Toggle Emitter Every Second

Questions & Answers
1

I want to create a script to toggle a particle emitter on/off every second, but I can't seem to get it to work properly. Here's what I have so far:

var emissionTime : float = 1.0;
var emissionDelay : float = 1.0;

function Start() {
    TimedEmit();
}

function TimedEmit() {
    while (1) {
    	particleEmitter.emit = true;
    	yield WaitForSeconds(emissionTime);

    	particleEmitter.emit = false;
    	yield WaitForSeconds(emissionDelay);
    }
}

It almost works, except that it stops after 3 cycles (i.e. after turning on then off 3 times). What am I doing wrong?

2

The easiest way to do this is write a coroutine that yields for 1 second and then toggles the boolean

function MyCoroutine()
{
    while(condition == true)
    {
    	bool = !bool;
    	yield WaitForSeconds(1); // waits 1 second
    }
}

The bool would be your emitter value. booleans can be toggled by setting it to be "not it's current value" since there are only 2 possible values.

The coroutine will continue on until that condition is no longer true...

If you don't understand coroutines I wrote a tutorial a while back here:

http://infiniteunity3d.com/2009/09/27/tutorial-coroutines-pt-1-waiting-for-input/

Hope that helps!

==

3

I figured out that it was because since the particles had a lifespan (energy) of 1, the particle system was automatically destroying itself after all the particles died. To fix it, I simply set the autodestruct property of the particle animator to false. For anyone interested, here's the fixed code:

var emissionTime : float = 1.0;
var emissionDelay : float = 1.0;

function Start() {
    TimedEmit();
}

function TimedEmit() {
    GetComponent(ParticleAnimator).autodestruct = false;
    while (1) {
        particleEmitter.emit = true;
        yield WaitForSeconds(emissionTime);

        particleEmitter.emit = false;
        yield WaitForSeconds(emissionDelay);
    }
}