Explosion FX editing, (and a projectile behaviour question)

[Carl_Bar]

Busy editing the Aeon T3 rapid fire artillery for a little personal mod. Unfortunately i've been out of modding sup com, or playing even for a long time, since before GPG went away. As a result i've had the devils own time finding info on all sorts of things. For the most part i've got it all sorted and got a whole slew of changes working on other units. But this is the first time i've played with projectile FX.

I'm trying to make the final stage use the quark bomb fx so that the visual AoE is larger. I've tried through trial and error the projectile bluprint, the projectile script, the aeonprojectiles.lua and the effecttemplete.lua files with no luck.

So having found this place whilst digging for a tutorial on FX editing i thought i'd ask here how to do it. Possibly i'm missing a vital step somewhere and have been editing the right files in the wrong way.


Also i changed said artillery to a low firing arc, but the shots consistently fall short of the aim point, it has the muzzle velocity to reach the specified range, (reduced to 500 max), but the final cluster stage appears to suffer gravity curve despite no such gravity effect being specified in the relevant projectile file and the aim dosen;t take account of said drop.


p.s. while i think on, if i successfully change the FX, do i need to start a new game instead of loading a save? I've been consistently starting a new game to test as i know some changes don't carry across unless you start a new save, but i'm not clear on which changes do carry across.

[nine2]

i dont know the answers to any of your questions. this may help a little

when i test i ...
- play with the /EnableDiskWatch command line so many file changes are applied instantly, with no restart required
- play a skirmish game. then you can hit ctrl-f10 to restart it
- play with cheats on
- bind ai_instabuild to a key (build things instantly) because i think the fastest way of spawning anything is just to build it, rather than the cheat menu

[Carl_Bar]

Hey thanks for trying. The problem with testing that i was asking about is i can just create a save game with the relevant building/unit built and load that up after making changes, but i discovered that in some cases the changes will not transfer and the only way to actually make them do so is to start a fresh skirmish, (yes that's how i test btw), from scratch. But not all edits seem to be subject to this and i'd love to know which types of changes are subject to that effect and which are not.

Of course the FXC questions take priority . But since you said you can't help there thanks again for replying on what you can help with .

[vongratz]

Can you put here the patch of all files modified ? Its easy to visualize something.Im slowly doing my personal mod,and had some troubles.

[Carl_Bar]

Give me a couple of hours to test the current build and bug fix if needed, (while i wait on replies here i'm editing other stuff), and sure. The changes are pretty extensive though.

[Carl_Bar]

OKay it's uploading now. The version being uploaded does have a couple of bugs i just discovered after starting the upload, (finally on this last attempt got it to write a log, yay, and discovered missing comma's in the edited poseidon and soul ripper files as a result).

It also sheds light on the issues i was having. Quite simply put it's not loading my modified .lua files at all. Only the projectile and unit blueprints files are being loaded, (though i know from functioning edits that the edits to the respective script files associated with them must be loading also).

So sounds like editing .lua is a bit more complex than copy pasting the file to be edited into the folder structure and changing the code you want altered. I know, i know i bet i'm getting funny looks atm. That's just how the tutorials i was able to find dealt with editing unit blueprints files, i've yet to see a single tutorial that deals with editing .lua.

[Carl_Bar]

@Vongratz: Had a ton of issues uploading it due to my crappy net so I culled it down just to this example mod which only edits the T3 SAM systems. Simply paste it into your gamdata folder and it should show up in the mod list.

Link: http://www.filedropper.com/examplemod

Also figured out my FX issue, once i knew it was an issue with how .lua edits worked a hard google trawl finally dug something up. basically .lua edits have to be done outside of the normal mod structure. In effect they become a hardcode edit that is permanently enabled so long as the .scd containing them is contained within the gamedata folder. Which sucks but at least i got them working. So yay.