I would like to make an entity shoot at another. Say one Combat Soldier shooting at another.

Two issues arise.

1. Implement the results of a hit. This should be easy. With some scripting I can check if the shot hit the target and decrease its health with SetEntityHealth(e,v).
2. Make the shooting VISIBLE. I have no idea how to make this happen. I would expect that the command FireWeapon(e) should produce a flash and/or smoke, much like when the entity fires at the player. But this doesn't work for me, i.e., including a FireWeapon(e) in my script only produces said effects when the entity is facing the player. I suspect it is required to also use some additional commands, such as "ai_combat_mode[e] = what???" but I could not figure it out from looking at the standard scripts.

Any help will be appreciated

Thn


The issue really is how to make this firing VISIBLE in the engine. The results of firing (i.e.,

I'm not so sure you can make it happen exactly as you intend. I'm working on this issue as well and I talked to Lee and SC about it. It seems that there is a lot of magic going on behind the scenes that may make it impossible to use existing functions such as FireWeapon and get the desired results. It would seem that complete custom scripting is required at this point. If I end up solving this challenge then I will be sure to share.

@tomjscott

Sounds good and I am always looking forward for some of your code magic. Here are some related thoughts.

1. One way to do this is to have some kind of missile emitted from the shooter's gun, like a bullet. Doable with the current FPSCR lu

as tom said they currently can't shoot unless at the player but you are correct in that you can do it via a seperate object (i.e. bullet) placed in front of the entity and then do your own checks for if it hits something

i saw some decals in lee's last blog (friday) so i think they will be placable in 1.009 maybe
no idea about the animation on the guns as such but you can call character animations so you should be able to call the firing animation

You can use animated sprites for the muzzle flash, but you would have to move them in script to the gun point and make them visible when the weapon fires. But as talked about in another thread, animated sprites just play in a loop and there is no guarantee that when you make it visible that it'll be at the start of the animation. This is all very tricky and complicated in the current engine.

decals / animated sprites --> where are the commands for these? I can't see them in global.lua. Am I missing something obvious?

Some sort of animated gif attached to the weapon, would be nice and simpler.
The script responsible for firing the weapon, also load the gif Animate, each time the weapon is fired.

3com

@3com (and the rest)

Ach Ja!!!! Have an object (textured by a gif / whatever) positioned at the muzzle of the weapon and keep it always hidden except for a few cycles after the weapon is fired!!!

I think this will work.

Thn