Adding/Editing Particle Emitters

[TheOldDessauer]

u

[mrennie]

I'm not sure if this is the correct thread for this...

A few questions for the Gurus: 1) How does one go about adding extra particle emitters/moving emitters around?
2) What programs/utilities do I need to do this?
3) How do I (hope I'm using this term correctly) alias the operation of those emitters to the HUD? For Example, turning on feedwater/injectors
or blower activates appropriate steam/smoke exhaust where needed?

Thanks in advance.

It would take a very long answer to explain how to do this. It's not simple.

Briefly, you add emitters by inserting appropriate child objects into the engine blueprint. If you were building the locomotive yourself, you'd be able to use the Blueprint Editor (BPE) previewer to move the new emitters to the correct position and rotate them to emit in the proper direction. If you're trying to edit an existing model, which you can't build in the BPE, you have to resort to editing the engine blueprint using RWTools. For the child objects, you could either make a new emitter yourself in the BPE or (easier) reference an existing emitter blueprint. Then comes the tricky part - in order to make the emitter start and stop emitting when it's supposed to, you'd have to modify the engine's script. That requires knowledge of LUA and how to read controls and other engine parameters, as well as how to activate and deactivate the emitters from the script. Since most scripts nowadays are compiled into .out files, the only way for you to change things in the script is to write an entirely new one, and you'd have to do that after somehow replicating (and not breaking) what's already in the existing one.

In other words, doing it to an existing model, one that you haven't built yourself, is probably not worth even trying, unless it's an emitter that's on all the time.