O_O LASERS

First, calm down. Panicking and running around arms flailing won’t do a bit of good to your comprehension.

You don’t understand because you aren’t willing to put the time to understand it. How long have you pondered on how to do it? Have you done any experiments? Have you even tried?

And by try, I don’t mean opening the file, glancing at it, screaming “AHHH I DON’T UNDERSTAND” and close it. I also don’t mean changing random numbers, seeing it crash or fail, and stopping. You must try to understand the underlying structure - it isn’t so hard, but you should try with smaller goals first. Baby steps.

I guess FF that it’s up to you whether you release it or not, unless you’re reserving it for some special purpose then I can’t see why not. Having said that, I’ve no doubt that there would be far greater value in teaching everyone how to fish for themselves, as a once keen fisherman myself though, I know that knowing how to fish and being any good at fishing are two different things! You may just open up a huge can of worms so to speak.

Nova wrote:

Wolfie wrote:
In my world at least, thats not it. I want you to learn, and you can’t do that without learning yourself. Just open beam_effects.ini and you will see.

Human’s brain cant know everything. I dont understand the ALE. I understand a lot of FL stuff, but ALE and SUR are exceptions. And I need a help such as little child needs help with learning the ABC….

Also it is hard for me to understand something special in english: sometimes i have to use google translator, but of course it may give translation in wrong meaning. There are no russian FL modding communities.

Ahh, that is where you don’t understand us. It has nothing to do with .ale when it comes to beam effects.

When it comes to .ale editing, its hard for people to help you. I think I can safely say that there are none in the FL modding community that fully understand ALE. Me and Xar are coming up with something you might find of use.

@Wolfie: I’d disagree with that. ALEs are seen as some sort of arcane art, but I don’t exactly see why. Unlike SURs, we have tools that work effectively and reliably, and the syntax is simple and clear once you’ve wrapped your head around it.

Nova, I think the most important thing you’ll need to understand is how particle effects actually work. I’m afraid there is no such thing as a length for beams. Could you find a reason why? Think about how particle effects behave, how they are created, how they move. What could create length in such circumstances?

FriendlyFire wrote:
@Wolfie: I’d disagree with that. ALEs are seen as some sort of arcane art, but I don’t exactly see why. Unlike SURs, we have tools that work effectively and reliably, and the syntax is simple and clear once you’ve wrapped your head around it.

You’re saying someone in this community understands ALE files 100%? I disagree personally.

The basic stuff with emitters, appearance etc… Sure, but there are some stuff in ALEs that doesn’t make any difference at all.

@Nova:
Dude… You should know how to get along with what you got, and not always cry for the best…
“I want this, I don’t like that, this is not exactly what I asked, I want it 1:1…”
You have beams. Thats not what you saw, but its the best you can get without having experience with ALEs.

What you saw is, I assume, is deep ALE editing. You should find out more insted of asking and bragging all the time… I think the mod you should look for is Reballance, the latest version.

No, that’s not what I want. I care not for fame and fortune (otherwise I wouldn’t be running a site for a near-forgotten 7-year old game ). I want people to UNDERSTAND what they are doing, not just drone out the same tutorials over and over. You don’t make great modders that just follow orders. It doesn’t work that way.

However, I see that you are unwilling to think. If you want to make ALEs, you also need to see how they work conceptually. Plugging in random numbers is not how it should be done! Either you really want to do it and you invest time and effort into the job, or you don’t want to do it, and you should just say so right now to avoid wasting everybody’s time. The question I’ve asked has a simple answer, one that should come to you if you try to think about the concept behind how particle effects work. You’ve worked with 3ds Max already, didn’t you? How would you make a beam effect there?

@Wolfie: By the same token, nobody understands anything because we do not fully understand everything. That’s a false dichotomy. You can know something, master something even, without having perfect and absolute knowledge. We have enough knowledge about ALEs to do almost anything. We probably know over 80% of the format and we can work with it handily enough. I don’t see why you want things to be so black and white. Stop propagating the myths about ALEs being hard and maybe we’ll finally see more ALE editing, which is right now sorely lacking.

I think its not right to play for or sell freelancer resources…

Err, no. Money won’t get you anywhere here.

Seriously, Nova, I think this goes to show I won’t give you the effect. I told you I’d help you learn, but you aren’t willing to learn. A student wouldn’t bribe the teacher into giving him a copy of the homework!

If you’re so blind as not to understand what I’m trying to do, then I’ll just tell you that there’s a similar prototype in SWWT 1.3 and above, attached to the mining laser. I’m sure you can dig up the ALE from there and yes, I allow you to take it apart. I’m not sure about letting you use it directly, however.

I had expected better, though, and you’ll realize it’s flawed on many levels.

Well no, because you haven’t answered using particle effects. ALEs are particle effects. You have emitters - sources that create particles - and appearances - how the particles look like. Then you have fields - things that affect how particles behave. All three have parallels within Max: emitters and appearances are described by particle effects, while fields are space warps.

The rest works just the same. You have settings you need to tweak to give the particles the appearance you desire. I would in fact bet that the original developers used 3ds Max or something fairly similar to first design their particle emitters. The values inside the ALEs aren’t clean enough to be manual work, so they had to have some form of visual editor.

I ask again: how would you do a beam in 3ds Max using strictly particles and space warps?