If you can settle for modifying an existing effect, such as changing its color, size, etc. you can usually strike gold just by looking for numbers in the .ale file that correspond to the attributes you want to alter. For example, the starflier here is using one of the bretonia engine effects that I toyed around with:
flame of doom
Another example, these are... one of the missile effects, I don't recall which. They were greatly enlarged and their color was altered:
missiles of doom
Back when I was messing with .ale files (roughly the same time that I was looking for constants in the .exes and .dlls), I had other things on my plate and so wasn't really interested in fully cracking the format. If there is enough demand for completely new .ale files, we may have enough information scattered throughout the TLR community to get a good head start with it.