Hi,
I’m trying to follow the particles tutorial from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Particles-Fireworks, and initially there were no problems with rendering the particle systems as I was developing them. However, at some point the particle system stopped being cached and it was no longer possible to scroll through the animation frames forwards and backwards in the 3d view, jumping in sets of ten frames, etc. Also it is no longer possible to render the animation.
I’ve tried to bake the particle system but with no effect. I’ve also tried to clear the cache to see if this will reset the calaulation of the particle system, but also with no effect.
I’m wondering if I’ve done something that I’m not aware of to kill this functionality or whether I’ve found a bug. (I’m using the official 2.48a build)
I’ve uploaded my .blend here (880k). Perhaps someone could try it out and let me know if the problem is some setting that I’ve inadvertantly changed or whether it works on their system. (.blend file is now the fixed version :))
Thanks.
Edit: I solved the cache issue (didn’t realise that the created folder needed to be copied too 
) but I still can’t get the reactor particles to render. If I change the visualisation to be the model of the rocket it works fine (with lots of rockets on the screen), but I don’t seem to be able to render the particles as points or lines with Halo materials. Anyone got any hints on where I’m going wrong?
Edit 2: I checked the box in one of the reactor particles systems to render the “Emitter”, and all of my particles have magically appeared (doesn’t matter which reactor particle system it’s done in). I’m guessing that the emitter object needs to be displayed in order to display all of the reactor particles. Since the reactor particles are “emitted” from other particles then the emitter particles need to be displayed in order to display the reactor particles. Very strange.
Edit 3: Nope… “Emitter” does just what I thought it would… it renders the emitter object (a plane in this case). It was rendering as the smoke halo texture so wasn’t obvious. I’ve placed a texture on the plane with full transparency so that it doesn’t show, but this seems like a bit of dodgy workaround to me. Maybe it is indeed a bug rather than my inexperiance that is causing this problem. Oh well, I’m happy with the result. Now on to making a plasma ball animated texture for use in a game I’m roughing out. 
