Weapons effects missing

You need to up the particle limit. They really ought to put a field in the effects menu to control this and make a min/max FPS setting link to it somehow.

You can change the maximum particles in the file (XP path) C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting\user.setting

Be aware that you need to have 'show hidden files and folders' enabled to be able to browse to this directory in explorer.

Open it with notepad and change the line MaxParticleCount to whatever you want. You will eventually lose frames from setting this too high with many ships and effects going off at once. I have a 7900GS and I seem to do ok with a setting of 15,000 even in quite large battles. Anti-aliasing and super/multisampling options will strongly affect how many particles will decrease the frame rate.

IMO they need to do something to address this, I'm seeing ALL my weapon effects disappear, save for the beam weapons, on even moderate sized battles with maybe 3 cap ships and 30 frigates cruisers and support per side. I have an 8800GTS 640MB, 2GB RAM and a 2.4GHz Core2 Duo, not really seeing a whole lot of slowdown on these battles so I don't understand why the effects would go away.

Any idea what the path is for Vista? Going to try changing the particle count value and see if it helps.

The vista path should be

C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting

The other setting there which will improve the visuals (and shouldn't cost frames if you have >256mb) is to set TextureCompressionEnabled to FALSE

I tried setting it to 60,000 and it did help a bit. No discernible performance loss. What is the maximum size particle count can be set to?

I don't know the maximum.

I don't know if it's so simple as 'no performance loss' - there will be a best and a worst case for this. For a simple game on a small map I am sure you could set this as high as you want. For a 10 player multi game with several big fleets pounding each other near a star and a tilted camera angle putting everything on a horizontal plane - that is where you would want some way to smartly adjust the number of particle effects. It would be good to have a smart threshold that would start scaling them back once FPS dropped below a limit and then raise them once it stabilised. Also if there was some way to preference weapon and special ability effect particles over drawing, say, the phase tunnel effects on a fleet far away from the camera...

We're currently thinking this is a bug, as it happens in small battles too.  Please zip up any save games you have where this is happening and send them along with a description to [email protected] so we can investigate further. Thanks!

I'm getting a good example ready for you right now. However I should mention that most often loading a save game seems to reset the particle effects for a short time before the issue resumes.

I just played a small battle with four capships, less than a dozen frigates and 6 squads of fighters. I had weapon effects but no explosion animations, the cap-ships just disapeared when dying. I'll try bumping up my particle count as well.