I was fooling around with the Particle Editor I had recently downloaded, and I opened up Sky's green chargeup effect. Then I copied it over, and set it as the trail effect in the EMP launcher's ord odf. In-game, it looks like the EMP launcher shoots a small green ball of plasma. I thought, "This is perfect for the Nova Pistol I'm developing!" So I modified the EMP launcher's odf to reference the pistol MSH and munged.

The only problem is that the effect, once it hits something, stays there. It doesn't fade away. So eventualy there's so many of them that more effects refuse to appear. I assume this is a problem caused by the chargeup effect. So my question is: can I edit it in PE so that it vanishes upon impact? If so, how? Or do I have to do an odf tweak or something along those lines?

The time a particle effect lasts is dictated by two things - "lifetime" (as referenced in a couple different places) and "Max Particles." Chargeup or other "permanent" effects have a Max Particles set to -1, which is infinite. Change it to 15 or something (maybe lower if you want it to last a short time) and you'll get what you want.

Editing those lines in notepad resulted in a crash with no severity: 3's. I couldn't find the MaxParticles bit in P.E.

Also, wouldn't editing those lines make it disappear after a short bit? How would you make it disappear right on impact?

Just play with it in PE. Particle effects aren't hard, they just take a bit of creativity.

Maveritchell wrote:Just play with it in PE. Particle effects aren't hard...

As long as you can get PE to work and don't have to do it with wordpad.

@Fiodis:
O-K. So it's the EMPs trail (as opposed to the blue rocket one), but it won't disappear? Weird. You sure you didn't set it as the explosion effect too?

PS. editing effects in (normal) notepad tends to screw them up. You'll probably need to get the original fx again, and replace the one you modified with it.

The explosion effect is the small, green laser bolt's explosion.


And I replaced it with the normal, un-notepadded effect, cleaned the common and rep folders, remunged, and it still crashes. With no Severity: 3's. Here's a small section that I think might be related: I have a few more like that. Also, and I also have several copies of.


Maybe.....too many effects? I don't think I have too many....

Can someone help me out? I'm really stumped. I retraced my steps to the place where it last worked, and walked off a cliff, so to speak.