Sounds more like a bug in the engine code that could have easily be fixed.
Though why Sprites CTD the game after hitting 5000 is beyond me. This is what I think is why Particles lag bad when lots of them are around and why Sprites don't lag. Particles can be effected by where the emitter is going, Sprites can not. They go their own path as set by their initial velocity and the drag settings and that's all they listen to. They spawn and are immediately no longer part of the emitter. When a object that is making a particle is set up in a certain way, the game tries to make the particle move with the object (granted it's not perfact though). I also noticed there is extra physics for particles. And as SpriteParticles are basically "ultra-light"-particles that have far less properties and values each there can be used more of them "safely". I think it simply is the sheer amount of particles and thus individual elements that Refractor can't handle and thus goes boom. I don't think it's the SizeoverTime or RGBAoverTime stuff that causes much problems, these should be very easy to handle, even by ancient BF42. Reducing the emitter rate I approached the level and as soon as I was on the "good" side, the problems immediatly stopped (despite a slightly higher GPU perfomance drain, obviously).
But for some reason Refractor is unable to "block" this invisible effect and calculates the smoke all the time in the background.So as soon as there are many objects and a high emitter rate I quickly reached the "particle treshold of death", meaning almost instant ultralag after the vehicles spawn or CTD. So when a vehicle spawns, the effect also gets started right away, it's just the LodSelector that makes it invisible. But as this effect had to be attached directly to the Wreck object (which I had to transform from simpleobject to Bundle obviously), this also caused the problem that the effect interestingly stays active all the time. I wanted to avoid the "smoke puff"-effect and thus had a pretty high emitter rate. When I worked on adding long and fancy smoke columns to destroyed vehicles (wrecks TTL was something about 60-120 sec), I also encountered that problem. The reason it doesn't lag is indeed the huge difference between particles and sprites that Refractor makes. Could serve as a basic tutorial for effects in general, or at least a good example, I'd say I can see now why DICE did not put AI on 64 maps as this would compromise the level design, detail, layout too much.Very nice explanation.
I of course prefer if I can get away with keeping everything original as possible. I do think that knocking out the large walls on the Great Wall map will probably be the most extreme change I will need to do in all the maps. So where necessary I will remove objects, shift vehicles and flags if needed to make it work. My navmesh "philosophy" is where there is a choice between static objects or map layout and the ability for the AI to navigate then the AI gets priority. The AI now takes the shorter more obvious route over the broken wall when spawning at Cam Yin (chinese base). The new flag position is identical to the 16 player map flag position. I thought a waypoint would fix it, but it did not. It was like the AI could not decide the best way to go. The vehicles can only go one way though, while the infantry can go the long way around the wall OR over the broken section north of Cam Yin. The thing was that vehicles had no problem navigating around.
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