Ingulit's Questions Thread

[Ingulit]

1) I'm trying to make a beam-type weapon similar to the Sentinel Beam that I want to have unlimited ammo UNTIL it overheats, at which point it wastes all of its ammo and forces you to reload. Is this possible? I want the weapon to be able to hold 5 clips max, each clip reloading 1 round. Minimum rounds to fire = 1. Each bullet uses 0 rounds to fire and heats up the gun slightly. How do I make the gun waste that one round once it overheats? I want it to be able to be out of ammo, and I want the reload animation to play when it does overheat.

EDIT: Can this be accomplished with scripts?
UNANSWERED (IMPOSSIBLE?)

2) I want to create a projectile that can be one of five different colors randomly when fired. How do I set up the materials to do this? What should I do in MAX to prepare the model for this?
ANSWERED/FIXED: Thank you EP_Killa!

3) Are there any good tutorials on effects? I've not found any... Specifically, I'm trying to make a gun that fires marble-like objects (I don't want to give it away), and I want to make the impact effect for this gun's projectile spawn a particle that uses the same .gbxmodel as the projectile that will bounce around for awhile (and hopefully make noise upon bouncing); I already have the .gbxmodel and gun done, but I have no idea where to start with effects. Can this be done?
ANSWERED: Thank you Apoc4lypse!

4) I want to make a .projectile of a lazer beam. I'm assuming I can do it with a contrail, but how do I make the contrail a certain length/could someone direct me to a good .contrail tutorial? I'm just now starting physics, so most of the .contrail tag is Latin to me.
ANSWERED: Thank you Apoc4lypse!

5) I have a projectile that rebounds off of just about everything besides players; this projectile slows down when it bounces off of stuff. Can I scale the damage done by the projectile's velocity somehow? I'd think it'd have something to do with the "initial velocity" and "final velocity" in tool, but I'm not sure...
UNANSWERED

[Ki11a_FTW]

Model permunitions for question #2

just make all your colourfull models in amx, export each individual one into your folder, then thats it

[Bad Waffle]

in the contrail tag, at the bottom where the color states are, add a new permutation and color accordingly.

for question one: clip, or mag? they're different, please clarify D:

[Ingulit]

Oh, I guess mag. I've got 1 round loaded maximum, 3 rounds initial, and 5 rounds maximum. Currently my shots use 0 rounds per fire, but heat the gun up; I want it to be so that the round is wasted when the gun overheats, if possible.

And, for question 2, I'm using a gbxmodel for my projectile... is there a way to change the color of the shader in a way similar to what you described?

EDIT: I figured out how to do the permutations in the .gbxmodel, so I've completed question 2. Yay!

DOUBLE EDIT: Though I have question 2 answered, the problem I was having the most trouble on was the first. ...Help?

[Apoc4lypse]

tbh i dont think thats possible lol...

kind of odd really... basicaly u want it to work until it overheats, then u have to load another magazine in...

I'd just give it as much ammo as possible, then when it over heats, use the over heating animation to make it look like your reloading, thus u have unlimited ammo, then when u over heat it makes it looks like heres reloading.

EDIT: oh wait... u want it to have 5 clips only... in that case idk.. u wudnt be able to do that really if u wanted the clips to be unlimited.

[Ingulit]

Dealing with Question 1:
I know nothing about this: could it be done with some form of script?

New Question:
Are there any good tutorials on effects? I've not found any... Specifically, I'm trying to make a gun that fires marble-like objects (I don't want to give it away), and I want to make the impact effect for this gun's projectile spawn a particle that uses the same .gbxmodel as the projectile that will bounce around for awhile (and hopefully make noise upon bouncing); I already have the .gbxmodel and gun done, but I have no idea where to start with effects. Can this be done?

New Question:
I want to make a .projectile of a lazer beam. I'm assuming I can do it with a contrail, but how do I make the contrail a certain length/could someone direct me to a good .contrail tutorial? I'm just now starting physics, so most of the .contrail tag is Latin to me.

Apoc4lypse:
You've got it nailed when it comes to what I want my gun to do in question 1... I really hope I can do this, because if I can't, the gun won't work that well with my custom weapon set (I want it to do this for balance). Dang it, I really need it to do this :S

[Apoc4lypse]

well, in order to do the projectile thing, you would need to make the projectile have a model (a sphere you said marble shaped right..) if you look at the plasma cannon or fuel rod gun ull notice its projectile has a .gbx model, projectiles can have gbx models, so just model the projectile in 3dsmax then export it to a gbx tag with tool and such. Then when u make ur projectile give it the gbx model. As for spawning more of the same projectile on impact that gets more complicated.

You'll need to do chain spawning to do this, I can't really explain it all in one post tbh... you need some knowledge of how effects in halo ce work, unfortunately i dont know of any tutorials all I know I learned by reverse engineering and just messing around with it.

Ok well chain spawning works on the bounds of useing effects tags to spawn stuff other than effects (spawn objects projectiles or anything)

If you open up a projectile and find its detonation effect area, (again if ur looking at the plasma cannon tag) you'll find its detonation effect is set to an explosion effect tag of some kind. If you open this tag ,you'll find everything that makes the explosion happen when u fire the fuel rod cannon, if you take this and add another part to it, and give it a location, and a type, then in the type use projectile, and find your projectile ur making, but dont use the same one... other wise it will loop, because if u make ur projectile explode and make more of the same projectiles they will too explode and do the same thing, so you need to have a diff type of projectile thats not gonna spawn more projectiles after the first one detonates.

Confusing eh? lol

But yeah thats the basics of how you would do that :)

EDIT: I also dont think contrails can be made a certain length, you can how ever make a fake contrail by making it in the projectiles effects. (The rocket launcher kind of does this, it produces smoke and fire effects as it moves) I would refer to the rocket launcher, another way is you could model the contrail into the projectile model (might work best for what u want since its a laser)

[Ingulit]

When it comes to the lazer: I kind of expected that, but I just wanted to see if a contrail that is limited in size was possible. I had an old idea of making every bullet a tracer that had a contrail that would taper off, so that you could see the bullets flying a la F.E.A.R. It's not that big of a deal that you can't do it, I'll just model the projectile.

As for the marble projectile, I thank you for that post because it cleared some stuff up that I didn't know, but that wasn't exactly what I was asking. I already knew that you could make a projectile have a .gbxmodel; in fact, I've already made my marble projectile do that. I don't want to chain-spawn another projectile when the marble impacts something; rather, I want the effect to spawn a new marble model that behaves like a particle, one that doesn't do damage or anything. The effect that I'm trying to achieve is that once my marble projectile hits something, I want the marble to "bounce off" and fall to the ground, bouncing as it does so (kinda like a spent shell coming from an assault rifle, except I want it to happen when the bullet hits something). I think it'd be neat to fire a bunch of marbles at once, and then in the aftermath of the shooting see all the marbles rolling around on the ground for a few seconds before they finally disappear. I'm almost 100% sure this is possible, I'm just really bad at particle physics and the .effect tags scare me. :X

[Apoc4lypse]

well in that case there are 2 ways to do it, 1 being particle physics... but in this case it'l be hard to make them create sound when impacting anything, im not sure how or if u cud do that.

I would do it the same way I said before, its still a projectile, when the marble detonates it chain spawns a new marble projectile, this one does no damage and behaves a little bit like a grenade (so it bounces around on the floor and such) it has no damage or anything, just the sounds of it hitting the ground or w/e (like when u toss a grenade and it hits stuff it makes noises) then you just need to give it a life so it goes away eventually.

[Ingulit]

I'd almost forgotten I made this; anyway, I've a new question.

I have a projectile that rebounds off of just about everything besides players; this projectile slows down when it bounces off of stuff. Can I scale the damage done by the projectile's velocity somehow? I'd think it'd have something to do with the "initial velocity" and "final velocity" in tool, but I'm not sure...

Oh, and I took your advice, Apoc4lypse, on the whole chain-spawn idea. It worked like a charm :)

[Skyline]

I remember the plasma rifle in hyrule field ontop of that tower could last as long as you want until it overheated it exploded. You could try to find your answer (for question 1) there maybe.

[Inferno]

question number five:

i dont think you can do that specifically ... the best you could do is if its velocity is above X then it will do one type of damage. but if it is below X then it will do a different type of damage. not really a scale but kind of close.

X being any number you want.

[Ingulit]

question number five:

i dont think you can do that specifically ... the best you could do is if its velocity is above X then it will do one type of damage. but if it is below X then it will do a different type of damage. not really a scale but kind of close.

X being any number you want.
That'd be great; how do I go about doing this?

[Inferno]

heres a nice picture tutorial i made. :)



http://www.freewebs.com/infernosk8terstuff/tutorial%20of%20effect.png

+rep if it helps plz

[Con]

Put large images in [shot] tags next time