect currently holds no particles — 0 / max. 0 means "simulated, and nothing is alive", which is different from showing nothing at all.

What the maximum measures

The maximum is taken over every simulated frame, not only the moments the display happens to refresh. A brief spike is therefore never missed, and the number matches the peak of the population curve in the Timeline preview.

The maximum is not permanent:

  • Restarting the preview clears the simulated history, so the maximum resets and starts building up again.
  • Editing the effect can invalidate part of the timeline history and force a re-simulation. The maximum is then recalculated from what remains, so it can go down — for example if the peak happened in the part of the timeline that was just invalidated.

Reading the counters together

The current total always matches the sum of the live counts shown on the individual emitter rows (see below), so you can use the summary row as the effect-wide figure and the row numbers to see which emitter contributes what.

Runtime buffer size

At the left of the same summary row is the effect's runtime buffer size — how much memory one instance of the effect needs while it runs:

1.69Mb

This is the figure to budget against when deciding whether an effect is affordable in the game or page it ships into. It is the cost of one instance of the effect, exactly as a game would allocate it — not the several copies the editor's own timeline keeps in order to scrub backwards — so it can be read directly as "this effect costs 1.69 Mb".

The breakdown

Hover the readout to see what the figure is made of:

  • CPU memory — with the CPU renderer, the simulation's state plus the buffers used to sort particles by depth; with GPU33, the buffers kept in main memory.
  • GPU memory — with the CPU renderer, the per-particle data handed to the graphics card; with GPU33, the buffers kept on the graphics card.

Both parts mean the same kind of thing under either renderer, so the numbers can be compared across them. The tooltip also gives the exact byte counts, which is where the arithmetic can be checked: the figure in the row is shortened for width, and shortening always rounds down (a buffer of 2047 bytes reads 1.99Kb, never 2Kb).

Why it does not move

Unlike the particle counters beside it, this figure is not a measurement of what is in use right now. It is the amount of memory reserved, decided by the effect's settings — above all the particle capacities you set on each emitter. It therefore stays still while particles are born and die.

It changes when the effect changes: raise an emitter's capacity, add or remove an emitter, or edit the scheme, and the readout updates to the new cost as soon as the preview rebuilds. Switching between the CPU and GPU33 renderers also changes it, since the two allocate differently.

Units are chosen for readability — bytes, then Kb, then Mb.

Row indicators

Each emitter row shows two numbers on its right side:

  • A blue live count — how many particles this emitter has in the current preview frame. Like the summary counters, it appears only once the preview has simulated. It is shown as N /, immediately before the capacity badge.
  • A grey capacity badge — the emitter's particle capacity, that is its maximum number of particles as configured in the emitter's properties. This is a limit you set, not a measurement: it does not change while the preview runs.

For an emitter attached to another emitter, the capacity badge also shows the fan-out, for example 500 × 3 = 1.5K — capacity per instance, number of instances, and the resulting total.

Comparing the blue live count against the grey capacity tells you how close an emitter is to its limit. An effect that constantly runs at capacity is usually a sign the capacity should be raised, or that particles are living longer than intended.