Crossbow Bolt Conundrum

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

I was going to use xbow's crossbow sprites for some nifty weapons, only while looking for a suitable image for the ammo I got to thinking you ought to be able to retrieve your crossbow bolts after firing them. There's no simple way of doing this and the only way I can think of would require more scripting per mission than the original campaign put together (that's if it worked). Can anyone think of a good description for the crossbow ammo that would explain why the player can't retrieve the bolts?

I thought that perhaps one of xbow's pre-war manufactured crossbows can fire energy bolts but that would be too much of a wookie easter egg for my liking, and I'd really like some low tech crossbows for the begining fo the game, any ideas?

[xbow]

Here is an Idea based on my experience as an archer and an arabalist. When you miss you almost never recover a bolt or arrow. When you get a solid hit that happens to kiss some bone the bolt or arrow is ruined. Only When its a penetraing deep meat shot is bolt or arrow is intact. That is with the light 150-175 pound Xbows and the 60 to 70 pound bows we have today.

The real Heavy war Xbows of the middel ages had pulls in the range of 500 to 1000 pounds needless to say the wooden bolts seldom survived intact if they kissed bone or armor, the shafts tend to shatter as the point penetrates. The quad Xbow I made is cocked by a linnear electric motor power by small energy or a fusion cell. so it would have a pull of about a thousand pounds.

With that in mind it might be possible to allow the arabalist to recover a bolt only on rare occasions. Perhaps only a few targets need to have a bolt show up in its inventory upon death by an Xbow bolt. I dont have a clue how to trigger such a thing, that is for you and the other resident master blasters to figure out hombre.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Okay thanks, I'll just treat the bolts as bullets and won't offer any further description.

I don't think adding the occasional bolt would work, the trigger to add to an inventory is for either npc to player or player to npc not npc to npc. I did think about using the skill used and item equipped set up and then moving the bolt to the entity but that will move all the bolts with the same tag name at once. So you'd need to set up each bolt with seperate tagnames, with a different trigger for every target. Which is why I said it would take more scripting than for the entire main campaign.

Did you ever make proper ammo sprites for the crossbows? http://www.archeryworld.co.uk/acatalog/bolts4.jpg

Cheers

PS I saw Van Helsing yesterday, his automatic crossbow with rotary magazine would be a great pre-war tech weapon.

[xbow]

Ah yes quite right the ammunition sprite here it is, should have posted it before. I didnt create a new ammo type I just modified the ammoBolt with this sprite i never did like that no fin version.

xbowbolt

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

If you were going to make a crossbow from salvaged junk what would you use? Or what would be instantly recognisable, so that if the player picked up the crossbow they'd go, 'oh it's made from such and such'. Kind of like the fake robot parts, that you just have to laugh at when you look closely at what they've used.