ALE lurker
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Thanks. Although I did find them a while ago but then simply forgot to add them to the doc as well, it (doc) hadn’t seen much use beside myself unfortunately, as a result had been rarely updated.
Here’s the crazy map effect from first post to test your editor. Just replace particle sprite names with your own since I use my own sprite library and not vanilla txms.
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Treewyrm wrote:
MeshAppearance is in few effects in vanilla but they’re never actually used and having them spawned by emitter simply crashed the game. … But it is kinda unclear what MeshName is supposed to refer to.
Without actually trying anything, it does seem the “intro_volcanoplanet” meshes would be used - they’re part of the template in [c]SCRIPTS\INTRO\intro_volcanoplanet.thn[/c], the asteroid band around the sun. In this case, it would appear MeshName refers to asteroids in [c]SOLAR\asteroidarch.ini[/c].
Skotty wrote:
One question for you: Have you any idea what those four additional float parameters in version 1.1 ALEs (right at the head) do? That should be called “unused” in the xml.
IIRC, I set breakpoints on them which were not triggered; since they’re read, but not apparently used (seemingly backed up by Treewyrm’s findings), that’s how I stored them.
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Thanks for that, adoxa.
@Treewyrm:
In your documentation some small detail is missing: As soon as there is no root (usually 0xEE223B51) in the <fx>part of the effect, all nodes which have parent 32768 will use the hardpoint as coordinate center. Else it is 0, 0, 0 of the whole star system.</fx> -
And enabling them just crashes the game.
Actually no, it’s not missing, it is briefly explained in EffectInstance section. In fact it’s not related to presence or absence of root node (the one with type set to 1). Simply put parent 32768 is world coordinates, except for type 1 root node which serves as a proxy to wherever effect coordinates are and whatever it might be attached to. This is why say particles with parent 32768 wouldn’t move with effect, their transformation matrix doesn’t inherit from root node, instead it is world space. And similarly nothing stops you from having emitters and fields at world coordinates instead, in fact it can be used to create interesting features, like a world gravity for particles which would be unrelated as to what orientation the effect has if attached to something. Or say a radial field placed in world space, and say it may attract particles from your dust effect, like say around some anomaly. Of course that would make effect rather specific to a system as translation offset for radial field would have to match coordinates of where you had placed some anomaly object in system, but there it is.
One more suggestion for edit. You have a time slider at the bottom. Add another slider there for sparam as well. That would help to test things like engine effects, to simulate how they would change in game based on engine usage, cruise mode. Thrusters too use sparam, and finally you can add “use_throttle” for AttachedFX to make attachable effect to be dependent on your engine (but sacrificing 0.9 - 1.0 sparam range that would be used for cruise mode).
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In version 1.0 ALE files there are additional parameter of BeamAppearance:
<effect type="bool" crc="0x03503B61">true</effect> <effect type="bool" crc="0x0ABE0402">false</effect> <effect type="xform" crc="0x0BA0B3BB">0x435</effect>Same for SphereEmitter:
Any idea what they are about? I couldn’t find them in any version 1.1 file, so I guess they are obsolete. -
0x03503B61 and 0x0ABE0402 appear to be aliases for DupeFirst and DisablePlaceholder respectively.
0x0BA0B3BB also present at beam particles, type of transformation matrix, but seem does nothing.
0xE63AA248 appears in FLDustField, also seemingly no effect.
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Have you tested if Emitters actually support Fields? Or do Fields only work assigned to Appearances?
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Yes, I’ve tried and predictably figured out that fields don’t affect node’s transformation matrix, so they wouldn’t have any visible effect on emitters themselves, may not be obvious at first but it is logical since they just affect individual particles vectors. Particle (appearance) nodes are essentially collections of particles, a grouping and instancing mechanism, so transformation matrix in appearance node is applied to them as a whole and not individually. This can be clearly observed when you start to adjust and/or animate scaling.
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0x03503B61 and 0x0ABE0402 (and BeamApp_UseCommonTexFrame within this context) are explicitly set false.
I was able to trigger a breakpoint related to 0x0BA0B3BB, but all it did was increase a counter.
0xE63AA248 does not even exist in alchemy.dll.
How do I test the mesh?
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0xE63AA248 probably existed in their effect composition tool, hence its strange appearance in the vanilla file, but I assume it was never coded to be used in the first place.
Test effect for meshapperance is in attachment.
[VisEffect]
nickname = test_mesh
alchemy = fx\misc\test_mesh.ale
effect_crc = -257469979 -
Hey Treewyrm, a quick question:
Is it legal to parent Root (0xEE223B51) to something else than 32768? -
Doesn’t look like FxMeshAppearance is properly implemented. The crash is because it couldn’t find [c]fx\misc(null).3db[/c] (as shown in the spew); but the name is always [c]NULL[/c]. Even creating that file (copying [c]ast_beryl_10.3db[/c]) didn’t seem to have any effect.
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Interesting find. Any way it could be forced to load anything but null? Also is it literal ‘null’ as in string or is it trying to load file with empty name and extension .3db?
Also what about MeshApp_MeshId property? Is it read, does it attempt to use it anywhere?
It doesn’t seem to work if you set its parent to something else.
Also root node doesn’t have to be 0xEE223B51 actually, it can have any hash, the only thing that matters for it is third property set to 1.
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Treewyrm wrote:
Interesting find. Any way it could be forced to load anything but null? Also is it literal ‘null’ as in string or is it trying to load file with empty name and extension .3db?It is a [c]NULL[/c] pointer, which gets printed as c[/c] (an empty name would be [c]fx\misc.3db[/c]). It should be possible to load anything, but doubt it’s worth the effort. I tried forcing [c]solar\asteroids\ast_beryl_90.3db[/c], but didn’t notice anything different.
Also what about MeshApp_MeshId property? Is it read, does it attempt to use it anywhere?
It was read, but not apparently used (at least, not with a renamed model).
Also root node doesn’t have to be 0xEE223B51 actually, it can have any hash, the only thing that matters for it is third property set to 1.
0xEE223B51 is tested, though, so it does do something.
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I suppose then they didn’t finish/fix MeshAppearance and simply removed them from being spawned. Oh well.
Well I guess every node hash in effect instances is read/tested, it’s just when I gave it some other name it didn’t affect anything, the effect still worked, even if there wasn’t any node in NodeLibrary with that name, the only thing mattered is setting type to 1 for root nodes (there can be more than one, not that it is useful for anything) and 0 for everything else.
I think that’s about it, no more mysteries left in ale stuff, heh.
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Just to give a preview on what we have been working on (work on ale rendering started over a year ago), here is a little screenshot from the first combined version (editor and renderer).
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Thanks! We hope that it will really help people. But there a still a few things to be done, like cleaning up the GUI. Also the value editing dialog is not good enough yet. It works and you can change the values and see the effects in real time, but it is not yet practicable.
Also the particle system still has a few issues and some minor things are not yet like in FL, mainly beams. Some appearances and fields are also not implemented yet (e.g. collidefield).
So don’t expect a release too soon.
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