Spring RTS Engine

I like the explosion generators used in Spring, how you can customize the fX for each and every weapon. But a simple addition to the weapon would allow for a host of new effects, a warhead added onto the existing weapon types.

Why a warhead? Because with a warhead you define two damage lists for a weapon. A paralyzer could actually do real damage, not just freeze a unit. And you could have fuses... and duds! Think about a free fall bomb hitting and not exploding. The kinetic energy of the dud should still do some damage, but your dud's explosion (that did not happen afterall) would not.

A fuse could be defined with a timer and dud percentage. Your anti-ship missile might hit the ship, wait two full seconds for the aircraft that dropped it to fly over, then explode. Maybe you want the tank shell to hit with a kinetic effect on a pinpoint target yet also immediately explode to hurt nearby thin-skinned units. Fuses could also fail at a regular percentage, say 20% for free fall bombs. The possibilities with this simple add-in are amazingly complex.

Whether or not a warhead has its own graphical explosion could be up to the creator of the patch. Yeah, it would be cool to have also, but its not a gamebreaker if it did not. A defined fuse is also not a big deal if its too complex to code. Keeping the add-in simple would make it easier to accomplish.

How could it be implemented? Add in the warhead= field in the weapon tdf. Tag the weapon's warhead effects on after the normal weapon explosion, perhaps just after the original DamageArray routine. Run back through the DamageArray using the new definitions. Voila!

Write a patch tbh.

Id say this would be hell to code. its not as easy as just adding a tag.

multistage chained explosions are a much better investment, and I'd say that argh can already give the illusion of a missile hitting a ship and waitign then exploding using custom FX....

... plus, the illusion is cheaper. TBH, after coding up the Demon's weapon and doing some other things, I'm not all that concerned about this now. It'd be nice, but only every once in awhile.

AF wrote:multistage chained explosions are a much better investment, and I'd say that argh can already give the illusion of a missile hitting a ship and waitign then exploding using custom FX....

Basically a chained DamageArray is what I think would be better than an illusion of two explosions.

so? The illusion would have the same outcome and appear to be the same, so really its just the under the hood stuff that nobody sees your going on about.

Not really, instead of a single damage effect you can have multiple. You might have a pidgeon-holed scope on the topic because you're seeing it from a different perspective. With this option one could use either damage or paralyser in any weapon, or a combination of both. And if its done with a combination of both the armor category and a dud variable it could really have alot of possibilities far more flexible.

I see under the SVN that 0.72b1 introduced "paralyzetime" for weapons but I've yet to see an example. Is this what you are talking about, AF, saying its already doable?

AF, he wants two hits from a weapon thats fired once, like missile hits boat and doesnt explode (ouch), and then missile goes boom (more ouchier)
witout haxing about with two weapons and stuffs.

Would be helpful for those WWII/Modern War mods, eh?