Any actor with a perceptiveness value of above 0 is alerted to the start of an emission. This is why an enemy will turn toward you if you start to jetpack within it's line of sight, but will not notice you if you begin a jetpack within, say, a corridor, come out of the corridor and fly near him. This is also why actors are alerted to dropships and rockets coming down because they are constantly starting/stopping emissions to stabilize themselves. This also affects explosions and gunfire, so I am not sure if the statement claiming that Darkstorm alt-fire "silences" emissions is entirely true. This is not problem with the devices, it is simply one of the exploitable fallabilities of the current AI.

Make sense now?

How would it 'silence the emission'? There is no emitter to speak of; it is creating a particle in mid-air out of nothing.

@411570N3: All particles unless knocked loose from terrain come from an emitter, that's how CC works. Emitters can range from the built in ones on devices to actual AEmitters like the ones used on crafts, wounds, and some high recoil weapons (eg: Coalition heavy sniper rifle).

What was that you were saying?

Ahh, I see. So via Lua you can simply tell a particle of your choice to appear when called upon, assign a velocity and direction, assign a starting position, and tell it to let fly? My apologies then. But what I said at first is true, all AI are alerted to the activation of an emitter.

Which is why we were talking about the best way to implement a Lua solution.

Okay, my bad. Thank you for enligtening me.

No problem, just read more next time.

So, is anybody actively experimenting with this? I wish I had more understanding of lua, and less of a hangover atm =.=

I probably experimented with this about as hard as one can. The conclusion is this: you can't use an HDFirearm's functionality if you want to make a silenced weapon. You'll either A: want to make an HDFirearm that spawns particles when you press a button that isn't the fire button, or B: make a HeldDevice that spawns particles when you press what would be the fire button on an HDFirearm.

I could have probably used the latter method to make my silenced weapons but I think I had already finished what I had so I was laaaaaaazy and used those weird hybrid weapons.

I also experimented with crazy methods of trying to "distract" local enemy units upon firing an HDFirearm's regular fire. No go: no matter what you do, if you fire, they know you're there and won't get distracted by anything else. Even if you shut them down completely for a brief moment, when they come back they remember you're there and turn and shoot.

i have new info concerning this topic , i think is worth mentioning.
ive found out MOSRotating are not detected by the ai, and can be quite easly shot from a HDFirearm.

defined like:


or

does the same thing , but seems less effective as bullet.

it does have a drawback, sharpness does not work with them.

ive recently uploaded a weapon that uses MOSRotating
you can get it here.
http://forums.datarealms.com/download/file.php?id=35311
here is a example of what i spoke of, silenced "shots".

You could probably then have a script on them that instantly deletes them and replaces them with the particles, copying the velocity.

i'm not sure that would work as they seem to not trust particles specifically.

Unitec pulled off silenced weapons.