I've come up with a method of doing the details of effects, too. I'm using the green steam of Fort Bush as an example in this tut, however it works with all the other effects (like ship trails, jumpgate effects, ...), too.

The unmodded green steam has two problems. The first one is it's sudden pop-up when closing in on it, the second is that when you're close enough to the station and turn your ship to view the steam, it looks like it just started. The fix is really simple and best done if you have something like Excel at hand.

Open the file "effect_types.ini" from the \DATA\FX\ subdirectory of your Freelancer installation.

We're interested in three entries for each effect-type, which are:
visibility = ; switch for keeping an effect running or not even if not currently on your screen
update = ; switch for updating or not an effect not currently on your screen
- and -
pbubble = ; similar to what lodranges = does with objects ingame

With that explained, here's what these lines should look like for every single effect:

visibility = EXIST_OFFSCREEN
update = UPDATE_OFFSCREEN
pbubble = 0, 1000000

And this is the result:
before
after
barely visible, but still there

To make it quick for the impatient of you, here's the link to the already modded file.

Edited by - Preacher0815 on 5/27/2005 1:40:56 AM