So, playing as the Dummies, I came to the brilliant (maybe) idea of mounting a Dummy torso on a Dreadnought's ACrab chassis. I soon discovered that "AHuman" is not an acceptable value for Turret = ****. Ever-so-slightly confounded, I went searching. I found this thread form back in 2008: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11668&hilit=AHuman+turret+ACrab.

I wasn't terribly surprised that I wasn't the first person to think of this. However, rather than mega-necro that thread, I wish to revive the spirit of the idea here. I want a fully-functional AHuman torso mounted in some way on an ACrab chassis. My thinking is that this would prevent the dope from diving onto grenades/out of windows into the line of fire, and, given large and impressive leg sprites and a nice walkpath, look ridiculously awesome.

I've seen wonders made possible via Lua, especially in the Darkstorm faction. However, the code itself reads like German to me: I get a few bits and pieces, but the overall structure might as well be an inkblot. Has anyone had any success with creating what the other fellow dubbed an "ACentaur"? (ADrider is more what I picture, but that's just details)

Would give a few problems, first the "German" lua .
Then the fact that ACrabs usually have their legs not turning, instead of AHuman's who completly mirror their body's when facing the other way. I think making ACrabs with both leg sets facing the same direction is impossible, since I've never seen anything doing it before.(Dogs anyone?)

So, maybe 2 AHumans behind eachother, but that will still make them bite dirt when fired upon.

ACrabs always having symmetric outward upward-knee'd legs is just because that's usually the easiest and best looking way to do it.

All you would really need to do to make all legs face forward is vertically flip the sprites and redo the offsets of the back legs.

ACrab's lack of balance when within 90 degrees of upright will be a problem if you make anything with a disproportionately high center of mass. So don't make giraffes with depleted uranium robot arms on their chins. Actually, do that. Make them anyways, because they sound awesome.

Attaching two objects with Lua seems to have been done fairly well with the gunship and armored car and stuff like that, and I would assume the same techniques would work fine for actors or any other mass objects.

I have attached two AHumans to make a four armed soldier, and it was mostly playable, but far from perfect. Maybe I could do better with an ACrab, maybe not, maybe I won't bother to try.

Just a thought. If you wanted to make a multi-legged actor why not just add a second leg into the same frames as the FG and BG legs. If you set up the body correctly I think it should work fine. Feet would pose a different problem however. I am unsure if you can attach two sets of feet to one actor without it causing problems. The walkpath might give you a headache though...

If worse comes to worse just attach a second foot to the FG and BG feet frames and hope it lines up properly! Just a thought. Actually... I remember back in my time someone may have actually created a 4-6 legged actor (around Build 18 maybe). It was like a caterpillar or something.

Way back in the day there was a "spiderbot" that used that method.

It's certainly possible to fake, but your displacement and walking is never going to be perfect.

"Gluing" actors with Lua is, if not a perfect science, certainly a proved one. There's a number of much simpler mods than Darkstorm that use the method; perhaps you should attempt to translate smaller passages before you declare "German" unintelligible.

Also, you could do it in reverse by making an AHuman hold, through .ini code, any other actor class (including crabs and other [or the same] ahumans)

Thanks for the replies, folks! Lots of stuff I hadn't thought about, really.

Maart3n, I hadn't actually considered a true Centaur, but your idea seems like it might work. Make a secondary torso in .ini that lacks head and arms, then gLua it to the back of the main actor. Hah, I'll have to try that! (Bonus points if said four legs chew less terrain due to better weight distribution, methinks)

Azukki, OMG FOUR ARMED DUMMY DRIDER!! Seriously, I'll be messing around with that as well, but I'm curious: Did you end up having two actors in one space, so that each set of arms was a different actor? Seems like with enough finagling, that'd work. Definitely worth me trying.

Ropeface, yeah, that'd give the aesthetic effect of it, but I'm aiming to land on the functional side of this idea. Still, sprite modification for that sort of outcome is a way of thinking that hadn't occurred to me...

Grif, you're right. My ambition got the better of me, as I was trying to read von Goethe's Faust before picking up German For Dummies (no pun intended, just worked out that way). What do you mean, though, by having an AHuman "hold" another actor class via .ini? In its hands? As an attachable? I'd like to try that out, but I'm not so certain where.

AddActor = ACrab
CopyOf = Dreadnaught
PresetName = Heldnaught
Mass = -100 //otherwise it will crush the actor holding it

AddActor = AHuman
CopyOf = Soldier Heavy
PresetName = Test Soldier
AddInventory = ACrab
CopyOf = Heldnaught

He was asking where the dreadnought would show up, which i think would be it's hands.

He didn't know how the code would be implemented. So I showed him.

The held actor is held by it's center of mass, in the idle arm position for the actor.



Yeah, it was two actors in one position. An actor missing a head, and another actor missing legs. I didn't make the script handle forces between the actors properly though, and there was crashing and control issues. If I can find the standalone mod version of it I made, I'll upload it.

You'd probably run into atom collision issues if they were on exactly the same spot; keeping them a pixel or two offset would probably be better.

They were set to not collide with each other, so that wasn't a problem.

But they could shoot each other, and I don't think a script could be feasibly made to avoid that. So that could be a major problem.

I think I'll give this a try. Without dual item management/operating, this should be much easier than a four armed guy. In theory. I still don't really know how to deal with the forces between the two objects to make a proper attachment, but I might be able to figure it out from an example, halfass it, find a way to avoid the problem, or something.

Ehhg, this thing sucks at walking, and I'm lazy. But here's a start for anyone else interested. Oh, and it crashes on death and is pretty terrible in all respects. But the .ini coding is a good enough placeholder for someone interested, maybe?

Even if it worked as well as possible, ACrabs' walking is somewhat flawed anyways so the best possible result would still be slightly wonky.