Antiphon's Toolbox

Were you ever able to fully decipher how the Emergency 4 light editor handles its logic — specifically in terms of flash frequency, offsets, intensity, and how it processes timing? I'm curious whether the system has been reverse engineered enough to allow for deeper control over light behavior, such as creating more complex flash patterns or timing sequences.

Also, is it technically possible to develop a more advanced external light editor or tool — one that would streamline mod development by enabling features like copying and pasting entire layered light setups, batch editing multiple lights at once, or visually previewing the timing of all light patterns? This would drastically improve workflow compared to editing individual lights one by one.

Zitat von Antiphon

Yeah pretty much, you can edit the values if you open it with the e4pViewer

You can do this with the blender plugin already, only the frequencies are propably best set in the editor. Of course one could do more here, however I believe the required effort would not realy be worth the gains.

Gotcha, I’ll take a look at the EP4 viewer, but I’ve never used Blender before so I’m not sure it’ll be worth the hassle. Still, I’ll poke around and see if anything stands out.

Antiphon

Hello, i went and downloaded your plugins for Blender 4.0 +. I am enjoying how easy it is to edit lights. However, I have a suggestion and question.

1.) Under your EM4 Light configuration box, it is missing a toggleable "Polygon Glow" option which is available in editor but not in your plugin, there is only "Polygon Darken" and "Bright Light" It would be great if you can include this.

2.) When making radiations in blender, how can i see the visual of it so i know how it'll look before rendering it in the editor.

Thank you!

I'm not sure if this is the right thread to ask but have you found a way to make custom animations for person models work? I was thinking of using Blender's keyframe animations system to move bones around on the model, to make the model act accordingly but I am not quite sure how I'm supposed to export this or even have it in Blender itself.

Also I'd like to apologize and say I was a dumbass regarding the preCompile. I found out the reason it didn't work for me was due to the Include Library file in the config.json

I was actually supposed to remove that entire section for it to compile automatically in any mod. I do recommend this for anyone reading btw, it's free performance gains.

For anyone who may have trouble figuring this thing out or getting it to work:

Follow Antiphon's instructions but edit the settings.json so that it looks like this. This is to avoid the error where the compiler looks for a nonexistent library.h

Now that I know what the Include library function is for, I'd like to ask:

What happens if I want to include a large libary file with lots of lines? Will that cause loading times to worsen or a performance hit to the game? After all, my understanding of it is that it copies the entire libary into every script 1:1, even scripts that may not need it. Is there a way to limit the inclusion of my library to only specified scripts?

Zitat von Antiphon

just curious, have you (or anyone else) ever used the polygon glow option?

By the way I'd also like to say that yes, I use the polygon glow feature a LOT.

Zitat von Antiphon

Dude it would be freaking awesome if you pulled it off, even if it's for a newer version of Blender. My only request if there's a way for you to make it still work in Blender 4.x, so that I don't have to download yet another version of Blender and keep up multiple file versions. Basically, I work primarily in a mix of older versions and for my specific case I end up losing track of which blend file is for 2.7, 4, or 5.

But you don't have to, I can do a thing where my person models blend files are on 5.2 and my older ones on 4.6 and 2.7.

Zitat von Antiphon

I would not expect a drastic performance impact, but you can just make multiple smaller library files and import them in the scripts you need with #import [filename] as [alias] at the top of the script.

Okay this makes more sense. It's just that one line right and nothing else? I think this method is better to avoid duplication.

To clarify if I add that import line to the relevant script, do I still need to define the same .h file in the settings.json? Or is that line enough?

Zitat von Antiphon

You just need to add the line to the script. What the import list in the settings file does is it basically just puts such a line on the top of every script before compiling, so also adding it there would add it twice.

I am not quite sure what you mean by the .h file, we aren't using header files as this system is a custom system independent of the C inclusion system. That's why it is #import and not #include as normal in C/C++. The suffix for our library files is .lib.

My bad, I'm used to .h because this is what I remembe from many years ago from college when were taught to import files in C. Your method is very different and it's tripping me up lmao.

All good though, I did trial and error and found out how it works. I figured it out.

I can report that I was able to get the namespace of my test libary added into this specific .script. I left my settings.json blank and it did not add this anywhere else.

For anyone else attempting this, here's the format on my end.

I put it up here above all my const chars. It slots right into any script, including LA mod based stuff. By the way, no quotes needed for the libary path. Another thing I have to keep in mind because I initially added quotations to the filepath and it threw a "not found" error.

Seriously man thank you for the technical support. What you've just explained changes a LOT with Em4 scripting and solves the main bullshit about not being able to load a class or function located in one .script, but then needing it in another script.

This stuff is in fact, so powerful, I may have to go through and rewrite my entire scripts systems to work this way. I can think of at least 5 common functions I'd like to split off into their own libary.

Update: I can trigger functions. Very good, now I need to confirm if I can store values, and have the value be edited.

I will need to now check if there is a library called by 2 scripts, what happens if there's a variable inside and one script edits it, who's changes will reflect. Is it first come first serve, time to find out...