Adding custom animations

[The Old Dragon]

Sorry for sounding like a complete plank here, but what exactly do you mean by 'material'?

Though on the plus side, my fumbling has lead to a partial success. I hijacked the engine glow textures from the human destroyer and put those on the corresponding areas of my model and it worked in the model viewer... untill I activated the engines. Then the glowing sections flickered a bit before turning to a black/white image. Still, it's a step closer.

[jstubbles]

Okay, scratch what I previously said. While I can get the effect to disappear entirely, it also seems to take all of the damage-charring effects that happen to the ships surface. Now, I've tried setting the EFX number in the shiptype ImpactEFX to something in the efx.ini other than the default "1" that it uses right now. However, this doesn't seem to change a damned thing! I eventually want to make a new fire effect for the smoldering particles, but for now I want it disabled, while retaining the battle-damage on the ship itself. I'm not sure why nothing changes when I edit it!

[Arparso]

Sorry for sounding like a complete plank here, but what exactly do you mean by 'material'?

Ah, sorry, little mix-up here... it's called 'surface' in Lightwave. Select the engine's faces in Lightwave, hit 'q' to create a new surface and name it "engine @boosters" or something like that. In the surface editor (F5) add your engine's texture to that surface and you're done in Lightwave. Now you only need a proper luminosity map for your engine's texture, which has the glowing parts colored white (or a shade of grey, depending on the intended intensity of the glow). These parts will now glow/flicker ingame, when the engine's active. They'll even match the engine's effect color, so you don't need to worry about that.

@jstubbles
Ah, now I've seen what you mean. Yeah, it seems Nexus tries to pull of some sort of default effect no matter what you have specified as impact effect. Since trying to overwrite any default particle effect in your mod's prt-files results in Nexus crashing (at least for me) I only see one solution: reduce the ImpactEfx size dramatically to make this combustion effect practically invisible, but at the same time increase the size of the actual effect in your efx.ini to compensate. For example, if you've got:

Code: [Select]

SHIPCLASS 10
...
ImpactEfx 50 1
...
SHIPCLASS

...

EFX 50
FLARE
Size 30
...
FLARE
EFX

then change that to:

Code: [Select]

SHIPCLASS 10
...
ImpactEfx 50 0.01
...
SHIPCLASS

...

EFX 50
FLARE
Size 3000
...
FLARE
EFX

The combustion effect should be way too small to be visible anymore, while your custom impact effect's size appears unchanged. Probably not a very elegant workaround, though, but whatever gets the job done, right?

[jstubbles]

Thanks Arparso - I haven't had time to test it just yet. But won't this also eliminate  the black char effect on the mesh? I want that effect, I just don't want those glowing "sparks" that it tries to pass off as fire

*** EDIT

yeah, it removes the black charred effect entirely, which is stupid. If I turn ship combustion OFF in the menu, it still shows the black ship damage. But if I edit the impact particle settings like you have, it removes BOTH effects? That's completely asinine.