Weapon Powerups

On the implementation side, I would like to avoid all the extra code Mysterial had to put in due to weapons being converted to RPGWeapons. This affected WeaponLockers, WeaponPickups and any code that dealt with LinkGuns. As well as being a lot of work, it is bound to have incompatibility problems with other mutators.

I notice that Actor has a Children array. I wonder if we can add a new "Powerup" class. Then when a player picks up a new weapon, we randomly generate a powerup owned by the Weapon, so it gets stored in the weapon's Children array. At this stage, we could also probably change the name of the weapon - if that is possible. The RPG code can then access this powerup serverside to do the appropriate damage and effects.

If a weapon we pick up already has a "Powerup" child, we can use the existing one rather than generating a new one.

When a clonable weapon is thrown, we save in the PlayerData the powerup that we had for that particular weapon. Then when we pick up another of that weapon, with no existing powerup, we can apply our saved powerup.

We will need to get powerup information from the server to the client. This is for correctly naming the weapon - if we cannot do it serverside and have it replicated. We also need it to set the correct overlay on the weapon - although this is probably sent to us from the server.

So, in the RPGRules, we will be trapping the weapon pickup and drop, the switching of weapons, and adjusting damage done by weapons. That ought to be sufficient?

Them some nice idea's Wail. This might be going to far to the op'd side but Wail make me think it when he said D2. We could maybe seperate the abilities out and have them as a prefix and suffix. (Healing Rocketlauncher of Damage +5 or Vorpal Shock Rifle of Regeneration +4). I think having the full ability of both Powers would be a little Op'd but perhaps on weapons such as these, each ability does half of its Main. Like Vorpal Shock Rifle of Regeneration +4 would have a 2% chance to instagib, regenerates 2 hp a tick but still have the 40% damage (if + modifier was set to 10% per +)

So, in the RPGRules, we will be trapping the weapon pickup and drop, the switching of weapons, and adjusting damage done by weapons. That ought to be sufficient?

I'm pretty certain that would work just fine. Not only would that save a lot of work as you said but it would allow compatability with other mutators and be I think a little less buggy too.

[ 1) How important is cloning? Typically it is the lesser types that can be cloned. The concept of sharing good weapons with others is great. Unfortunately, you can't share the great weapons. And it would be wrong to let someone share intentionally rare types like vorpals. You definitely ought to be able to throw the good weapon to someone else - no matter how good it is. However, you could argue that really good weapons may require a Weapons Master to bring out the best in them?
I suppose some servers will want weapon cloning. In which case, each individual powerup type needs to have a flag to say if it is cloneable or not.

To me cloning becomes more important the more rare magic weapons become. also at lower level where a couple of percent damage makes more difference to my end experience for the map.

2) Do we want to be able to allow multiple powerups to be applied to a single weapon? Or rather, will some servers want that? Again should this be a configurable option? If so, it dramatically changes the way we implement weapon powerups. The number of powerups allowed on a weapon will need to be different for different Classes.

I think not, I know that some RPG servers use multiple power ups for the same weapon, but I don't think tis needed.

3) If I have say a Vampire Flak, should I be allowed to pick up a different Flak e.g. an infinite Flak?

Maybe,

4) If we go for the powerups being effectively single-use artifacts that apply the powerup to a specific weapon, should the powerup artifacts be spawned by luck weapons and dying monsters?

luck weapons, hmm now that adds a new twist on one of my favorites. I guess it would depend on how likely they were set to occur

I like all of the ideas above on different magical types for weapons...

have you considered allowing magic types to generate for other things like turrets? or to be configurable to be able to be applied to other things?

EDIT: uhhh, that turned out very eyesore, sorry guys!

Szlat wrote:

On the implementation side, I would like to avoid all the extra code Mysterial had to put in due to weapons being converted to RPGWeapons. This affected WeaponLockers, WeaponPickups and any code that dealt with LinkGuns. As well as being a lot of work, it is bound to have incompatibility problems with other mutators.

Agreed. In the first BattleRPG prototype I have now approached this problem by creating a generic BattleGenInvItem for players which is attached to every player in the game. For now it handles regeneration, ammo regen, Mana bonus, HUD replacement and dodge jumping, but it seems to me a similar approach could be used for vehicles and weapons without actually replacing the classes behind those. Just like BattleGenInvItem changes Pawns without subclassing them. I am not sure what is the best approach here, but I am considering to make things like magic properties of an Inventory item either attached to the Pawn or to the Weapon. It will take some more experimenting to determine the best aproach here but not replacing classes has it's advantages here.