I am trying to create a flow of water by duplicating metaballs along a curve. I've gone through the motions of creating a curve and a metaball, setting the Parent of the metaball to the curve, set the Duplication to Frames, unchecking Speed, and animated the End frame. Looks good in the viewport (sometimes needing to click the Update buttons to get it to update).

However, when I go into Rendered view or actually rendering the thing, none of the metaballs show up, not even the starting metaball. Changing Duplication to None shows the whole thing in Rendered View, but when I do anything to update the metaballs I only get the starting metaball. I even played around with the metaball's resolutions to no effect.

Is there any other method to create this growing "sausage"? Remember the material is semi-transparent so using ordinary spheres will produce ugly overlaps.