Hi guys
Quick intro: New on the forum, learning to mod CC for a week now or so... In the past I did a lot of Liero weapon editing. Also some spriting experience.I've been fiddling around with beam physics I saw in the Amrobotics' Death Ray.
I've managed to get some great effects you will hopefully be able to experience on your own in a few days when I'll get proper ini file done from scratch, rather than ripping the source.
For how it evolved and the most recent look, see images below. Lowest are most recent, last is a completed sprite. No shooting animation yet. I also made some experiments on the ray animations. One of the recent versions of the beam gun proved to have very high obstacle penetration rate, but acted more like a railgun... I'm gonna make it into a different weapon sometime.
There are some issues I encountered while working on the gun:
The gun uses the same principle as the death ray, so it shoots a TDExplosive projectile at speed of 200. Upon detonation, it explodes into short-lasting particles, projected at an angle to the hit element. This looks pretty cool, like a discharge you see in electrical metal fusing. Now, the problems are:
1. Since the TDExplosive is sprited, when you move the gun up and down, the projectiles become visible around the wake of the laser (not covered by the beam sprite).
2. If you try to increase speed of the particle beyond 200 to make it flow in the wake of the laser, the spread of the detonation particles becomes very narrow, which looks strange. I was wondering, could I fix it by changing the joint strenght/stiffness somehow? Cause the spread values of the TDExplosive detonation get OVERRR NINE THOUSAAAAND and the particle speeds get like -0.000001 not to slice the map into pieces with one shot...
3. Don't know much about projectile bounciness, but when I set mass of the beam particle to something like 0.01 to reduce kickback (considerable with such rate of fire), it seems I have to increase sharpness for the projectile not to bounce off walls, thereby increasing damage to some crazy value. Do not want.
4. The beam sprite goes across the map, regardless of where the projectile is detonated. Looks good, pretty cool for aiming... but we shouldn't talk ourselves into being comfortable with what we've got now just because it's easier, should we?
So, I was thinking something like this:
a. Make the beam a MOSRotating particle
b. Make the weapon shoot a
sequence of different projectiles, each with a different sprite set
c. Upon detonation of the MOSRotating, spawn a TDExplosive with a sub-zero speed that instantly explodes, OR, if it's possible, make the MOSParticle generate particles on detonation.
So, what I'm asking is: does the code allow such scripting like in those 3 points?
now, the juice. Gun itself is xbox hueg, but it's pretty detailed, and the beam gibs people really nicely. Skeletons tend to explode into neat circles, especially if shot when falling from a height. It digs ground pretty nicely, it leaves MetalBullet on detonation which deflects itself, preventing it from excessive map demolition.
Tons of Respect to Amrobotics for Coding Stuff with Cool Physics 
PS.
Any chance we'll get the ability to make alpha channels on separate grayscale sprites?
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Amrobotics', not mine
