ALE Editor Alpha 4.2 Release

Hey guys, I got the itch to mess with freelancer again and currently messing with this tool. I don’t know if this a bug or not. In the node block and root when I make a custom ale, nothing appears. I can start a custom ale, Node library, Effect. But after that I can’t seem to go any farther. Am I missing something?

Nevermind, I got it. Different question, how do I make a file like the sparks1anim_0_0? I know how to make txm, but not how it reads the sprites inside. How does it read the texture? Left to right and then down and continue correct? How can I make it bigger to read say 30 sprites instead of 15?

The user interface is far from user-friendly currently. The first focus was to get it just work somehow. But it isn’t intuitive and there is no tutorials or help either currently on how to use it. That may cause some confusion.

On the usage of animated sprites I also sadly do not know myself, I never tried it and as well would have to experiment with it first now.

I found it fairly simple to work once I got something to actually work. I can write up a user tutorial, if need be. There are somethings that don’t work as you have mentioned. But I am learning quite a bit of what it can do and it can do quite a lot.

As for sprite textures, here’s what I know using utf 2.1:

sparks1anim_0=

Texture count 1 (uses 1 256x256 texture)

Frame Count 16 (16 individual frames of the texture, dividing the 256x256 texture into 16 individual, guessing on this, 32x32 squares)

FPS 15 (how many frames of the texture per second)

Frame rects (how it reads the texture, ie left to right then down to next row and repeat. This data is the one I’m trying to edit.)

I believe it controls size and where to move from and to. But I don’t have a way to edit it.

ALE Editor version Alpha 4 is out now! Find it in the attachement of this post.

New feature:

• Render ordering. ALE effects render particles in a defined order. This can be important when one particle is supposed to hide another. Now you can see and set up this order in the editor, too.

• Also for being orderly you can now close gaps in the automatically generated IDs for effect nodes.

Bugfixes:

• Previously the editor saved the data twice into UTF files. Now it correctly saves it only once. This had no negative side effect except for bigger file size.

• Preserving render order: Previously the ALE Editor changed render order unasked (see feature above). Now it is kept as in the original.

• FLBeamAppearance was missing in the context menu to create it.

Additionally there is now also a Linux executable for those who fancy it. Requires qt5pas lib to be installed.

Another release. I fixed wrong node IDs and empty UTF nodes. Both leading to game crashes on their own. Thanks to Treewyrm and Serenawyr for pointing it out.

Deleted the previous download because it’s breaking game files.

Alucard wrote:
Any way to implement a x,y,z axis in view window?

Was this added in latest update?

No. Just bugfixes mostly.

Maybe next update?

ALE Editor Version 4.2

Features:

• Right click on any Appearance or Emitter Node to get a “Scaling” tool to scale them up or down.
• Right click on any Effect to get a completely generated [VisEffect]-entry for the ALE.ini files for the given effect. The Texture-Files are automatically assigned when you also imported them via the general “Select Textures” option.

Improvement:

• “Default Value” input of some animations disappears now as soon as some Time-Value pairs were added. The game uses those additional entries instead of the simple ones.´

Correction:

• Change second and third value labels of some animations to their correct labels of “in tangent” and “out tangent” for interpolations.

Bugfix:

• Correct changing anything to the “Transforms” of a Node required a complete effect reload.

For engines FXs resizing, is it better to resize the appearances or the emitters ?

Both should be resized. The appearance makes the visual particles. But the emitter is necessary as well to make sure the area in which those particles get spawned is increased, too, and the pressure - which makes sure the flame looks the same on full power.

THX ! I thought about this case. It’s nice ! I will be able to resize big ships effects without testing them ingame again and again. I will test some fighter weapons effects on warships.

I will try to see how the software works when I will need to create new FXs. But that’s a thing I will do later.

Thank you for the hard work you put on this editor !

@Skotty and @Schmackbolzen Love the tool and get a ton of use out of it, but for the next version can we get a confirmation box for ‘New’ if there’s .ale data loaded into the editor? For some reason I have awful muscle memory that takes me there when I want to make a new VFX inside the current ale, and have lost a number of hours of work (several times) as a result

Piggybacking - what’s a current reliable download link?

@WatercoolerWarrior This should be up for a little longer, but there’s an attachment on the old TSP forum here: https://old.the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=66464#forumpost66464 (it’ll be up for about another week)

We’re looking at forum attachments/an alternative in the meantime for hosted files!

ALE Editor 4.2 + Bugfix for Loops being not resetted when changing them in the Node Properties.

ALE Editor 4.2.zip

Would it be possible to add a feature to basically mass rename as if it were a CTRL+F find and mass replace in notepad++?

Basically if I had nodes+file name with an engine called Tau_Engine_Green

With Tau_Engine_Green_Firewhatever

I would want to mass rename them all to Tau_Engine_White which includes the ale name, all the emitters and apps? This is just to make it easier to mass rename everything, lags badly when you try to open each node just to rename?