I finally figured out why Particle Effects won't load in my projects...

Bear with me here. I'm not very good at writing out technical stuff, and this is going to get a bit wordy.

The problem I've been having is when I add the "particlesArt" through the "Resources" menu item into my project, the images arrive in the "Create" tab fine, but the effects don't load in their section of the "Create" tab.

I found a workaround to load individual effects by putting a "newEffect.eff" into my work area, and then in "Edit" chose "Load" and then navigate to the folder that has all of the .eff files and pick one at random. The problem with this is you can't see what the effect does, so until you are familiar with them it's very hit and miss.

Tonight I decided to figure it out by looking at what the pre-built projects that come with the engine have that my new projects lack. I started with the included TutorialBase and found the answer there.

This path is the same as what I have in my own 'Training' project... "TutorialBase : resources : particleArt : effects" and the "effects" folder is full of .eff files, same as mine.

However the TutorialBase also had a folder at this path... "TutorialBase : game : data : particles" ... that was full of .eff files. My 'Training' project had that folder, but the only .eff file in it was the one that I created during the "Feature/Particles" tutorial.

So I copied all of the .eff files from my "Training : resources : particleArt : effects" folder into my "Training : game : data : particles" folder, started up TGB, loaded my "Training" project, and all of the effects were listed and accessible in the "Create" tab.

I hope that helps anyone else who is having this problem. I'm not sure why loading the particlesArt resource doesn't copy the .eff files where they need to go, but at least now you know where to put them to get them to work.

Also, a note: If you have a list of particle effects and you can't see anything in the boxes, it might be because your "Object Library Background" is set to white. Some of the effects are light and they don't show up on a light background. Under TGB's Preferences, in the Scene Editor tab, you can change the object background from 'Light' to 'Medium' to 'Dark'. To the developers, this might be a handy thing to be able to change right within the editor tab instead of having to go into preferences. I would figure out a way to do it, however I'm an artist and not a programmer.

Now back to my evaluation of TGB.