Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2009 4:35 pm Post subject:
Flamethrower Infantry
Subject description: adapted from Weed infantry animation and icon
Hey, new here, thought I'd share my favorite small mod, which gives Nod back its old flamethrower infantry. You might want to tweak some of the values (mainly speed and strength). I have the unit going fairly fast because it was quicker than the others in TD, but to be honest I think a flamethrower would weigh one down as much as a RPG launcher.
Rules entry (remember to add it to your infantry list)
; Flamethrower Infantry
[FLAME]
Name=Flamethrower Infantry
Category=Soldier
;Image=FLAME
MovementZone=Infantry
CrushSound=SQUISH6
VoiceSelect=15-I000,15-I004,15-I012,15-I048
VoiceMove=15-I018,15-I024,15-I044
VoiceAttack=15-I044,15-I050,15-I044,15-I046
VoiceDie=DEDMAN1,DEDMAN2,DEDMAN2,DEDMAN4,DEDMAN5,DEDMAN6
VoiceFeedback=15-I058,15-I064
Locomotor={4A582744-9839-11d1-B709-00A024DDAFD1}
Speed=6 ;5 (difficult to hit targets moving away, balance)
ThreatPosed=10
Owner=Nod
Prerequisite=NAHAND
Primary=FireballLauncher
TechLevel=3
Strength=32 ;to make pseudo Type-Immune
Armor=concrete ;see above
Sight=5
Cost=220 ;felt fair, but these can really decimate enemy infantry
Points=5
PhysicalSize=1
Explodes=yes
ImmuneToVeins=yes
TypeImmune=yes
EliteAbilities=SCATTER
Note: In case my comments aren't clear, TypeImmune didn't work so I used Concrete armor with a low value to give a flame retardant armor effect. They do still take damage from each other, but it's less than it would be otherwise. The value 15 will give identical protection to the grenadier from normal gunfire, though explosives take out the flamethrower infantry much faster. You can also try adjusting the damage from [FireStream] Damage,and [Fire]verses, but I couldn't achieve the desired effect in either (all units became immune, or there was no effect). So far, I've been compromising by giving the Flamethrower Infantry a strength of 32, which makes it substantially more resistant to small arms fire, but not enough that an infantry can take out a buggy one on one, for example. It also helps with balancing since a flamethrower can take out a lot of rifle infantry before it goes down, which is what the unit was made for. I think most people will prefer a value much closer to 15. If anyone has a better way of reducing damage from flame type weapons without effecting durability in other respects, please let me know.
Art entry
[FLAME]
Cameo=FLAMEICON
Sequence=E1Sequence
Crawls=yes
Remapable=yes
FireUp=2
PrimaryFireFLH=145,0,75 ; looks right from certain angles
Note: The FLH isn't perfect.. I think this is because the particles are randomly drawn on either side of the FLH, not centered on it. Hard to tell. It doesn't stand out as being "off" with these values, at least.
i'm unsure what to think about this tutorial
on one side i would say why doing such a tutorial which is not only simplest modding but also incomplete
on the other side it could be a good base for a useful beginner tutorial.
Ok, lets add some additional information
1. Basically it's nothing more than a copy of a [E1] infantry (which would have been better so the keys aren't that randomly arranged like in your code example) with the weapon changed to the devils tongue FireballLauncher.
Better would be if you would have shown the code for a different FireballLauncher so it goes a little bit deeper in detail and shows how to change the properties of the particle system.
2. You added your SHP, which you should have mentioned to be a slightly changed weedguy. Imo better would have been if you only renamed the weed.shp and then wrote a new sequence instead of changing and deleting some frames of the weed.shp to fit the E1sequence.
It should be also mentioned that the SHPs have to be placed in an ecacheXX.mix file. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
I did mention that it was adapted from weed in the subject description, and it's a simple mod because it was a simple goal (to recreate the TD Flamethrower Infantry).
I reordered the SHP rather than rewriting the sequence because it was faster. I had to color replace the death sequences to get rid of the green goo, so I reordered them while I was doing that. I guess you can pretend it's some kind of flammable green gelatin if you want, and write the new sequence to use all the death animations in the original SHP.
There are several different entries from E1.. speed, cost, primary, techlevel, armor, strength are all changed. These are the only differences between E1 and E3 as well... I mean you can change the movement zone to InfantryDestroyer, I guess. Armor and strength are changed for a very specific reason which I detailed.
I didn't see any need to edit the weapon/particle systems aside from making them type immune, which I couldn't do without breaking the weapon, so I used the concrete armor and low strength instead. Again, if you have suggestions there, I'm open to them. Even with "[Fire]verses 0%" on concrete, the units still damage each other.. and editing "[Firestream]damage" effected all units. I couldn't think of any other way to deal with the particles to make them TypeImmune, unfortunately. So I just left them on the defaults. and adjusted the armor and strength values until I had a similar (albeit compromised) effect. To be honest, I didn't want them completely typeimmune anyway, just enough that they didn't kill each other extremely quickly.
I'm not sure why the code's out of order now. I think I must have wrote it over an old SunEdit2k entry. My bad. I ctrl-f for tags so I didn't really notice.
Well, anyway, the board doesn't seem to let me delete my topic, so a mod will have to. QUICK_EDIT
I did mention that it was adapted from weed in the subject description, and it's a simple mod because it was a simple goal (to recreate the TD Flamethrower Infantry).
Ups right. Now i've seen the description.
However to follow the tutorial rules you should add (*) to your tutorial title showing this is an easy tutorial.
hybridfurie wrote:
I reordered the SHP rather than rewriting the sequence because it was faster. I had to color replace the death sequences to get rid of the green goo, so I reordered them while I was doing that. I guess you can pretend it's some kind of flammable green gelatin if you want, and write the new sequence to use all the death animations in the original SHP.
You removed the fire death anim, which isn't that obvious from a reordered SHP and which is something that someone might miss when adding this unit. That's why i suggested to use the original and add a new art.ini sequence. Then it's easier to see the differences between your modified SHP and the original.
In addition would this give a nice additional instruction on how to add the right sequence.
hybridfurie wrote:
There are several different entries from E1.. speed, cost, primary, techlevel, armor, strength are all changed. These are the only differences between E1 and E3 as well... I mean you can change the movement zone to InfantryDestroyer, I guess. Armor and strength are changed for a very specific reason which I detailed.
I didn't mean the values of the keys, but the order of the keys.
If you have to compare 2 Infantries for balancing, it's much easier if they both have the same order in their keys.
hybridfurie wrote:
I didn't see any need to edit the weapon/particle systems aside from making them type immune, which I couldn't do without breaking the weapon, so I used the concrete armor and low strength instead. Again, if you have suggestions there, I'm open to them.
1. both units (devils tongue and flamethrower) wouldn't use the same weapon, so it's easier to make them different.
2. with a new particlesystem you could give it
-a shorter duration so the infantry fire short bursts but with a higher rate of fire
-a shorter range
-a different anim (for example the unused flamthro.shp; but that needs a small change so the frames are ordered correct)
etc,etc
hybridfurie wrote:
I'm not sure why the code's out of order now. I think I must have wrote it over an old SunEdit2k entry. My bad. I ctrl-f for tags so I didn't really notice.
Urgh, please don't mention that program.
hybridfurie wrote:
Well, anyway, the board doesn't seem to let me delete my topic, so a mod will have to.
Make it complete (by editing the tutorial) and there is no need to delete it. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
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Flamethrower Infantry
