Projectiles on OSMT mobs

[Joostified]

Hi,

I've got a question and a compliment :D

First of all you deserve my undying respect for not only developing this mod but also staying with it to help people out.

Secondly I was hoping you'd be able to help me with something thats been bugging me for a few weeks now. I'm building a level predominantly populated by Skaarjs, but since they're rather hard hitting with their porjectiles I'd like to tone those down a bit damage wise.

I've been rummaging through the actor properties and through the Unreal scripts a bit but since my US understanding is far from fluent I haven't been able to find what needs to be changed if you want to weaken their projectiles.

Thanks for any effort put into reading and/or answering this, hope to hear from you.

[outpt.co.uk]

Yeah, Skaarj can be quite powerful, and i think they got toned down a touch earlier on. Depending on your map, you might be able to reduce their difficulty by ensuring there is a lot of room for the player to dodge/run around in battle, some good cover, and beef up the player with shield, health, and decent weapons. Also, ensure you are using the weakest skaarj class. SuperApe will be able to provide more detailed help if he gets time.

I look forward to details of your OSM map.

[Joostified]

Thanks for the reply so far :)

Sure, I'll keep you guys posted, although what I've done so far feels like nothing more than a glorified test of triggers and patrols ;)

I'm still planning however to get a much larger scale map into my portfolio using OSMT, but that'll probably take a while since I'll have to study both machinima and loads of scripting for that one methinks.

Ow far by the feel of it the Skaarjscout seemed weakest (in terms of projectiles at least) hits for 30 health instead of 50 head on, or was that just coincidental?

[BigJim]

I did exactly what you talk about (reducing the amount of damage dealt by a skaarj projectile) in the last level of UseOfWeapons, but imo it's not a good idea unless you have at least a basic understanding of how the games' actors & pawns work, how subclasses inherit from their superclasses & so on. :)

Even then I only did it because I was altering other, more important stuff at the same time, since I know I'm pretty damn nooby.



In rough terms, you'd have to find the SkaarjProjectile actor in your actors list, subclass it, and then in the new subclass, set it's damage from 35 to 15, or whatever number you wanted.

Then, you'd find your SmartSkaarj, subclass him, and change it's projectile property to your new projectile, instead of the original projectile.

Overall a pretty easy task, but if you're not familiar with messing about with the classes in this kind if way you can tangled up very quickly (I know I did! ;) :D).

I know it's tempting to want to tweak everything, but often it's better to use what you've already got creatively, instead of trying to create a new subclass for every possible eventuality.
Best of luck matie. :)


*EDIT*

Just a coupla idea- first off, you are using the SmartSkaarj, and SmartSkaarjScouts, right?
The reason being they have a lot of AI properties that can help you control them, and other properties to control the amount of Melee damage they can dish out (hand to hand damage, when they're right up-close).

You can olso use the more basic mapping tools, for instance, using small blocking volumes in out of the way places, set to only block OSMT.SmartSkaarProjectile (or whatever) so that some shots hit you & other get blocked, invisibly.

I like to make sure that hard to kill baddies drop health & ammo (AI>GoodieDrop), makes life a bitesier, or you can even set up traps designed to hurt baddies.

Another example.

Say you enter a room, with 20 Skaarj in it.
The player doesn't know that the mapper placed a Physics volume set to bPainCausing, and attached it to a mover that quickly moves past the monsters (but doesn't hit the player), and then stops, well out of play.
As the player walks in, he hits a trigger, makes the volume brush over the monsters, takes some damage off them & does all of this instantly.

If you set it to like 50 or 100 damage, you can use it to quickly take 100 damage off the monsters, without the player even knowing you did anything, leaving you with a room full of 20 Skaarj, but each one only has like 10 health left - job's a good un! :D

It might sounds like a crude way to take damage off your baddies before combat, you could even use Scripted Actions to do it, but I point it but just to show how you can use the most basic mapping tools to achieve things that at first, look like they are require coding and/or modding SA's actors.

Anywhoo, just a couple of ideas for ya, I don't know exactly what you're designing but hopefully at least it might give you an idea or two. :)

[Joostified]

Now that made me wanna go at it for another two hours tbh :p imba advice thanks a load. But I have this little map pretty balanced now (aimed at average players like myself) gonna finish the report about it hand it all in and get my degree. :rockon:

But I must admit that your idea's and some of my own I already had really wanna make me get in there for a better longer and more complex series of levels.

Thanks so far, I'll definetely look into how those classes and subclasses stuffs operate sounds complex but also very impressive once you manage to work with it.

I'm sure you'll be seeing me around here more often so cya soon ;)

edit: yes I did use the smart ones, already toned down their melee damage and in a few cases the range they follow a player to give a few moments peace, but not too many ofcourse :evil:

[SuperApe]

(wakes up) Hmphf. Huh? ;)


BigJim gives the basic idea:

OSMT.SmartSkaarj uses OSMT.SmartSkaarjProjectile, which is where the damage is tweaked. Subclass both those to your custom versions. Point the custom Skaarj to use the custom projectile.

These Skaarj were taken (and then modified) from the UT2004 Invasion Skaarj. After I had finished OSMT v1.0, I got a chance to play the original Unreal Skaarj and saw that they were much more tame. Three things are different: the look of the projectile (it used to look like a corona), the damage done, and the knockback. UT2004 Invasion essentially used Shock Cores (damage and knockback) with a link gun flash (for looks). So, if one were gonna "fix" the Skaarj projectiles to make them more reasonable, I'd take down both the damage *and* the knockback. I forget the name of that property (for knockback) atm. (maybe KDamageImpulse)

But, at the same time, I'd modify the looks of the custom Skaarj (as BigJim did) so that players don't assume it's a normal one, or assume something's wrong with these Skaarj.

Glad OSMT could help you in your studies. Good luck.