Ok, I've just gotten done with the last ship that's going into this version of the Toolkit. I'm really happy with this one, because not only is it a cool design, but it showed me a few new tricks.

First off, I did a visual upgrade on the good ol' Heavy Lifter the other day. I have given it some smoke that comes out've the Exhaust intakes, and have it pushing some Cargo Pods... it looks waaaay better than it did now, much more interesting, instead of something that you just ignore because it doesn't have any loot (heh, fixed that too- pirates will enjoy that).

At any rate... my new ship, called the Light Hauler, is a very neat design for players to fly... it's basically a very utilitarian ship that straddles a Cargo Pod. A "poor man's Transport", more or less- big cargo space for its cost, but otherwise kind've weak.

At any rate, I was going to use some dynamic particles that were going to come out've its exhausts. This didn't work out as well as I'd have liked (the smallest-size smoke in the game, rh_continuoussmoke, is too large for this ship's scale, and looks lame), but I did discover yet another thing that might be useful:

AttachedFX objects have all sorts of uses. I'll let others look into them and maybe report back anything of interest. But one of the things that's very easily overlooked is that anything that generates Particles can have the following tag applied:

use_throttle = true

This basically makes the effect become more/less dynamic depending on the throttle setting. It's used by the Contrails, but it's probably useful in lots of other areas... if the ALE supports a range of activation, that is. Some don't, but a surprisingly large number of them do...