So any particle system I drop into the Scene view in the editor does not play. Even creating a default one right from the menu doesn’t play (not in the Particle Editor window either). I’ve noticed the Particle Effect little preview window has changed and now has a “Restart” button. Underneath of it is a value called “Playback Time”. This value is 0 by default. If I scrub it, the particle system does play the proper particles. What is going on with this? Is this user error with something? It’s always been that when I create a default particle system (from the main menu) into the Scene view it plays.
Hi JamesArndt,
I just tried it an it works fine for me.
Since the playback time is not advancing, I wonder if you might have set your time scale to 0.
Can you go to Edit → Project Settings → Time and check what the Time Scale value is? The default value is 1.
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Ha ha you know I’ve been using Unity now for 10 years and sometimes it’s the simplest thing I just don’t think to check. Mostly because I never mess with Time Scale on my own, however I imported a few packages last night and one of them must have modified it for some reason. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
Haha, happens to everyone 
You’re welcome, glad this helped!
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Well since you’ve been so helpful maybe you could point me in a good direction for getting a particle system to emit via script. Stuff I’ve found online for doing it just ends up in compiler errors at runtime. No good deed goes unpunished
You mean something like this? https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ParticleSystem.Emit.html
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Awesome that did the trick! For some reason Googling it led to outdated docs and or Unity Answers that didn’t work any longer. Again, always look over the official latest documentation…and it appears Google archives and displays outdated docs if you hunt for them via Google.
FYI @VladVNeykov and I are experimenting with adding a bit of info in the UI, to detect and inform about this situation, as you’re not the first person to get caught out by it
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That’s awesome! Thank you for the hard work you put in on the engine. I’ve found I go directly to Google for pretty much any script issue or implementation I have to do. I feel if the documentation info were more integrated virtually into the engine UI itself that would be a huge help. I know the little “blue book” button exists over any component and it will take you to the docs, but for some reason I always overlook/don’t notice it (and this is after like 8-10 years of using Unity).