Weapon "condition"s

[Jimmy]

For one of my mods I have a system in which weapons degrade over time until they become less and less reliable and eventually cannot be used or sold. I also want the player to be able to drop these weapons (with a script calling UseInventory to use an item which drops said weapon) if they become unusable.

But then a problem arises. How do I keep the weapon in its unusable state if/when it's picked backed up (perhaps by another player)? I have a set of inventory items which track how many times the player has fired each weapon, and if the player has a certain amount of the corresponding "WeaponShots" item the weapon degrades to the next stage of disuse (which are Mint, Excellent, Good, Fine, Poor, and Valueless). When the player picks up a "Mint" new weapon of the same type the number of these items returns to zero, but I have yet to find a way of making this number of items return to what it was before the weapon was dropped.

I figured I might be able to do something involving [wiki]A_SetUserVar[/wiki] and/or [wiki]GetUserVariable[/wiki], but this project is for Skulltag which IIRC doesn't have these functions yet.

If worse comes to worst I should probably just change the system to make the dropping script drop a dummy weapon that can't be picked up and fades away after a while - if the player WANTS to drop one of his weapons why allow him to pick it up again? (Although since this mod is to be as multiplayer-compatible as I can make it, I would like some way of allowing players to exchange weaponry, though it won't be a crucial asset to the mod's online gameplay.)

[NeuralStunner]

How do User Vars work when used in weapon definitions? (IIRC it just references the "owning" Player. )

I think weapons can have an Ammo value... You could set one of each weapon's ammo type to indicate its quality/durability. However, I'm not certain how to spawn a weapon with a specific ammo amount, or even if you can...

Another idea: Give each Player all the weapons they can use to start with, but no ammo for the ones they shouldn't have yet. Each weapon would have a unique required ammo type to represent its quality. Then, instead of weapon pickups, use CustomInventory pickups - You could use its Args[0] to indicate its current quality value. Thanks to Decorate Expressions, that would be usable directly in codepointers. First, check to make sure the player already has 0 of that ammo before collecting the new "weapon".

Also use INVENTORY.UNDROPPABLE on the weapons, and add a new command/keybind to remove the ammo after dropping the CustomInventory (with Args[0] set correctly) instead.

Another advantage to this method: by giving WEAPON.CHEATNOTWEAPON to each, you can limit the ones certain classes can use! Just check for the weapon in its corrosponding CustomInventory.

Hopefully I explained that clearly enough.

[Jimmy]

That might just work, although I'm a bit dubious about using ammo, since of my some weapons have altfires and therefore need a second ammo type defined. Would you care to throw together a quick example of how I'd set that up, please?

[NeuralStunner]

Actually you could technically use any regular Inventory, you can do manual checks in the weapon's code.

Example? Whew, okay...

---

Decorate concept (Should work, more or less):

Code: Select all

Actor PickupLongSwordIron : CustomInventory
{

	// "Window dressing" here (I.E. pickup message & sound).

	States
	{
	Spawn:
		LSWI A 35
		Loop
	Pickup:
		LSWI A 0 A_JumpIfInventory ("QualityLongSwordIron", 1, "PickupFail")
		LSWI A 0 A_GiveInventory ("QualityLongSwordIron", Args[0])
		Stop
	PickupFail:
		LSWI A 0
		Fail
	}
}

Actor QualityLongSwordIron : Inventory
{
	Inventory.Amount 1
	Inventory.MaxAmount 300
	Inventory.InterHubAmount 300
	INVENTORY.UNDROPPABLE
}

ACS concept to drop the "weapon"(Off the top of my head, probably wrong in several places):

Code: Select all

Script 1000 (Int TypeNumber)
{
	Str QualityType[4] =
	{
		"QualityLongSwordIron",
		"QualityLongSwordSteel",
		"QualityShortSwordIron",
		"QualityShortSwordSteel"
	};
	Str PickupType[4] =
	{
		"PickupLongSwordIron",
		"PickupLongSwordSteel",
		"PickupShortSwordIron",
		"PickupShortSwordSteel"
	};

	Int QualityToTake;

	QualityToTake = CheckInventory(QualityType[TypeNumber])
	If (QualityToTake) > 0)
	}
		Spawn (PickupType[TypeNumber], GetActorX(0), GetActorY(0), GetActorFloorZ(0), 1000 + PlayerNumber() );
		Thing_SetSpecial (1000 + PlayerNumber(), 0, QualityToTake, 0, 0);
		Thing_ChangeTID (1000 + PlayerNumber(), 0);
		TakeInventory ("QualityType[TypeNumber]", QualityToTake);
	}
}

You should also definitely edit the Spawn line to spawn the pickup outside of the player. (I wanted to get the POC done, so I didn't go that far.)

[Jimmy]

I'll give that a go. Cheers! Looks simple enough.

[NeuralStunner]

Looks simple enough.

"It all made sense, like a mermaid on a bicycle."

Heh, my ACS probably sucks. I'm not just rusty, I've just hardly done a thing with it.

Oh, and yet another advantage to the Args[0] method: It's simple as heck to put "pre-damaged" weapons on a Hexen/UDMF map.

[Nash]

Well I was messing around with user variables to create a similar system (and no, I'm not copying from you; I've been wanting to do such a thing ever since I played Fallout 3, which was quite a while ago :)) and I have a feeling that the user variable system in ZDoom just isn't working as expected when used from a weapon which is in the player's inventory.

Either that, or I'm doing something wrong.

The following example is supposed to increment the user variable user_weaponcondition everytime the Custom Shotgun is fired.

1) Assuming that calling ACS_Execute from the shotgun should make it the activator, it should properly print the user variable. But it keeps saying 0.

2) Calling [wiki]A_LogInt[/wiki] reveals 65536... huh?

3) I've set it up to jump to a "WeaponBroken" state after 2 shots. It's not making the jump regardless of the amount of shots.

Any ideas?

[EDIT: Fixed a sentence to make it less offensive]

[Gez]

2) Calling [wiki]A_LogInt[/wiki] reveals 65536... huh?

It does seem a reasonable value. 65536 is how 1.0 is encoded in [wiki=Data_types#Fixed_point]fixed point[/wiki] format.

[Nash]

It still doesn't change the fact that this isn't really working (it's supposed to make a jump after 2 shots, yet it's not jumping)