Plasma Ball placement

[BlueFireZ88]

I noticed in Vanilla Doom that the plasma sprites look as if they appear from the gun themselves. Is there a way of replicating this with a replacement actor?

[Blue Shadow]

Maybe you could fire an invisible, 0-speed projectile that, itself, fires the "real" projectile using A_SpawnItemEx with some offsetting. I'm not sure if it'll work flawlessly, though.

NeuralStunner made something, dubbed "Projectile Spawner", that you could probably use as base.

[BlueFireZ88]

Where would I place this dummy actor though? In the plasma ball replacement actor? Or the weapon itself?

[Blue Shadow]

The idea is that the weapon fires the dummy projectile, and the dummy projectile fires the "real" plasma ball one.

Oh I just thought, if you're going with Neural's code, then 0-speed isn't viable, in this case.

[Xaser]

Using a dummy projectile like that is probably more trouble than it's worth. It'd work better to either lower the spawnheight in A_FireCustomMissile or do what I do sometimes and make the first tic of the projectile animation be invisible -- this usually results in making the projectile look like it comes from the end of the gun rather than from the player's chest. It delays the shot slightly, but not enough that it's noticeable.

If you do go with the Neural method, though, keep in mind that you can still make the dummy projectile have a speed greater than zero and destroy it in less than a tic. It's easy enough to make it never affect actors anyway (+THRUACTORS mainly) even if it lasts for a tic, so no biggie there.