Editing particle effects, vanilla Dust/Smoke/Blood/etc.

Users who are viewing this thread

Frigidius

Recruit
Hey all, I'm trying to mod various native particle emitters in the game. The loop I've been in: Import emitter I want to Assets in my mod via Create new... in the right click menu of resource browser, edit that asset, and then try to save. When I try to save, it tells me it's a protected file and can't be overwritten. Someone suggested naming it something extremely similar as that has worked for them in the past, but no luck as it doesn't appear in the game. Anyone have some thoughts?
 
Solution
For completeness, I'm adding a Discord comment by @Murat Türe :
We will not be adding direct override functionality to the particles since the override mechanism is already there for the ones in prefabs and scenes(you can change some values of the particle system and the rest will be used through the original one). What you can do is create a duplicate particle with different name (we can add a faster way of doing that) and then override that particle through collision_infos or by overriding the prefabs that hold that particle.
Hey all, I'm trying to mod various native particle emitters in the game. The loop I've been in: Import emitter I want to Assets in my mod via Create new... in the right click menu of resource browser, edit that asset, and then try to save. When I try to save, it tells me it's a protected file and can't be overwritten. Someone suggested naming it something extremely similar as that has worked for them in the past, but no luck as it doesn't appear in the game. Anyone have some thoughts?
Hi, I've not tried to create an override for Native particle systems. The way they work, you shouldn't need to and doing so could corrupt Native scenes using that particle system.
The way particle systems are set up currently, you need to create an empty entity in a scene then add a Native particle system to it. Once placed in your scene, you can edit an instance of that particle system to customise it to your requirements (without altering other instances of the same system used in other scenes), which will be saved with the scene, presumably in the entity section of your mod's Scene.xscene file.
 
Upvote 0
What if I want this modification to emitters to happen universally, like smoke is red, and blood is green? I could go in an recreate every combat xscene but wouldn't that be a waste of time?
 
Upvote 0
Great idea, but I do also still need to edit the emitters(like in conjunction with the decapitation mod, adding arterial spray or just increasing the size/volume of the blood that spawns. To do that I would just replace that emitter in all combat scenes correct?
 
Upvote 0
Your mod Assets would need to have a duplicate particle system with the same Name to universally override any Native particle system. The tools were modified for easier overrides of materials and animations but that hasn't been extended to particle systems as yet.
Accordingly, the only approach is open your mod's Asset folder in the Resource Browser. Then right click in the main window and select create > Particle System. Then double click on your new particle to open the inspector and click the second + to edit your emitter. Unfortunately, you'll need to have noted down the settings you need from inspecting the Native one you intend to override as all these will need to be reinput into a blank emitter form.
When it works as required, rename it to the same name as the Native one. Then check in the Resource Browser that the Native particle system is labelled overridden in red.

Hopefully, @gkx or @Murat Türe will consider extending their override feature to particle systems.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
If I do exactly that to the T, copy and pasting values exactly replicating the system(no changes yet even, just want to get it to override), then once it's saved and I try to rename, I get a yellow popup at the bottom with error message: "An asset with same name and type already exists in another module. This item type cannot be overridden. Very frustrating
 
Upvote 0
Ouch. Sorry for suggesting it. I had assumed these could be modded. I've just been equally frustrated trying to modify a shader. These also seem to be fairly inaccessible.

Given your question was about universally changing the colours of particle systems, I can only suggest that you investigate replacing the quad and decal meshes used with coloured ones or to force colour changes at runtime with C# onto white quads/decals.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Ouch. Sorry for suggesting it. I had assumed these could be modded. I've just been equally frustrated trying to modify a shader. These also seem to be fairly inaccessible.
I feel, been waiting since release for these tools to come out and the first thing I try to mod is a huge pain, I'm too stubborn to move on though. I'm dangerously close to trying to straight up hack the editor and nop the calls that prevent files being overwritten
 
Upvote 0
For completeness, I'm adding a Discord comment by @Murat Türe :
We will not be adding direct override functionality to the particles since the override mechanism is already there for the ones in prefabs and scenes(you can change some values of the particle system and the rest will be used through the original one). What you can do is create a duplicate particle with different name (we can add a faster way of doing that) and then override that particle through collision_infos or by overriding the prefabs that hold that particle.
 
Upvote 0
Solution
For completeness, I'm adding a Discord comment by @Murat Türe :
We will not be adding direct override functionality to the particles since the override mechanism is already there for the ones in prefabs and scenes(you can change some values of the particle system and the rest will be used through the original one). What you can do is create a duplicate particle with different name (we can add a faster way of doing that) and then override that particle through collision_infos or by overriding the prefabs that hold that particle.
Yep I was speaking with the devs about this yesterday, forgot to add here in case someone finds this thread later on. If I'm successful in using prefabs to make my changes then I'll make a new thread detailing the process.
Thanks for your help NPC99!
 
Upvote 0
Back
Top Bottom