Debrief 3: Four ways one thing fires another

Twenty exercises are behind you. This page adds nothing new. It sets down what the last ten had in common.

The same procedure, five more kinds

Exercises 11 to 16 each brought in a new kind of emitter. None needed a new way of working. Each was built, transformed, given its timing and its look, and fired, exactly as the Part of Exercise 1 was.

Five of them were made with Transform as, and the five behaved alike.

What they shared	Camera Shake	Lightning	Rocks	Rope	Distortion
Made from an ordinary Part	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
The Part becomes an invisible marker for where the effect comes from	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
One particle is one whole thing	One shake	One bolt	One burst	One rope	One bend

The rule from this is short. When an emitter makes one whole thing and not a crowd, that whole thing is one particle. An Emit count of 3 then means three of the whole thing.

An effect grows by layers

The explosion began in Exercise 10 as three emitters in a Folder. Each later exercise added one layer, and the step was the same every time.

Exercise	Layer added	How
11	A flash and a jolt	Build, transform, set, drop into the Folder.
15	A shockwave	The same.
16	A sound	The same.

No layer had to know about the others. Each keeps its own Emit, Delay and Duration, and the Folder fires them all. An effect of any size is built this way: one layer at a time, each tested alone with its own Emit button.

Four ways one thing fires another

By now an emitter has been fired in four different ways besides its own Emit button. They differ in what does the firing, and in where the fired effect appears.

Way	What fires it	Where it appears	Met in
A Folder	One press, or one call, on the Folder	At each emitter’s own place	Exercise 10
Nesting	Each particle of the parent	At the parent particle	Exercise 9
An event	A moment in a particle’s life: made, hit, ended, removed	Where that moment happened	Exercises 12 and 13
A script	A line of code, at a moment the game decides	At the emitter’s own place, or at a place the script gives	Exercises 17 and 18

Choosing between them is a matter of two questions. What should set it off? Where should it appear? The table answers both.

The three numbers, once more

Debrief 2 found Emit, Delay and Duration behind every form of firing. The last ten exercises add three more to the list, and the rule did not change.

Where	What the three numbers govern
An emitter fired by an event (Exercise 12)	Its own three, counted from the event. An Emit count of 0 is treated as 1.
AbsoluteEmit in a script (Exercise 17)	Each emitter’s own three, counted from the call.
AbsoluteEmitAt in a script (Exercise 18)	The same, unless the options give a Count, Delay or Duration for that one play.

What stayed particular

Exercise	The particular thing
11	A screen effect and a camera shake are seen by one player only.
12	Seek strikes whatever surface it finds. It does not aim.
13	Rubble is not physics. Its path is settled when the burst is fired.
14	A rope does not collide, and its length is fixed when it is made.
15	A Ripple at its starting Wavelength is too wide to be seen as a ring.
16	With Lifetime at 0, a sound plays once to its end.
17	In the game nothing starts by itself. A script must start it.
18	AbsoluteEmitAt takes a Model, not a Folder.
19	The Clipboard pastes only what is ticked when Paste is pressed.
20	Fewer Anim. Steps is cheaper only until the motion starts to jump.

From here

The exercises have covered the procedure and each kind of emitter once. The rest of the manual is for looking things up. The Particiliary describes every row of every emitter. The Toolbench describes every tool. The Why Dictionary gives the reason for each thing you meet. Troubleshooting lists what to check when an effect does not appear.