General Curiosities

[Xaser]

For weapons, you can make the alternate pickup a WeaponGiver and halve the ammogive amount there. That should do it.

[EDIT] Flelp.

[Ed the Bat]

Yeah, setting how much ammo it contains is not the issue. The issue is finding a way to check if it fell out of a defeated monster.

[NeuralStunner]

These will not really work for me; the bullet solution seems like it would cause more issues, particularly how bullets will not pierce things that survive them; if something tough like the Cyberdemon absorbs all of them, nothing behind him will get hit.

This isn't the case. Whether hitscan or projectile, damage is processed individually and the remaining shots will continue past a killed actor.

It's actually more of a challenge to do just the opposite, E.G. Quake-style shotguns.

[Ed the Bat]

Right, but if the target isn't killed, he'll take the damage of every hitscan, and there will be no shots left to pass through. That's not much of a piercer. That's rather more the opposite, like a hollow-point.

[NeuralStunner]

I guess I misread the issue here. In this case I think the best approach is a bit of fixup for rail attacks. (Since they already do everything else you want.)

[Ed the Bat]

rail attacks

Sounds good to me. =)
I'd just need for them to support autoaim (beyond my power), and then to teach myself how to properly manipulate the puffs so they spawn when/where I want them, and I think I'm golden.

[FDARI]

I'm not sure it would be a good feature internally (in terms of how I'd code it in C++), but from a modder perspective, would actual ripper hitscans be any good? It sounds like the kind of property that could reside on a bullet puff. Max 1 hit per actor, infinite pass-through until meeting an impenetrable obstacle/range limit.

As long as that doesn't make the bulletpuff itself a very damaging presence whenever it spawns. That'd be some side-effect.

[Ed the Bat]

A ripping hitscan sounds good to me. In fact, that's pretty much how I always thought of the railgun. I can't speak to how well the engine would accept it; the source code is a bit over my head. But if it can produce the effects I want, I'd be happy with it.

[Ed the Bat]

The list continues to very slowly whittle down over time, thanks to new developments. Right now, it seems to me that the simplest item remaining on this list would be the piercing bullets. Right now, I'm finding that railguns can do everything I want, except for autoaim. I'd like to ask anybody who knows the mechanics better than I do, would it be possible/feasible to add a flag or property to allow rail attacks to honor autoaim? It's never been done before so I have to suspect there's some kind of obstacle, but I'll need a more expert opinion on this.

[Xaser]

Railguns use the same trace function as everything else; though I haven't looked at autoaim specifically when tinkering with the railgun code, I'll bet it's nothing more than a purposeful force-off presumably to prevent multiplayer attacks from being cheap. If that's the case, adding an enable-autoaim flag would be trivial.

[Ed the Bat]

That would be excellent, if it could be done. It would also be nice if, as you and I discussed in the Feature Suggestions a while back, such a toggle or flag could be added to all attack-based codepointers, so we could have more specific control than the WEAPON.NOAUTOAIM flag. Of course, I expect that to take longer to realize, as it requires more work.

[Xaser]

Well damn. I'd be totally up for looking this up (and maybe doing an implementation) right now but I'm away from my primary computer where my proper dev environment is. D:

I guess I could download VC++ Express on here really quick, but then the changes would be a bit out of sync with my usual stuff.

[Ed the Bat]

Don't feel any need to rush that on my account. Though it would make me rather happy to see something new come of this. =3

[Ed the Bat]

The list both shrinks and grows, as items have been crossed out, but also a few have been added in because I either forgot to add them to the list, or entirely new concerns came up.