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Custom Colored Particles with Lua#

Written by Natejoestev, you can find me in the Guild or
Scrap Mechanic Maps on discord.

This tutorial will show you how to make a custom particle that can be colored with the effect class.

It will replace the transparency of the particle dif texture with the given color.

The smoke effects had helped me a lot while searching for examples.
Always look at the game files kids.

Note that this tutorial assumes that you already know some things about
modding SM and the particle system.

Table of Contents#

Required Resources#

  • Scrap Mechanic
  • Scrap Mechanic Mod Tool you can find for free in the steam library
  • VS Code or any other code editor that can handle JSON and Lua files.
  • A particle and effect to be used (documentation uses my_particle and My - Effect)

Modifying the Particle#

Note: I have not tested for multiple emitters, if you need help, contact me.

First, open Engine Parameters and make sure Color is checked
and set Color Fraction to 1.0.

Image of Particle Editor

Then save it with Ctrl+s. You can now close the editor.

Open /particles/my_particle.json and add 

{"control_point":[[0.0,[1.0,1.0,1.0,0.0]],[0.050,[1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0]],[0.495770,[1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0]],[1.0,[1.0,1.0,1.0,0.0]]],"guid":2,"name":"Color"}

to system:emitters[0]:effects (this should be an array).
This adds a color effect to the emitter,
but the reason for copying the json is because it requires specific data.

Note: guid, should be the index of the chunk you added (indexing starts from 1)
So if there is 4 elements including the one added, you would put 4.

Changing color with Lua#

You can set the color like this:

effect:setParameter('Color', sm.color.new(--[[Your Color]]))