Debrief 2: One procedure, six changes

Ten exercises are behind you. This page adds nothing new. It sets down what the last six had in common with the first four, and with one another.

The procedure held

Debrief 1 gave the procedure in six steps. Build one particle. Transform it. Say when. Say where it goes. Say what it looks like. Fire and watch. Every exercise since has followed it. Each one left five of the steps alone and changed one.

Exercise	The step it changed	What changed
5	What a particle looks like	A picture that plays, in place of a plain shape.
6	How it is fired	One object that plays in place, in place of many particles.
7	Where particles appear	At another object, and carried with it.
8	What is built and transformed	A Beam, in place of a Part.
9	What a particle carries	Another emitter, fired by each particle.
10	How many are fired	Several emitters, as one effect.

A new kind of effect is therefore never a new subject. Ask which of the six steps it changes, and the other five are already known.

Three numbers fire everything

The Emit, Delay and Duration boxes first appeared in Exercise 3, as the way to fire one burst. They have come back in every form of firing since.

Where	What the three numbers govern
One emitter (Exercise 3)	The burst, the wait before it, and the stream after it, counted from the press.
An emitter in Animate mode (Exercise 6)	One cycle after the wait. Duration keeps the cycle repeating for that long. Emit is not used.
A Beam (Exercise 8)	The number of beams fired at once. A Beam starts at 1.
A nested emitter (Exercise 9)	The same three, counted from the moment the parent particle is made.
Emitters in a Folder (Exercise 10)	Each emitter’s own three, all counted from one press.

The rule under all five is the one met in Exercise 3: the button fires what the boxes say, and nothing more. An emitter whose Emit and Duration are both 0 does not fire, whether it stands alone, sits in a Folder or is nested in another.

Transform keeps what you built

Three times a thing was built in the ordinary Roblox way and then transformed. Each time the emitter began with the look it was given.

Built	What Transform kept
A small Neon Part (Exercise 1)	Its size, colour and material.
A transparent card (Exercise 5)	Its size and its transparency.
A Beam between two Attachments (Exercise 8)	Its widths, its colour, its transparency and its two Attachments.

The working habit this gives: make one particle look right first, with Studio’s own tools, and transform it afterwards.

What stayed particular

Each exercise also had a thing of its own that no rule above would have told you.

Exercise	The particular thing
5	The Part’s Transparency and the picture’s Transparency are two separate graphs.
6	In Animate mode an edit waits for the next cycle.
7	The emitter’s own rotation is added to that of the object it is linked to.
8	With Enabled on, beams stack on top of one another.
9	A nested emitter must be inside the RenderTemplate, and its Delay must be shorter than its parent’s life.
10	With a Folder selected, the HUD boxes write to every emitter inside it.