"house_smoke" effect bug

[Vendigo]

I have a question to my fellow mission builders - has any of you used the "house_smoke" effect extensively? Whenever I try to vivify a village by adding it to houses and cabins, I always find this specific effect's behaviour to be oddly different from all other effects (city fires, factory chimney smokes etc).

For example, I place a dozen or more "house_smoke" effects on top of the stovepipes in a village, and when I run the mission - it's always just a probability whether they will appear or not (normally they won't). But all other effects - big city and village fires, landfires - always do appear normally! This can be seen in the very beginning of the "Hunter in the snow" first mission - there are many "house_smoke" effects in the village around the player but they don't appear most of the times you run it!   

Then I make an empty test mission with just one player's vehicle, and only 2 or 3 "house_smoke" effects placed nearby - and voila, now they seem to appear every time! But I just can't get them to appear every time in a regular mission IF they are placed on top of the stovepipes! 

I am certian that something is off about the "house_smoke" effect, unlike all the other effects and maybe it is connected to how populated the mission is (although the missions are never too populated). 

Any thoughts?  Thanks! 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited March 22 by Vendigo

[AEthelraedUnraed]

Isn't it simply a cap on the number of effects that can appear? I know that's the case for runway lights - use 32 and it's fine. Add a 33rd, and they all disappear.

[CzechTexan]

1 hour ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Isn't it simply a cap on the number of effects that can appear? I know that's the case for runway lights - use 32 and it's fine. Add a 33rd, and they all disappear.

Hmm, that is interesting.  I did not know about limits of 32.  Does the cap apply to other things as well?

[Vendigo]

6 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Isn't it simply a cap on the number of effects that can appear? I know that's the case for runway lights - use 32 and it's fine. Add a 33rd, and they all disappear.

Actually, it doesn't seem that this problem with the "house_smoke" effect is caused by the cap limit - I have a bunch of house_smokes on top of the stovepipes in a village that just don't appear in mission, and then I add 6 more simply put in the middle of a road (ground level); and those on the road actually do appear in mission while those in the village still don't! But I will do more testing! 

Btw, have the devs released information on cap limits for various effects? I don't recall it.          

Edited March 22 by Vendigo

[Jaegermeister]

8 hours ago, Vendigo said:

Actually, it doesn't seem that this problem with the "house_smoke" effect is caused by the cap limit - I have a bunch of house_smokes on top of the stovepipes in a village that just don't appear in mission, and then I add 6 more simply put in the middle of a road (ground level); and those on the road actually do appear in mission while those in the village still don't! But I will do more testing! 

I have used the house smoke effect a lot. It is one of those effects that if you look away, the effect stops generating, and if you look back towards it, it starts again. I think if you keep your eye on the location of the effect, it will just need a couple of seconds to start generating. 

There is definitely a bug with smoke effects randomly having their elevation changed when the mission is opened and closed in the ME. I have never been able to isolate why it does that, so I just keep all smoke effects in a separate Group and reset their elevation every time I close the mission. For elevated chimney smoke effects 30 to 40 meters above ground level, I have never had to do that. Only for smoke placed at ground level. 

 

8 hours ago, Vendigo said:

Btw, have the devs released information on cap limits for various effects? I don't recall it.          

The limits on the number of objects and MCUs in missions are available to read by running an integrity check on a mission in the ME, but I have never found them to have a real impact on the mission. I think it is a legacy artifact from earlier versions. I do avoid having a bunch of enabled complex triggers to save resources, so they are activated and deactivated with triggers as needed. Besides that, I don't even try to meet those limits.

[Vendigo]

Thank you all! I am still struggling with this one. The house_smoke has a tendency of just refusing to appear in the right places, I check the elevation and such but still fail to have several houses with smoke emanating from the chimneys!