Help with no_cloakeffect.ale ?

Went a little crazy making cloaks and decided i’d need some snazy new fx for them all… and I’ve run into a small problem…

I used the existing cloak .ale’s & when testing only the 05 (standard nomad) and gunboat/bs cloaks from the extra 2 .ale’s worked… having based them all on the exact same .ale’s as the original’s i thought it was either CRC or something i’d done… even though my changes were light and no structure was messed with. I had touched the original’s a bit but even lighter treatment (just color) and re-compiled them with the new ones when i was done.

Deeper digging revealed there’s something wrong with either the decode or encode of no_cloakeffect.ale using the ALE_Editor0_008. I tested this by replacing no_cloakeffect.ale with the original and the standard cloaks were working again… sweet… so then i (as i had a hunch) I re-decoded the working ale, re-encoded without anything else done, placed that back on the working mod and the cloaks were bust agian…

Now i can happily build from 05 and the gunboat/bs cloaks… but i hate leaving a mystery unsolved… and 01-04 are the stock rhienland cloaks with the funky electric ring 06 is the osiris cloak…and i want to play with changing the texture and color there as well… when im done i’ll have 64 new cloak effect’s (maybe more) and will happily share.

What i need is someone with working cloaks and a basic ale knowledge to do the same… grab the no_cloakeffect.ale run it through the ale editor extract/re-encode and see if it’s bust… I have a few ideas from how my .ael & .anl look… but im shooting in the dark really all i can do with confidence is rename/recolor and retexture… and the odd re-size…

Sry for the long post… but i wanted to explain in full

ahh… thanks, so its not just me

Also noticed in the .anl a few sections chronically out of order… i was betting this was the cause but i’ll look at the UL_params as well…

As i said… if i cant fix it i can always use the working 05 and the other extra two ale’s (which work fine) and just build new ale’s from that as i’ve already done the hard part (planning color/texture schema and param coding to reflect) i just need to make 30 odd ales instead of 6 as the ale in question holds 6 effects per file… and that was pretty groovy for a while there… till i noticed it wasn’t working lol.

BTW… any other .ale’s i should know about? might save me some hair… i have precious little left

EDIT: will try that Adoxa… I totally suck at XML coding though

Sry for dble post of sorts… this is a new Question though…

Ok… took Adoxa’s advice and used XML project and couldn’t notice a darn thing different from the two outputs (XML & ALEed) so i went with my gut and repositioned the rh_cloakeffect01.app from way down near the bottom (just between 05 and osiris cloak!) up to the top of the .app’s for the 01 cloak… outputted that with XML proj and we’re working a treat…

Hard to say if that was the problem… but at least i have a working solution to my dilemma and a fresh template to work from that i’m 100% will now work… Nice program BTW Adoxa… XML scares me but i can work within it nicely… just can’t wrap stuff in XML code… ID’s are a pain lol

Ok… now question 2… .ale “rules”… were can i find some?
Im getting the hang of how its all constructed… but not every .ale is the same (think my previous problem reflects that…) looking for the “basics” if you will… what NOT to do and so forth… limitations, and most of all texture preparation (injecting .txm’s) and alpha/format rules specific to Freelancer.

I’ve got the wiki saved and almost every page here as well that mention’s .ale files… just wondering if there’s any more info