Emitters - Curse Them

[Legacy_ia.Pepper]

               

I will just be straightforward here, I am having troubles with emitters, they're a bit of a headache for me.  I am trying to figure out things with not nearly enough documentation at my fingertips to figure out this insanity. I am trying to get emitters to beam from one point to another, where the points will move and sometimes get closer to each other, if they can't compensate for that then the mission is for naught.

 

I have tried lightning effects, but whatever I am messing up, keeps causing them to fire off to 0x, 0y, 0z, on the map, instead of to their reference point. Without that, just using plain ol' P2P, the best I can get is them sort of remembering where the points are (and by sort of, I mean a whole meter off, up or down from the reference point.)

 

The lightning effect would be nice if I was intending my model to fire lasers at one specific point in the map, nuking it, but it's not too useful for anything else. And the P2P settings are so close, yet so far away, from what I am wanting.

 

 

Another thing I am wondering about is; the birthrate when I am toying with this - even when I revert settings to about where default would be - gets stuck at 2. I can change it in the actual .MDL file manually to get what I am aiming for, but it's not too practical. I am hoping that's not me being inept, and it's a problem with NWMAX? 

 

 

So I am wondering, how you get a beam effect between two points, each of which happen to move about in non-uniform ways. Any help on this would be heavily appreciated, and my aching head would be in your debt. 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Michael DarkAngel]

               

Can you give me more detail as to what you are attempting to do with birthrate?  I'll check into it to see if there is an issue with NWMax.

 

Not sure if this will help at all with what you are trying to do, but it does give some good information -- Aurora Emitter

 

 MDA

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ia.Pepper]

               

Can you give me more detail as to what you are attempting to do with birthrate?  I'll check into it to see if there is an issue with NWMax.

 

Not sure if this will help at all with what you are trying to do, but it does give some good information -- Aurora Emitter

 

 MDA

 

It seems to happen when I turn the emitter to a lightning and then back to fountain, it refuses to allow me to push the birthrate past 2. Say I tell it to be a lightning, and then change my mind and switch it to fountain. Doing that allows me to change the birthrate (to say 30), and when I click off the emitter and then back on, the birthrate is still 2, despite what I told it to change to. It reverts my changes no matter what, unless I make a new emitter entirely. I can manually change it by opening the .MDL file in notepad, but that has its obvious drawbacks.

 

I have also seen that page, seems to be the only good page with any sort of documentation, but it still didn't help me or tell me why lightning and P2P aren't working for my particular project in mind. 

 

 

Anyway, sorry if my information about birthrate isn't satisfactory or explanatory enough! That is just what is happening, and I just tested it now, and it does it with a fresh emitter. Change it to lightning, click off of it, click back onto the emitter, change to fountain, and try to change birthrate. It says it changes, but as soon as you do the click off and on switcheroo again, it shows it defaulted back to 2, despite being a fountain emitter.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               

It  might help to clarify the question. What kind of model is this? Tile? Placeable? Creature? Effect?

 

When you say you are changing the emitter type, to and from lightning, do you mean within 3dsMax before you export it, or are you somehow scripting that change to occur dynamically in-game?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ia.Pepper]

               

It  might help to clarify the question. What kind of model is this? Tile? Placeable? Creature? Effect?

 

When you say you are changing the emitter type, to and from lightning, do you mean within 3dsMax before you export it, or are you somehow scripting that change to occur dynamically in-game?

 

Wings, actually. If you look at the Technomancy challenge for this month, I posted about some "technomagic wings", so I suppose a character model of sorts. As for changing the emitter type, yeah I am doing that within 3DS MAX. Somehow indeed, I don't see how you would script that, or why. But that's not important, because I did it all within the program.

 

Within this menu:

 

 

Basically it only happens if I select 'Lightning', click off and then back onto the emitter, then switch to 'Fountain' update style. Birthrate becomes locked, as do some other things (basically anything Lightning update style prohibits).

 

Apparently if I select 'Lightning', don't click off, and then switch to 'Fountain' again, click off finally, click back onto the emitter, birthrate and every other setting works as if it was a 'Fountain' emitter, aka how it should be.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               

Ah, thanks. I thought at first that you were fighting the game engine but now I see it's a NWMax question. Ignore me. '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<striking a pose...>

 

...Ignore me. '>

Nevah!

 

<...and raising his snifter high>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Valthrendir]

               

Struggling with emitters was on my ''to-do'' list a while back, haven't gotten round to it yet.

Therefore: I don't have a clue, but would it be possible that the type of emitter is specified in the .mdl file of the wings?

 

(Edit: Or are we looking at an export problem here?)

 

Edit II:

Way to go for me rephrasing the OP's question. Nevertheless, this makes me wonder: what is the technique used for the lightning door that is available in the toolset? From what I understand the OP wants to recreate this kind of effect in a wing model?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Michael DarkAngel]

               

Basically it only happens if I select 'Lightning', click off and then back onto the emitter, then switch to 'Fountain' update style. Birthrate becomes locked, as do some other things (basically anything Lightning update style prohibits).

 

Apparently if I select 'Lightning', don't click off, and then switch to 'Fountain' again, click off finally, click back onto the emitter, birthrate and every other setting works as if it was a 'Fountain' emitter, aka how it should be.

 

Right from the wiki page I pointed you to, which I had to go back and read again, because it didn't sink in yesterday when I originally read it

 

Lightning is merely a specialized p2p emitter that's set up to spew lightning as its used often enough that it's convenient to have a unique set of controls for it.

 

It appears lightning is more of a preset as opposed to being an emitter type.  There's nothing in the script that specifically tells me this.  However, seeing that a good bit of the variables get locked down, even going so far as to save old values for some of the key variables before locking them, leads me in that direction.

 

Doesn't help with what you're doing, but at least we know why lightning does what it does '>

 

 MDA

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Anyway, sorry if my information about birthrate isn't satisfactory or explanatory enough! That is just what is happening, and I just tested it now, and it does it with a fresh emitter. Change it to lightning, click off of it, click back onto the emitter, change to fountain, and try to change birthrate. It says it changes, but as soon as you do the click off and on switcheroo again, it shows it defaulted back to 2, despite being a fountain emitter.

 

Big hunks of NWMax or pieces of MaxScript code that later became incorporated into NWMax, were written well before the official Bioware max export scripts were released and once they were released, there wasn't much work done to reconcile the NWMax maxscript code with the Bioware maxscript code.  Key difference between the two is the Bioware export scripts were derived from engine specs whereas NWMax was, in many cases, the product of reverse-engineering and, sometimes, guesswork.

 

Not only can NWMax get confused in certain situations, like the one you experienced above, but because that code reconciliation/review I talked about didn't seem to happen, NWMax doesn't always correctly expose how a function of, say, an emitter actually works.  Or its relationship to other functions.  Here's a little example of the kind of disparity I'm talking about, though it can manifest in other ways.  It's a pain in the butt and took me a few weeks of intensive emitter function use to realize this was even a problem.  Only later was I able to confirm (to my satisfaction) why this situation existed, which is my first sentence in this post.

 

So, while NWMax is generally good to use and while more recent and well-maintained projects like NWMax Plus finally lured me away from using the Bioware scripts and Max 5.1 all the time, some things like the emitters, especially more exotic ones, are probably easier to do by hand.  The Omnibus helps but it's not a good replacement for doing one's own testing.  Neat things can be achieved with exploration off the beaten path.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Michael DarkAngel]

               

It seems to happen when I turn the emitter to a lightning and then back to fountain, it refuses to allow me to push the birthrate past 2. Say I tell it to be a lightning, and then change my mind and switch it to fountain. Doing that allows me to change the birthrate (to say 30), and when I click off the emitter and then back on, the birthrate is still 2, despite what I told it to change to. It reverts my changes no matter what, unless I make a new emitter entirely. I can manually change it by opening the .MDL file in notepad, but that has its obvious drawbacks.

 

I have also seen that page, seems to be the only good page with any sort of documentation, but it still didn't help me or tell me why lightning and P2P aren't working for my particular project in mind. 

 

Anyway, sorry if my information about birthrate isn't satisfactory or explanatory enough! That is just what is happening, and I just tested it now, and it does it with a fresh emitter. Change it to lightning, click off of it, click back onto the emitter, change to fountain, and try to change birthrate. It says it changes, but as soon as you do the click off and on switcheroo again, it shows it defaulted back to 2, despite being a fountain emitter.

 

I'd swear I tried this a half-dozen times the other night and could not reproduce what you're seeing.  I just did it again and it does exactly what you describe (must have been tired the other night).  As I mentioned in my previous post, when selecting Lightning NWMax saves some of the variables so it can re-apply them if you switch back.  Maybe it has something to do with that and de-selecting/re-selecting the emitter.  As OTR stated, perhaps that is confusing things.

 

My suggestion, until I can track down the offending code, is to stay away from Lightning unless that is what you want your emitter to do.  And, if by chance you do select Lightning and decide you want something different.  Scrap it, and start over.

 

Thanks for pointing out the problem.

 

@OTR: It's unlikely that I'll ever fix all the issues you have found But as I'm coming across some of your older posts, I'm trying to fix what I find

 

 MDA

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Thank you very much, MDA!  This one, if you haven't swatted it down yet, is a nasty one.  Birthrate gets set to -1, unintentionally.  I don't think this would be super hard to reproduce because I'd run into it (and forgotten about it) when I was helping Rolo with his issue- which turned out to be the same thing.

 

Obligatory, tangential aside: IIRC, birthrate -1 is actually a pretty neat effect and causes the emitter to emit only when the object it's attached to is in motion.  But for emitter testing, it makes you think you screwed up somewhere because you're almost always likely to be testing it on a stationary object.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_211darthrevan443]

               

I have a problem with "NWmax" that doesnt allow me to export anything at all. When I click on the button in "AuroraBase", it seems as if something happens, but nothing goes into the folder, I need help with this please.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Michael DarkAngel]

               

Are you using gMax or 3DSMax?

 

Are you using NWMax or NWMax Plus?

 

 MDA

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               

I had run into this problem before with nwmax and gmax along time ago. For some reason I seem to remember finding on the web that if nwmax is installed and you launch gmax with its own shortcut, you have this problem, even though the nwmax toolbar appears. If you launch with the nwmax shortcut, everything looks the same, but the export will now work.