Changing weapons effects

edited December 2015 in EmptyEpsilon
How much customisation is possible for the beam weapons?

I have already played around with changing the location, arc, range, cycle time and damage of the beam weapons.   I have made a ship with a weak, rapid-fire beam.   (This particular weapon tends to overheat, so I guess that each shot generates a constant amount of heat, regardless of weapon.)

For example, I am interested in making a "super beam" that inflicts a large amount of damage, but takes 1 minute to cool down.   I want to give it a blue beam to make it distinctive, make the beam fire for a few seconds, generate a large amount of heat, and would like to give it a unique firing sound.   Is that possible?

What about weapons that fire "bolts" instead of beams? i.e. have a sprite or 3D model move from my ship to the target.

Comments

  • Bolts are projectile weapons, which are currently only fired from weapon tubes. (Missiles)

    Currently it's not possible to customized the beam weapons beyond the basic parameters. Everything else is hard-coded in the game and requires source code changes in there.

    The super-weapon beam does interests me, so I might work towards that at some point.
  • I made a Frigate (custom mesh and uv) with a heavy beam.

    It is basicly this:
    template:setBeam(2, 45, 0, 1500.0, 10.0, 30)
    1500 km range, 10 damage currently with 30 sec recharge.  I am toying with the amount of damage.  It seems to work pretty good, the major benefit is it's reach, not really the damage.

    But it would be cool to see different effects.
    One coming to mind is haywire, it damages systems only while not destroying hull.  either bypassing shields (like star wars ion cannons) or not (such as heavy gear).
    I don't know if you would want to code a disabling feature, where it is disabled for a certain time before coming online instead of damage.

  • I already have the option for different weapon damage types. Currently there is "Energy" "Kinetic" and "EMP".

    Energy is effected by shield frequencies. Kinetic is the default for explosion (missiles, nukes, mines), and EMP only damages shields.

    Beams are currently always energy weapons, but no reason that couldn't be configurable.

    Currently the beam weapons generate a fixed 2% heat per fire. And heat is only modeled for player ships, it does not effect AI ships. Could make this depended on the damage done with the weapon.

    Beam weapons are currently always a cone/arc. And are always auto-fire.

    So there are 5 properties that are currently "fixed" in the code that could be made dynamic in the future:
    * Beam color
    * Damage type
    * Heat generation
    * Straight line vs arc (arc of 0 deg might visually get this, but it will never fire)
    * Auto vs manual fire
  • If you have a look at this in the future, perhaps consider "unfixing" the amount of energy consumed, too!
  • Nice! How did you do it? In the code itself, or in script files?
  • Modified the code to use custom textures for beam weapons.
    I submitted the change to the main code depository. This modification would enable setting the color either un the template script or on the fly.
  • Merged the changes to make this possible.
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