Discussion: Modifying Bullets

[talamander 10]

Hello everyone,

I'm unfortunately not very experienced with BITools (Only 130ish hours, mostly working on cars) and have just made my first weapon (pp90). I really want to create a laser gun, like you may see in Star Wars or Star Trek. I know this is possible as I've seen flamethrowers, fire extinguisher, and other types of guns shooting out things other than typical bullets. So, my questions are:

• How do you alter the bullets to something like a lazer or flames?
  
• Can you change the particle effects that occur when a bullet lands?
  
• Can you change the speed of the projectile the weapon fires?
  

I would appreciate anyone that could help and hopefully we can get a good discussion going on different ways to achieve this.

Thanks,

Talamander

[HorribleGoat 1464]

This is all possible and all the attributes in question can be altered but there is a big difference between flamer and laser.

I think there has been different kinds of approaches on the flamer and I would make it with appropriate particle effect and low velocity "bullet" that arcs like the flame. Its more work than it sounds though and there are probably more ways to do it too.

Laser (beam) on the other hand is a bit more trickier to do properly. I've been pondering over this myself and know there are others too. Most problematic is that Arma has shot types for kinetic/ballistic weapons only and as such they are not that good for simulating laser. For instance if you set the bullet speed to light speed it will have incredible range as lowest bullet life time is 1 second. With scripting the range could perhaps be controlled but then again the whole damage effect could then be scripted altogether and not use the ballistics at all.

I've experimented with this on Arma 2:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/cc-tiberian-era/videos/obelisk-test-a2#imagebox

And have a cannon that has lightspeed ammo and have a animated "laserbeam" cone that has unlimited animation range and theres a little script that animates the cone as far as the shooter looks at when fired. But with this I could not really restrict the range.

Current iteration is one shot only, but it could be used with really fast firing burst/autofire to simulate constant beam.

Laser blaster like in star wars in its simpliest is just a very high speed bullet with largeish always visible tracer but here again there is the range issue if you speed up the bullet too much.