Particle Overload

[Zaela]

Out of the blue I remembered screwing around with some of EQ's particle data 2 or 3 years ago. Decided to give it a quick revisit -- always fun to take particle effects off the rails a bit.

Funny how the sedate shaman epic particle looks probably the most epic when put in motion:

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Looks neat actually in motion, too (even with classic-style low video quality...)

Made a little tool for messing with particle data for classic items: s3d_particle_editor. Open source, code is just lua scripts.

All the pre-luclin particle weapons are in gequip.s3d. The tool automatically makes a backup copy of the original before you edit anything; easy to play around a bit and revert later.

edit: forgot to mention: all the item names are gonna be pretty unfamiliar to most of you. The epics are in the "IT140" to "IT160" range. Some of them have helpful names like "DRUID_PCD" and "MAGEPOOP_PCD" for the names of the particles.

Most of the neat things you can do are packed into just a few fields. The main things are particle lifetime (how long particles stick around), the emission delay (how long it waits before spewing out another batch of particles), and whether the particles follow the item that emitted them (think war or shm epic) or trail behind, sticking to the point in the world they were emitted at (think mage epic).

There are a few other fields, mostly related to how particles move: their velocity, vector (direction of movement, although it's not used much), spherical radius that causes the particles to be emitted at a distance around the emission point rather than directly from it. And there are a few high-level modes that influence everything as well.

Few more things, like an aura of songs; smoldering with notes of passion; a portable forest; leafblower of the gods; monk epic is nice an open ended: how about armageddon fist, a dragon streamer, or supernova sun disk gravity wave wheel? And of course, war epic has something to prove...