Duck and Cover

The entity editor was poorly covered in the editor readme... (and nearly all tutorials)

What's the difference between the column of stats for "modifiers" and "effects". I'd expect it to be exactly the same thing...

Also:
How does the "cone" attack work for weapons. It seems to be like a burst attack that only uses one ammunition point. I'm guessing that it shoots out 10 attacks but I could be wrong.

Is there any way to make an attack that uses up several ammo points but only shoots out a single attack? (that is, 10 energy cells for a big plasma bolt instead of 1 energy cell for a small one).

Do weapons which have projectiles display them while doing burst attacks?

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:What's the difference between the column of stats for "modifiers" and "effects". I'd expect it to be exactly the same thing...

As far as I can tell, "Modifiers" apply to the entity itself, whereas "Effects" apply to another entity. So if you want to boost a character's Stats/Skills/whatever you use the "Modifiers" section (e.g. points spent on skills are reflected in this area), whereas a bonus to a skill provided by an item would use the Effects area (e.g. a set of Lock Picks' bonus to the Lock Pick skill).

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:How does the "cone" attack work for weapons. It seems to be like a burst attack that only uses one ammunition point. I'm guessing that it shoots out 10 attacks but I could be wrong.

Yep, you're wrong.

What this type of attack does is to use one "shot", but it affects all targets within range inside of a 70+ degree cone from the firer, centered on the actual target. This is a vastly over-powered mode of attack used by shotguns in the core campaign. For a long time I had a screenshot of VaultBoy with a Pancor Jackhammer after having fired a single round into a formation of 30 dummies, with 19 of them having been "killed". I highly recommend against using this in a weapons catalogue.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:Is there any way to make an attack that uses up several ammo points but only shoots out a single attack? (that is, 10 energy cells for a big plasma bolt instead of 1 energy cell for a small one).

No, unfortunately not. I tried to do this to make ammo usage a factor when deciding which e-weapons to use, especially since the description of the Pulse Pistol talked about it being an ammo hog. However, since it uses only 1 SEC/shot, it isn't an ammo hog, it simply has a small, 5-shot magazine.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:Do weapons which have projectiles display them while doing burst attacks?

No, they do not. So if you were to make a Laser, Plasma or Gauss weapon with a burst mode you would see the projectile when firing in Single Mode, but not while in Burst mode, just as the Gatling Laser does not have any sort of projectile.

Cheers,

OTB

As far as I can tell, "Modifiers" apply to the entity itself, whereas "Effects" apply to another entity. So if you want to boost a character's Stats/Skills/whatever you use the "Modifiers" section (e.g. points spent on skills are reflected in this area), whereas a bonus to a skill provided by an item would use the Effects area (e.g. a set of Lock Picks' bonus to the Lock Pick skill).

Uh... come again? (brain fart).

So "Effects" apply to whoever you're shooting, and "Modifiers" apply to the shooter? (the context is taken as a weapon)

So, in the effects field, I could make the target have a penalty to armor stats (ie, negatives to DT or DR); and in the modifiers field, I could make the shooter get a bonus to their weapons skill?


I was inquiring because I was gonna make some ammunition Armor Piercing and then circumvent the -25% damage penalty by imparting 25% bonus damage on the user (ie, that under-used stat which gets boosted by the character trait "kamakazi" or something). That way the ammo says it's AP, and I dont have to make it use DU.

Up until now, i've been putting the bonuses / penalties in the effects tab, not knowing what the modifiers tab did.

Of course, there's all sorts of fancy stuff i'd like to do with it. Right now I made my shotguns simply shoot a powerful single shot (~18-38 damage) instead of the cone attack because it was sleazy.

I made most of my modifications to ammunition:
*Spread Shells - 25% attack bonus, -9% bonus damage, Ball variant.
*Slug Shells - no attack bonus, +15% bonus damage, AP variant.
*Flechette Shells - 25% attack bonus, +41% bonus damage, Comp. variant.
*Electrical Shells - 25% attack bonus, Comp. variant.

If these kinds of modifier / effects tabs work for ammo too... I could do all sortsa crap with ammo (improve armor piercing capabilities, make it heal a target, make it reduce stats on a target... make it inflict poison damage?).


As for the cone attack, I noticed that sometimes you could do 100+ damage to someone even though the weapon itself only did 15-25 or something (and it wasnt even a critical hit). I'm guessing that there's a certain number of "attacks" that get divvied out amongst all the targets in the field (otherwise if there was only one guy, he'd only get hit once). Unfortunatly, the attacks must get distributed evenly, with a certain percentage chance to hit for each one regardless of range.

The cone attack was a big design blunder for the programmers... I could have designed something better (heh, a narrow burst attack which only uses 1 ammo; or maybe something more arbitrary that tries the chance to hit another character close by based on how far they are, with a maximum distance)... of course there's alot of stuff in FOT that I could have designed better too.

Are you saying that the Cone attack basically takes a shell, multiplies it, and then divides the total damage among the targets hit?

If that is true, then wouldn't a shotgun work better (and be more accurate) with lower damage? If you remember correctly, shells are made up of pellets. So technically a shotgun should only do damage like a BB gun (1 to 5?). Multiplied by 10 or more, the damage would be accurate.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:So "Effects" apply to whoever you're shooting, and "Modifiers" apply to the shooter? (the context is taken as a weapon)

As far as I can tell the Effects section has no effect on certain types of entities. You can't give a bonus to Small Guns with an ammo variant, for instance.

What I meant by the "Effect" affected another entity is that if an entity is in possesion of/has the entity in its Active Item slot, then it gets the bonus/penalty to whatever you entered in the "Effects" field.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:So, in the effects field, I could make the target have a penalty to armor stats (ie, negatives to DT or DR); and in the modifiers field, I could make the shooter get a bonus to their weapons skill?

No, you can't. I've tried this and it doesn't work.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:...That way the ammo says it's AP, and I dont have to make it use DU.

That's easily changed. You can simply have the DU type display as AP. Just change the appropriate text in the ammo.txt file located at core/locale/game. Most of the types in my mod have been changed to "AP" or "JHP" so I can get differing types of Dmg./Pen. while still not veering away from the standard FO ammo sub-types.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:Of course, there's all sorts of fancy stuff i'd like to do with it. Right now I made my shotguns simply shoot a powerful single shot (~18-38 damage) instead of the cone attack because it was sleazy.

My solution was simple: I used the standard FO/FO2 damage ratings without the Cone setting, and made the ammo (only one type, just like in the RPGs) JHP, which I felt more accurately reflected the role a shotgun should play.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:I made most of my modifications to ammunition...- 25% attack bonus...

I don't think that the attack bonuses would be working. I suggest setting up a range and testing it out on dummies or something. (Basically, just set something up so you can check your to-hit chances against a target, then switch the ammo type to compare. If you've already done this, please let me know exactly how you did it. Remember the following little phrase. Knowledge: don't hide it, divide it!)

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:... make it inflict poison damage?).

No dice here. The way that weapons poison things is to set the "Special Damage" of the weapon to a certain type. (In this instance, "Poison".) Unfortunately this means that if you want a weapon to poison something it will do so w/all types of ammo.

The short of it: the weapon controls the Special Damage Type (Poison, Knock-Down, etc.), while the Ammo controls the Damage Type (Normal, Electrical, etc.).

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:As for the cone attack, I noticed that sometimes you could do 100+ damage to someone even though the weapon itself only did 15-25 or something (and it wasnt even a critical hit). I'm guessing that there's a certain number of "attacks" that get divvied out amongst all the targets in the field (otherwise if there was only one guy, he'd only get hit once). Unfortunatly, the attacks must get distributed evenly, with a certain percentage chance to hit for each one regardless of range.

As far as I can tell it's a matter of range. Someone standing really close will get hit for a lot of damage, while targets farther away get for the standard amount.

Then again, you could be right. Unfortunately no one knows enough about FoT anymore to give us a definitive answer.

Sirgalahadwizard wrote:The cone attack was a big design blunder for the programmers...

If it hadn't been intended for shotguns this might not have been such a bad thing. If you wanted to put some sort of nasty "Black Ray Gun of Instant Death" in your game you could make it truly nasty w/this setting. Er...just keep the range short and not 30 like some of the shotguns in FoT...

OTB

Or you could just call it a "Pancor" and players would use it regardless.. just like multiplayer!

[TBC]-PaladinHeart wrote:Or you could just call it a "Pancor" and players would use it regardless.. just like multiplayer!

Pancor + Flechette Shells = legalized cheating.

That goes doubly for 2K games like I used to play.

OTB