Particle Emitter Only Works in Scene Design Mode

Scene & World Building
1

I created a volcano using the details in the book, Unity Game Development Essentials. I have the particle emitter, particle animator, and particle renderer defined. They appear to work when in Scene Design mode. But when I build and test the scene, the particles do not emit.

I reviewed the book, and I found that two enhancements in the same chapter which were meant to improve the appearance and performance of the game, interfered with the emitter. First, the book recommends enabling fog. When I enable fog, I lose my particle emitter completely. So I removed the fog. Does anyone know why? Is it the fog’s alpha setting and/or color?

Also, I noticed that my particles were getting clipped far below the max energy that I specified. Another enhancement that was recommended in the chapter was to decrease the camera clip plane to improve performance. But when I do this, my volcano’s smoke gets clipped and it looks bad. At least I understand why this happens.

2

Try switching to scene mode while the game is running and have a look at the object with the particle system from there. If you select this object, you might see the particles being drawn invisibly, but with wireframe outlines. If so, check that the particle material is still correctly assigned. If not, check the emit flag is enabled and also look around the scene to check if the particles are being drawn in the wrong place.