The features list on the main 3DGS page says that the A6 Commercial edition supports beam effects, but the A6 help manual says it doesn't, so I am just wondering if anyone knew whether or not it did. I honestly can't tell whether or not my particles have the beam effect.

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure it does. You cant tell if the effects have beam or not? It's usually a pretty big difference!

A6 Commercial has beam effects but I believe only Professional has streak effects.

- Tesanders

Oh, now I see it, thanks! Funny, I never noticed I've been using the beam effect all this time. That's pretty cool!

I don't know, maybe commercial does have streak. When I turn beam off, but turn streak on, it looks different than when streak is off.

A6 commercial edition has both stream and beam.

You're right -- Commercial does have streak. My bad. Elsewood has posted the incongruity in the "Blame the Manual" forum, though I can't read German.

Just a quick question, what does beam and streak do to particles?

It kind of smears the images of the individual particles as they move, making the effect more realistic, especially for things like explosions, where each particle moves quickly.

I didn't notice commercial had beam and streak until I turned it off and watched it a few times. If you don't have commercial or pro and want to see how it looks in realtime, demos like "The Conflict" on the download page have it.

> I didn't notice commercial had beam and streak until I turned it off and watched it a few times.

I didn't realize this either; the streak effects are subtle. Here's an example that really stretches the particles:

Code:

---

function part_4() {
	my.alpha -= 5*time;

	my.x += my.vel_x*time*0.3;
	my.y += my.vel_y*time*0.3;
	my.z += my.vel_z*time*0.3;

	if(my.alpha<0) {
		my.lifespan=0;
	}
}


function effect_particle_4() {
	vec_randomize(temp, 20);
	vec_add(my.vel_x, temp);
	vec_add(my.x, temp);

	my.alpha = 75+random(25);
	my.bmap = bitmap_electric; # Any bitmap will do.
	my.flare = on;
	my.bright=on;
	my.streak = on;
	my.move = off;
	my.function = part_4;
	my.size=10;
}

---

In another thread, JCL suggested moving particles independent of their velocities, since the streak effect is tied to vel_x, vel_y, and vel_z. Here, the particle's vel_x/y/z are larger than the actual speed so as to augment the smearing.

- Tesanders