The issue with the beam impact seems to be caused by a missing particle source direction and that was easy to fix. For the weapon in-flight effect I'll have to create a test-case so that might take some more time until I can determine what's wrong there.
You work quick (:
What could be improved in the wiki article? I did my best with the layout but I am not familiar with what an end user would expect from the documentation of this feature.
The primary issue when I look at the wiki page, is that I can't tell at a glance in what order everything goes. While I get the intention behind having links going to the Common syntax constructs. It makes everything really unclear and confusing at a glance, and makes it tedious when repeatedly having to look things up. Rather than having the links, It's
much better to just repeat the information for each effect entry.
Also, there's no clear visible seperation between Single, Composite, Cone and Sphere (no spaces, or lines, or colors etc), it looks like its one big list, which adds to the confusion when trying to make sense of it as a first time reader.
I had to make my own list in a notepad so I could tell at a glance how many inputs Single, Cone and Sphere actually take. Since on the wiki page, I constantly have to scroll down and up and try to piece things together. Look at Ships.tbl and the Weapons.tbl wiki pages for example, the contents list has everything in the order that the game expects it in.
Single
+Filename:
+Size:
+Lifetime:
+Duration:
+Delay:
Cone
+Filename:
+Size:
+Lifetime:
+Deviation:
+Velocity:
+Number:
+Direction:
+Trail effect:
Sphere
+Filename:
+Size:
+Lifetime:
+Velocity:
+Number:
+Direction:
+Trail effect:
My notepad list after some puzzling and trial&error.