Physmotor performance? Particle clouds?

[Terr]

I've got a phys_motor driving the slow movement of some non-solid brushes with clouds painted on them in the 3D skybox.

(1) Does anybody know if this is a significant performance issue? (Some other person's anecdotal "lost X fps everywhere" account suggests so.)

Secondly, I'm experimenting with recreating the effect as a single-particle system with a circular orbit in the skybox. There's a glitch with viewer orientation left, but it seems doable.

Currently I'm working with the skybox/cloud01* textures, with a radius of 850 (measured in the 3D skybox area.) They each complete a circle about once every 900-1100 seconds. I'm use four info_particle_system entities, one for each unique cloud texture.

(2) Is there a way to tell a particle to take on a single random texture from a set? (Or random frame from an "animation" set?)

(3) If this works out, does anybody have requests for cloud patterns (image, image scaling, radius, angular velocity) in the PCF? (I've tried to use control-points to avoid hardcoding, but the right options just aren't there.)

 

[n30n]

For one, something like that is in egypt. Func_rotating in middle of skybox with brushes with clouds parented to it. For est i have no idea.

 

[Terr]

Isn't func_rotating broken?

 

[A Boojum Snark]

Just use a func_door_rotating. Works fine for such a purpose.

 

[Terr]

Does it have less overhead than phys_motor on non-solid objects? (Not that I'm sure phys_motor is even the performance problem.)

My hope is that by using the particle system, it'll be using one of the few things the TF2 engine seems to effectively offload to multiple processors, along with getting better options for animated clouds, alpha changes, etc. (Maybe even oval paths for certain maps, but I'm not sure how I'd get that working yet.)

 

[A Boojum Snark]

I'm quite certain any non-physics entity has less overhead than a physics one.

 

[Washipato]

Like ABS said, a func_door_rotating will do the work very well. From my experience, it has almost no impact in performance.