Anyone have experience working with VEF's? Could use some advice

[Daeros_Trollkiller]

Good evening all, 

              I've been playing with visual hit effects, creating some custom effects for one of my mods.  There is one specific effect I am trying to duplicate: the small, randomly scattered flames that appear on an avatar when they are hit with fire.  Everything I have discovered so far leads me to believe it is probably a VEF, possibly hardcoded?  I'm pretty sure it's hardcoded in BG1-2 because the DMGTYPES.2DA doesnt reference a VVC or BAM for the effect.

I've read the VEF documentation, and I've worked with BAMs enough to know that the centers can be changed to affect where they show, but I'm not really understanding how to piece one together.  Would love to hear from anyone who's worked with them.  Thanks!

[lynx]

You mean SPBURN / SPFIRIMP or something else?

[Daeros_Trollkiller]

On 7/17/2020 at 12:56 PM, lynx said:

You mean SPBURN / SPFIRIMP or something else?

FIREBRN in this case, though now that I look SPBURN is similar.   From what I can tell, when an avatar is hit with fire dmg, a visual effect is played that plays random frames and sequences from the BAM, and is places in random spots on the avatar.  I can create a VVC easily enough, but it only plays the BAM, no random placement, etc...  I could create a custom BAM and move the center to random spots, but it would still play the exact same every time.

I know from working with projectiles that those can be set to play BAMs starting with random sequences and frames, but I don't think that would work for what I am trying to do.

[Gwendolyne]

afair VEF files are a bit tricky to be played on creatures with #215:

On 6/6/2013 at 1:55 PM, argent77 said:

It is also possible to use VEF files in spells. By using effect opcode #215 (Play 3D Effect) you can add a VEF file into the resource field as you can already do for BAMs or VVCs. There is a minor drawback however. The effect state 1 (Play on target (attached)) doesn't appear to be supported.

[Daeros_Trollkiller]

12 minutes ago, Gwendolyne said:

afair VEF files are a bit tricky to be played on creatures with #215:

I've run into that particular issue with some standard VVC's as well.  I'm confident I could work around it if I can figure out how to structure the effect so that it plays in the desired way.

[Daeros_Trollkiller]

@Gwendolyne - maybe I am approaching this in the wrong way.  I created a weapon, with an effect to play the damage animations (opcode 170) for fire. There are three animations.  Do you know how I could extract those into a VEF or VVC?  I think I can accomplish what I am looking to do if I can pull those out and set them to play manually using probabilities to control the "randomness"