SD: this is the post I was trying to send yesterday when Netscape refused to connect to the Asylum:
: Sorry, what do you mean by localize? If it's supposed to
: hit every enemy on the map, in what sense would it be
: localized? Oh, and have you tried using an invisible
: initial projectile, which only promotes into the
: "blowing snow attack" when it hits the
: target?
Sorry--that was unclear. What I meant was that since my original idea (localized projectile) didn't look right my next idea was to use the particle systems to make it snow when he taunted but that meant it snowed everywhere, hence no localization, and if I just localized the damage it looked kind of funny--everybody was getting snowed on, after all. Good idea about the invisible projectile but the blowing snow thing just wouldn't look right no matter how I did it (maybe for a defensive spell...), especially since it can't follow the target, so I gave up on it and concentrated on the cyclone, which looks incredible and now works perfectly.
: If you felt like sending me the tags, I could see if
: there was anything I could do with it. I'm sure many
: folks more skilled than I have already volunteered,
: though.
: --SiliconDream
Hey, I really apreciate that, but after about six straight hours of tweaking I finally got it to work on my own . Turns out I had just forgotten to check "centered on target", and since it has an area of effect it didn't bother . The real problem, as it turned out, was a lot sillier. The projectile is made of two parts: a ring of dust puffs (based on the mahir hold field but faster and tighter) and a descending column of puffs for the funnel. Try as I might, the column kept going up instead of down! Even after I used the "fast descending object" they would go up... and then come back down, through the ring, which sometimes looked like a really cool mushroom cloud but not like a tornado. I finally fixed this by tweaking the inertia (which of course kept the damaging projectiles from actually hitting anything--I had to give them invisible projectiles wholly seperate from the column which turned into dust puffs on detonation... man, I love Fear. Really I do). It's pretty much perfect now--I love, love, love it, I do. I just have to tweak the damage and the radius of the effect so that it doesn't blow Trow to smithereens from half the map away but is still more than a minor irritation to a tight platoon of Thrall. It works pretty much like a stationary dispersal dream--if you use it just right, all the dark forces will walk right into it and go boom one by one, but if you use it wrong it'll just sit there in a corner of the map and blow debris around harmlessly. I've made it mana based, rather than ammo based, because I think that was the emphasis with M2--all the same, three of them will use up all the mana and then it takes about five minutes for Cu Roi to recharge.
Hey, I have one other question, though: I made a "cu roi wounded" unit because the plot of the level is that your jmen have to sneak in and heal him, then defend his camp against a massive invasion. It works kinda like the Deceiver's body in M2, so there's an invisible, 80% healthy Cu Roi standing on this guy's chest who appears (and the wounded one disappears) when you heal him. That works great. The problem? The wounded unit, who just lays there (I had to tweak the "dead" sequence to keep him from twitching wildly! Now that was fun!) has a blue bounding box but no vitality bar (and yes, I checked it in his object tag). He's set to be a missile unit and everything else. But still, when an archer gets within range of him, he starts taking posthots at the body! And if your jmen is told to move near him he attacks with his shovel--I kind of solved this by making him non-autotargettable (now there's a word) but friendly units can still attack him, and usually kill him before help can arrive. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Is this maybe because I set him to "inanimate object", so they think he's a fence post?
Anyway, thanks for your suggestions, help and interest. I apreciate your taking the time to respond to my geeky obsessiveness ;)
