First off, ramonimbao, your avatar is the best ever.

Secondly, I'll probably do what Brainwashed
said and combine all these silly things into a
Minor Lua Mods thread (because, I genuinely
want to help people. Even if no one else notices
that I did, I'm still happy. )

Also, I don't want to deprive Bubs from a nice, organized Library of cheap lua tricks.
(maybe in the wiki there could be an example mod for each function?)

This must have the ''Lets do the time warp agaaiinn!!..'' as a some sort of firing sound etc.

Unfortunately, you gotta take such things with a pinch of salt. Although it might imply LUA can make your grandma's toast, all systems have limitations and sooner or later modders run into them. But that's where ingenuity begins =)

Back to the subject of time travel, this made me think of an alternate idea for a time machine; a pod that takes an actor, then disappears in a shiny special effect. It reappears on the same spot in the future, say five minutes later. Store a few variables and remove/respawn the actors... why its so easy I may even do it. Finally, an opportunity to put a Delorean in Cortex Command

Oh yeah, custom sound never hurts too...

Wait, I take that back =P

Very good mod, Zalo. Lua can surely do some impressive things.

But I was wondering: would there not be a way of creating a selective time changing effect? More specifically, to create an actor that could slow down everything in a scene but itself. I didn't think it would be possible, as the TimeScale appears to be applied to all objects in a scene, but as Numgun created the Slow Time Grenade, maybe the method he used could be applied map-wide...
Hmm... *smoke starts coming out of my head*

I think numgun's effect just slows everything down by cutting particle velocity.

That'd be entirely possible, though it'd probably lag a good bit checking through everything.

Must make a Dear Sister weapon now...

But what if it did the exact opposite?
What if the actor used Zalo's TimeScale script to slow down everything in the scene by, for example, 5x, and Numgun's particle velocity script accelerated the said actor by 5x? The whole scene would get slower, but the actor would continue moving at normal speed, and much less lag would be generated. ( I guess)

Now that, good sirs, is definitely worth trying out.

Well, uh, you could also just y'know add an if check so that if it's your actor it wouldn't be slowed down.

Iterating through everything and doing two simple calculations per thing shouldn't lag at all. Unless there's millions of stuff on the map.

OMG. Agreed!

Also, yeah, I think this will benifit to the community. Explanations are good, but they're only theory. This is practical stuff that you can mess around with and modify easily.

Good job!

But then, what would be the calculations? The first one would be simply to check if the actor's name is TimeRobot, or something like that, and if it is not, change its velocity to, say, (ActorNewVel = (ActorCurrentVel/5)), or something like that. The problem is, if that math is applied, the actors' velocity would be divided by 5 every sim update, generating really low velocities over time. And I cannot even conceive the code for accessing an object's movement speed (Started learning lua today ) and changing it to a new value.
All in all, I'm very confused...

Well you only have to cut velocity once. You'd make two tables: the previous speed for reference/to go back to, then a new speed setup. Everything is forcibly kept to the new value, and if anything new enters its speed is cut similarly.

Also, it's just actor.Vel. Stored as a vector. actor.Vel = actor.Vel / 5 should work just fine.

Thanks! Gonna try implementing it now.

(Sorry for the double post)

It doesn't work, for some reason. I'm posting the code here:



The console says there's a problem on line 8. It says " expected function argument near then". Apparently, it wants some kind of argument after the "then" but I have no idea why, as there is an argument in the following line. Any ideas?