I decided to make my own particle engine for my game from scratch, since I wanted some unusual custom functionality. All works well except it is very slow.
My explosion effect uses 6 emitters which give a total of about 30 or so particles on-screen at the peak of the effect. Not many, yet at this point my app drops from about 180FPS to 30FPS. See FPS in titlebar:
![Image](http://d-white.org.uk/irr/explosion3.jpg)
Have ruled out the system code since it stays at 180fps if I just do node->setVisible(false) on all particles.
I think the problem is my amount of draw calls, since I'm using a scene node for each quad/particle. Yes, this is bad, but I'm not 100% familiar with the best way to do this in the irrlicht pipeline.
Since I have lots of independently moving quads with changing scale, rotation and material (colour+alpha) properties, what is the best way to render these in the irrlicht pipeline for performance?
D