Hey, I've done a few small mods in the past and am now working on one that adds a new system, some new ships, and new weapons/shields/etc.
As I'm creating new weapons here I'm seeing a few weapons which are apparent beam-weapons in game, but do not have a vis_beam entry in their [Effect] entry in effects.ini. Instead they just have a vis_effect entry which is in weapons_ale.ini. (and a vis_generic entry for lowest-quality effects settings)
The weapons which have these are the ones that have things like ring-shaped trails or the molecular-shield-like hexagon trails such as the Adv. Devastator and the DIAMONDBACK.
I guess my question is, how are these effects different from the standard BeamBolt/BeamSpear types listed in beam_effects.ini, and how would I go about editing and adding these to new weapons with different colours, etc.? Is this built into the ALE itself, or can I change this just by editing the weapon_ale.ini file?
I'm familiar with standard INI editing but I don't know anything about ALE editing. Can someone just give me a brief explaination or point me to someplace where this is explained? Another thing that might help me figure it out would be a list of texture entries for the [VisEffect] sections ... I notice some called obvious things like "hexagon" and others which are not-so-obvious like "sarma" -- what exactly are these?