are there any plans to have a tool for coding up new weapon effects ingame? Can we even compile any code on the fly in game at all? if not, whats the current state of weapon effect modding?
Yep you can compile the game multiple times, there's a mod that comes with the game you need to enable though. It makes it so (can't remember which key it was) refreshes all mods and the game itself.
Before @bgolus has said (if I understand him right) there is no such tool and all effects you see in game were created manually. So there is no WYSIWYG tool for effects even internally. Though effects written in JSON na it's pretty easy to learn how they work.
The problem is testing it. There's a significant amount of trial and error involved in both learning, and tweaking effects until you're happy. Having to boot up a game every time you want to test something get's very tiresome. However that shouldn't be nearly as bad with the release of offline mode.
The "tools" for effects creation were a text editor and chronocam, ignoring textures and meshes. If you change a .json or .pfx file on the client it will live reload the spec. For units it will update any that exist, for effects the next time one is spawned it'll be using the new spec. If you scrub in chronocam each time an effect plays is a new spawn of the effect on the client. So my work pattern was play game to cause an effect to play, pause, tweak .pfx file, rewind 15 seconds & play, repeat.
Last time I checked effects reloaded for sure each time you start the game. So with server release this should become a bit easier. Also long time ago Windows version had ability to constantly reload shaders/effects/etc on the fly, but later it's lose it or at least when not using developer mode.
Wish I knew all that. Have always been working on mod local copy, without pausing and restarting / rejoining ongoing game. Damn I fell dumb
Just checked it for sure. On Linux it's still only reload effects when you join game. So likely it's just not implemented there.
When I worked on rescale PA I noticed that PA on my win7 did reload the changed model files on the fly. It did crash though when I changed them to broken files in some cases :s I'd guess the models and effects would use the same system to achieve this.
Yes, on linux live reloading of content doesn't work (since none of the artists or designers work on Linux).
Any chance you guys can at least implement content reload on demand? For example with F5 or some other special command?
F5 works because the UI is a web browser, you're just refreshing the page. If we're going to fix Linux it's just a matter of making @jorgenpt make the file watch work on Linux. It'll be low priority for a while.
I've been playing today with the particles effects and this works really well! The code speaks for itself btw . I had some trouble opening it structured and all but notepad++ with json plugin does the trick! So what do you think. Some teamcoloured explosions? I think its already looking pretty neat. Gonna frap it up pretty soon. Still wondering how i can extract and put particles textures in it. This will do fine for now though. Gonna give that ssx some luv soon.
Looks good But keep in mind some colors combination looks better than others. Black / Green / White / Brown are from my experience sometimes not really good
