[Super Weapon] Storm Caster

[Pegasus]

[...]Everything you hear after the beam are sounds from RA2 - a longer startup sound, background humming and the various thunder sounds.[...]

*Tips hat*.

[...]Only the shadow part of a moving storm worries me a bit.[...]

Hmm, yeah, I see your point. Have you ever done any performance tests with projectors (BSP-only, or BSP/st.mesh) attached to movers? Do they tend to have a significant client-side CPU/GPU impact?

[...]Wind effects, though... Convincing wind visuals are hard already if you have full control (i.e. if you design the map), dynamically creating them at runtime without knowing the map is probably not going to look good.[...]

Yeah, I know, half-baked idea there at best. Still, I suppose you could just pick 3-4 random points within the storm's disc, trace directly down and spawn the corresponding 3-4 dust blowing emitters with their direction pointing outwards from the center. Would probly take only a few more commands during the storm's emitters creation stage. Now if the whole thing's moving, yeah, per-tick adjustments ahoy -_-. Edit: what about if every spawned emitter were directly anchored to the master mover instead of having to relocate everything per tick in relation to the storm actor itself? Wouldn't that perform better for clients? Of course to do that a variant of the current code would need to be made with the mover in mind from the start. Anyways, if the idea does intrigue you, I'm sure you can figure it out on your own.

[...][edit]Added lightning impact effects, including vehicle overlays. New version is up at the same location and should be network compatible to the previous ones. (Impact effects only show if the client has the new version, overlays only show if the server has the new version.)

Time for a new tropic thunder video by Worm Studios ?

[Wormbo]

New version is now available in the first post.

Changes from version 1:

• thunderstorm stops immediately on level reset, so it won't carry over into the next round in e.g. Onslaught
• ion blast damage reduced from 200 to 50 against players and 150 against vehicles and objectives
• lightnings no longer target teammates explicitly; teammates who happen to be under the storm may still get hit indirectly
• lightning damage reduced from 400-600 to 200-400
• storm duration reduced by about 10% (from 22 to 20 seconds)
• lightning target radius reduced by about 25%
• lightning ground impact effect is now always visible

[Pegasus]

All those adjustments seem sensible enough, although the duration could still prove too long for players' taste; we'll find out in due time, I suppose.

Meanwhile, I'm still not giving up on the dream of a standalone, placeable thunderstorm actor operating in constant or periodic mode that mappers could attach to an invisible, slow mover. Panalesh, SlatedWorld, IslandHop, Alien2 - freaking Dinora; so many places it could make players' lives more miserable interesting !

[Ten]

nice job wormbo.. i see its being used on the omni server!

[Droopy_Bollocks]

Jeez that's all we need, two mega smart-arses finding new ways to kill us!

Nice job you two ;-)

[Ten]

Lol I don't think it'll be coming here..

[MrPenguin]

Heh, I hadn't read this thread before coming across the weapon and using it... badly. I think I managed to kill myself with it more than I affected other players - basically as you'd want to use it against an open enemy node, then go in and claim the node, and I get impatient waiting for the storm to clear