Aurora Particle System Settings

XashXT

Aurora Particle System Settings

The Aurora particle system first appeared in Spirit of Half-Life 1.2, but was severely limited. In particular, the way it was attached to objects was fairly buggy. Because of that, the system could not be used to its full potential.

In XashXT, most of the system's bugs have been fixed, which has made possible the creation of new interesting effects. A visual editor (xash\devkit\tools\AuroraEditor.exe) has also been added, making it a lot easier to create particle systems.

You can test the effects of changes to most parameters directly in the particle editor, so I will not go into further detail. Only the mandatory essentials will be described.

Adding a Particle System to a Map

To put a particle system in a map, use the env_particle entity. Remember that linking to the attachments on models cannot be done using mapping techniques, because a particle system is aware of the attachment number only on the model of the entity that it is linked to. Since env_particle contains no model, this linking method makes no sense. However, it can be useful for developing a new mod based on XashXT, where you can make, for example, new rocket jets, smoke trails etc.

Note that it takes the object some time to restore particles on savegame load. As a rule, such behaviour is common to most particle system implementations in mods and game engines, so this is nothing out of the ordinary.

The path to the script file must be full and include the extension. This lets mod authors store particle system definitions in folders of their own choice. The extension does not matter—instead of aur, it can be txt or anything else.

For examples of script files, see the xash\aurora folder.

 

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