How to have a weapon display a "tip" message when equipping?

[JtoTheB]

Basically, I want to make it so whenever you take out a weapon, a little message appears at the bottom giving you a tip of sorts about it. (ex. "Great for close range, terrible at long range.") Is there a way I could do this? If so, it would be greatly appreciated if someone were to either give me some code to base off of or give me a tutorial on how to.

[JtoTheB]

Any help? (Sorry to bump post)

[Enjay]

I'm sure that there would be a ZScript way of making tips (not sure how to do it myself). However, a less flexible and less sophisiticated way of doing things could be to hijack the weapon tag property and put your tips in there.



Of course, you'd also have to ensure that your users had their options set to show tags. ( displaynametags=2 )

[JtoTheB]

I'm probably gonna do the tag method, as I'm only educated in DECORATE and not Zscript.

[Enjay]

Another way to do it that might give you more control (I don't know why I didn't think of this before - I've even done it myself before now) is that you could put your tip into an ACS script and run the script from your weapon's decorate. You can use functions like ACS_NamedExecute directly in one of your weapon's decorate frames (probably something in the select sequence, but it might be possible to define a pickup state for a weapon and put it there - I haven't checked that) and the ACS script could print whatever you like to the screen.

You'd probably want to set up your ACS so that it only calls the script once per raise, but that's easy enough to do. You could also put in checks if you only wanted it to happen the first time that you raised that particular weapon.

In fact, if you did want it to show only on the first pickup, it could be even easier. You could attach the script to a map-placed weapon and the script would run when the player picks it up. No need for DECORATE changes at all. That's not so good if the player can get the weapon via it being dropped by an enemy though.

Edit: proof of concept attached.
Just load up the PK3 in Doom2. It will give you a message (that lasts about 4 seconds) when the pistol first appears. If you pick up the shotgun, it will give you a different message.
You can switch between the weapons and the pistol and shotgun will always give their messages. I didn't bother giving a message to any other weapons (including the fist).

If you did only want it to happen once per weapon, that would be easy enough to do.

I did it all in DECORATE because that's your preference. I'm sure in ZScript you could probably do away with the ACS entirely.