Particles doesn't work - how make it snow another way?

I tried the particle thing, but... forget it. Nothing works. So I want to use a transparent snow animation as an overlay. But even with webp this animation (I need it on nearly every stage) is huge. It's only 1024 x 720 px. Every scene starts with some seconds freezing. To make a smooth snow fall I have 12 f/s at least and to make an acceptable non-visible loop I use 30 pictures. But the most terrible thing is: this "transparency" isn't really transparent, I think. Clicking on an object beneath it sometimes doesn't work. The animation object conceals other objects.

Any idea to make it snow?

Machtnix

you kinda like BIG animations to put in your games, right ?

Maybe you could use animations, but not to animate the snow. Just a still image which you set as an animation and move this via a function.
Making 3-4 "layers"/animations and moving them in different speeds down and also using the shader toolkit to make them wobble a bit could imitate the particle system

No, I don't like big animations in every case... ;-) But what should I do? Snow falls on the whole scene, doesn't it?

And: 1024 x 720 isn't a big size today, I think. A big scrolling I tried in my spaceship game: I wanted to have an effect of a fast flying ship - so I needed to move the stars behind it with a 15 frame animation (physically not correct, I know, but seen in every Star Wars/-Trek movie...). THAT was huge, takes one minute to load,... and looks horrible with this "jump" every loop...

After some frustrating days I made a working particle effect with 50+50px non-transparent png at last. I never won't change the settings by now. :-) :-)

I think, there is a loss of ducumentation how all this settings work :-)

Machtnix

I believe Simon intends to update / replace the particle system at some point (to go with the upcoming GUI) & make it a little more intuitive to use.

In regards to what you said about 1024x720... yes it's still pretty large; especially when you consider the file-size per frame.

Quick tip: when creating animations / particle type animations such as rain, snow, fog, mist, steam, smoke, things in the distant background etc, you could consider exporting them from your image / animation software at quarter of the intended size. Import them into the engine as an animation & then inside of the first frame you add a single line of Lua script to scale the animation up to the actual size you want it to be displayed on the screen. Animations such as these don't need to look crystal sharp, so a bit of blur due to scaling up isn't going to hurt your game much, but it will certainly reduce the loading time of the animations, & even more so if you convert them to webp format.

Thanks! The zero point of the animation is still the same? The upper left point is fixed? Or have I to adjust the middle point?
For snow and rain I am still going to use the particle system (if the result is suitable), but for clouds, fog and waterfalls it's a very good idea!

All images & animation positions are always based on the top-left most pixel. If you scale up then the position should remain the same & it should scale outwards to the right & down.