Particle Overload
 

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:

http://i.imgur.com/3xajX9F.png

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...

I enjoyed this, thanks Zaela.

Leafblower was my favorite :)

Thats pretty damn cool. Thanks on for sharing. Monk and shaman epic look nice.

Got one for Rogue? Their epic has such a tiny particle effect that I wonder what it would look like cranked it up.

I can barely see the rogue epic particle effect on p99, am I the only one?

The Rogue epic has a particle effect but it's very small. That's how it was on live, too.

Could be my foggy memory, but wasn't the poison dripping a green or yellow color?

The rogue epic particle is a pretty odd case.

Rather than having the particle spawn at the tip and then move down along the edge of the weapon (doable), the particle stays still and follows an invisible animated piece of the model that does the dripping motion. It also seems to be hardcoded in some way -- I can't get it to do anything other than drip a lot the first time it's supposed to drip (a 0.4 second window after 1.5 seconds) and then stop altogether. I know in the past I made a tool to increase the frequency of the drip by editing the timing of the animation, but understandably nobody bothered with that.

Worth noting that the rogue epic has the lowest model id number of all the epics (IT140) so it was probably done first. The other epics I've mucked with don't seem to have any such restrictions (other than the ranger epic lightning not being a particle at all, presumably it's a texture animation). A few particle weapon models pre-exist the epics though, so it's not the very first one they ever made.

I realized what the last major field in the particle data does: it's an angle in degrees to make a directional/stream effect disperse in a cone shape. It's what makes soulfire's flames lick about -- an 18 degree cone. Here it is amped up to a 62.5 degree spray.

There are a few flag fields that don't have clear effects yet; either they are really subtle or they are conditional somehow (just as the cone angle only does anything for directional streams) so I haven't noticed the difference with or without them. There are also 5 unknown fields that don't seem to have any extant examples of weapon models using them with non-zero values, even in the luclin and PoP+ stuff. I haven't tried any of them -- I assume they are fields that were used in the ancient spell particle system, which the item particle system presumably piggybacked on top of.

If you have a particle weapon it should be really easy to play around yourself! For posterity these are the settings I used for the awesome shaman epic (they were proving too awesome for me to change, couldn't try other things...):

http://i.imgur.com/xfzw2en.png

Aye, it was a green poison that dripped every so often. I remember you couldn't even notice it unless you went into first-person and looked at it up close. Poor Rogues got hosed on that one.

That's what I thought. Its a grey color on P99, right?