Cold, Heat, Hunger, and other Elements Simulated on Maps

[xkcon]

I have come up with an idea on how we can Simulate Cold or other Elemental Attacks from our environment, but we will require the help of an expert sprite maker to truly make it work nicely.

What I did was create an Entity called cold and placed him stationary on a map and made his team occilate between friendly and Hostile (set to pre-determined time intervals)


The Entity requires special 'Elemental' weapons and armor. what I did was take an ordinary sniper rifle, and change its sound to 'none'. the Armor was a little more complex (but still easy enough!) you need to set all resistances and thresholds to 255 (or higher?) add 255 to sneak and 255 to camoflage in the 'Effects' categorys.
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For all intents and purposes the 'Cold' entity is invisible to the player's squaddies, but the shitty thing is that 'WE' can see the entity on the screen. It would be seemless if the Elemental was invisible period. So I tried to create an Entity using no sprite, but then it won't attack, it will still use floating speech though . It seems that an enitity has to have a proper sprite to partake in combat...? is this correct? if so would it be as simple as dumping all the existing zars or bmps or whatever from an existing sprite?

If thats all that there is to it then we got a way to simulate almost any detrimental environmental element. the nice thing is that shelters can be used as the cold can't get you if you inside a building or triggers can be used to 'turn on' hunger, etc. there is a lot of potential here... All we need is an Invisible Entity sprite. Surely a kind mod-maker could make one? Any thoughts?
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[requiem_for_a_starfury]

There's already a system in place that can deal environmental damage, Deathtraps. Check mission 16 to see how they are set up, but place death traps around the map with a tagname and then either have them on all the time doing damage that certain types of armour resist or use zones and triggers to set their script state on or off. Deathtraps already use an invisible sprite and if you don't fancy having to place loads to cover the map you can copy it and increase the bounding box in spray or one of the new sprite editors quite easily without needing to make new graphics.

You can use gas damage for cold damage renaming it in core\locale\game\misc.txt and giving armour a resistance to it.

Nice idea though.