Are (continuous) beam weapons possible?

I'm thinking about adding a beam/laser type weapon to my giant dox.

It's going to be like the scarab laser in Halo.

I don't know how to make this kind of weapon or ammo. So, is there some kind of program used to create these weapons? Is it even possible?

There is some really big problem with beam weapons on round planets except it's not anti-air or your bot isn't just extremely high.

I think it was either @elodea or @burntcustard who posted this in the irc a few days ago.
From what I understand it's a hack, but at least the screenshot looks awesome


EDIT:
As can be seen in the screenshot it was @elodea xD

It's only three times bigger than the normal dox, so about the size of the commander.

Since the planets are round i thought there would be a cut-off distance so it doesn't go on forever.

Yes it's possible, but very finnicky to get 100% perfect looking and working (even this example is not very good, and i had to make some tradeoffs to get this far).


Use a soft dot particle emitter of whatever colour with high emission rate as your fx trail then use high alpha value to smooth it out. Then define a high velocity in the ammo json file, and a highish rof in the weapon tool json.

Be careful too high velocity and the game will not render the full 'beam' properly (there will be gap between the muzzle bone and where the game renders the start point of the beam). Too low velocity, and it will not look like a real laser.

Too high rof and it will lag the game with too many units doing it. Too low rof and it will look weird when you have your unit shooting while moving.

The beam weapons will also start shooting into the ground past ~90 range instead of properly hitting their targets.

Haha so it is a hack.

Thanks, I'm going to test this out.

That 90 probably depends on the height of the unit and the size of the planet/or the specifc form of the ground in the area if you have a heightrange above 0?

That's awesome

Maybe, i didnt calculate exactly or try different models like commander with a higher muzzle bone. From just using random uber planets, it seemed like 90 was the maximum range to get the sheller model to reliably hit regardless of radius or terrain.

The size of the target didn't seem to matter either.

So i'm looking at one of the .pfx files.

I've never edited these before, so i'm wondering what these different "spec" categories are. There are a total of 3 for the bullet_proj_trail.pfx (i made a copy of this one, it was the default dox weapon trail, so i'm going to just change the paths for the giant dox)

How do I know which spec to edit? (trial and error?)

Figured it out with trial and error

EDIT: my god there are so many paths to keep track of.... bullets, ammo, trails, effects, tools, etc.

How well do they btw hit targets? Like can they reliably hit air units?
Lasershow?

I'm wondering how you kept track of the seemingly endless amount of paths to edit the weapon.

As a general rule there is one spec for each 'entity'. The unit's main body is one. Each turret can potentially turn and track independently, so that's another entity. Each shot (ammo) has a location, velocity, etc, so that's another entity. At least PBAOE ones have an explosion entity. PFX are visual only, not game objects, so those are fairly separate things.

Could it have been made more user friendly? Likely; a lot of the implementation details are showing.

Is there a way to get rid of the annoying single-line code? I keep on having to format it in jsonlint; this makes it much worse.

My mod process auto-formats all the files and I haven't had any trouble with the formatted ones, but I haven't touched all types.

Sure, they can hit air if you put high enough pitch/yaw rate.

But why stop at air? =D

I'm actually doing something correct right now. I've already gotten my giant dox to shoot ultra-fast bullets. I think i can even make it shoot dox.

I'll post some screens later

I'll be putting the final version in the REL section tomorrow/in 18 hours. It's going to be called Dox4Lyf Mod. Like boom bot wars, except with dox.

Put that weapon on a satellite and you made the coolest unit in PA.

Stick it on the Anchor. If a beam weapon were to be added I'd want it on the Anchor.

The actual energy beams on the Anchor already look quite nice but i always envisioned it to have an energy beam and the SXX have the powerful short beams.


If an enemy unit moves through an active energy beam, does it cut it and take the damage?


And remember, don't cross the <strike>streams</strike> beams.