I'm building a monster of a mothership in what little free time I have, and I'm trying to make it somewhat autonomous.
However, if I leave it anole for too long the craft is deleted by the game because it's managing its velocities and stating level over a target on the ground.

Is there a good way to reduce the chances of the engine deciding to delete it?

Also, I'm still not having success with an emitter spawning actor-particles to collect gold, has anyone ever done that?

Thanks in advance for whatever suggestions you have.

The docks take care of this by shaking the ship around just a little with a basic script, you could try that method.

Allright, thanks
An alternative I have been considering is making the craft tiny and the body simply attached via Lua, thereby allowing me to make the craft vibrate rapidly all the time.

Any ideas about issue #2?
Grif lent a hand a while ago in a thread that is now buried on page 2 or 3, but what I created did not work.

Edit:
What dev created the autoscuttle "feature?" I would like them to change that, asap.
And then release a new build.

That would have been Data of course, since it's a hard coded thing, and has stayed in place despite years of complaints from the community. No doubt about it.

To make actors that are functionally on your team, you'll need to either create it through Lua, or put it in the inventory of a craft and gib said craft.
If you emit or gib actors into existence, their team is screwy.

If you gave some more detail on the size and spread and quantity and whatever of your actors, I could better suggest which specific method to use.


Wait, why is this in requests? You want help, not someone to do your work for you.

Actually I'd love to hand off this long rambling document detailing this awesome thing I want made, but that's boring.
I'm going to need... everything but the code itself. I cannot sprite for crap, and gibs intimidate me. Sounds? Lol wut? Etc.

I have my ship vibrating nicely, though a little strangely, I'll be revising that later, now that it flies and avoids crashing.

The actor-digger was going to operate this way:

1) Human activates toggle switch in controls (got that part done easy)
2) Ship raycasts to the ground and spawns a little explosion there (done, and fun as hell to glass a level with)
3) Explosion has actors emitted (or spawned) to collect whatever gold may be found there. (?!?!)
4) Actors are destroyed, and do not count on the death toll (presumably easy)
5) Player makes a profit on the remote mining operation, buys more soldiers or something.
Basically.

It's one of a few features I want to put on this big mothership-thing I've been working off and on for seven months or so.

Yeah, undoing deaths on the frag counter is easy.
The main problem I'm seeing with this idea is that for an actor to collect the gold, they have to be able to be hit by MOs. And if they can absorb gold, they'll absorb and/or block the explosion's effect.

I've got an entirely different idea for you that might be worth a shot...
Displaced terrain gold particles all will have the exact same mass, and it will be a unique mass, because the material density value of gold in materials.ini has so many decimals.
This means that you could theoretically check the mass of all of the MOPixels in an area around the explosion, and if it is exactly the mass that a displaced gold particle would be at, the particle is brought to the ship however you'd like.

Messing with this mass business instead of just checking the material is necessary because I'm fairly certain checking an object's material directly is difficult/impossible.

Heh, I think that sounds like what I have from a really early description I wrote of how it would work:

"check vicinity of emitter for gold particles, set gold particles' velocity to fling at ship, possibly set their gravitational acceleration to 0"

That sound do-able? I'd obviously prefer that the gold held a constant speed, rather than get flung, but I can do the trig for targeting the collector thingy and make the flinging work too.

I guess this becomes a request now, because I have to go do calc work for the next few hours.
I'd like a script to fling all the gold in an area the size of a standard block at a target of 100 game-meters up.
(hey, we can teleport the gold too, right? teleporting to a hole in the ship might be stylish)

Why bother making a hole to teleport it into? I'm pretty sure it will still collide with the ship and be collected if you place it at an overlapping position. The center of mass position would obviously be easiest since you could just copy the position vector,

Anyways, I would consider actually doing it for you, but I would have to recreate pretty much everything you've done so far, which is too much of a hassle. Maybe if you provided what you've got, for a requestee to add on to, the problem would seem more approachable.

The hole would just look cool. (gold teleporting into a little capsule and then being absorbed just sounds neat)

I'll trim the crap from the mod the ship is being made in later, but this is what I currently have, extra stuff and all.

The mod is currently called "smart mortar" because I built it on top of my other in-progress work.


Right now there are two ships, one that flies using Lua and one that has a "mining beam" toggled with Lua.
You can tell which one is the mothership because it is A) huge B) has a one-color "shadow sprite."
The mining beam on the nuclear dropship is toggled by clicking ... but it has some glitches.
Both can be found in the scene "testing grounds" on the campaign map. It has infinite crabs to lazzor and some rudimentary obstacles for a ship to avoid. Also a kickass turret I made, but it too lacks a good sprite.

Oh man I need to go do my homework.

Bumpdate.

I've added the kick-ass "pull all particles up" feature borrowing code from the particle accelerator.
This is the best thing ever.

Sorry for making updates, anyone who is trying to help.
Here is latest stuff:The ship now has a beam that scans the ground right to left and digs up dirt and gold.