Wail
I figured I might as well add a page here since I use UnrealWiki all the time.
Eventually I'll probably put some links up to code I've written or adapted and some tutorials / explanations that might help other people with a low/intermediate level of skill in UnrealScript.
Coding Projects—:
'Hitscan with Splash'
I was asked by players on a server I frequent to do some balancing to the ZenCodersWeapons2004 weapons pack when I discovered that the weapons in that pack had some really obscene damage values and it was causing issues with players only using those weapons on the server.
One of the requests that was made was to add splash damage to the (hitscan) primary fire mode on the Zen Benelli Shotgun. Since I have yet to see a weapon in UT with this implemented I thought it would be a good experiment to try on my own. I quickly found the [Weapon_Mutator_Tutorial] where presumably one creates a Minigun weapon that causes splash damage, but found that it didn't work, or at least not well, for my own purposes.
I then went about adapting the InstantFire class from the ShockRifle and using the MinigunHE tutorial as a base to produce a weapon that actually worked for the most part. The most difficult issue I encountered in creating this weapon is that when playing on a dedicated server, the explosive hit-effects I had set up would not appear when (a) a direct hit against enemy player pawns was scored (b) while on a dedicated server.
Although I'd already given the weapon a beam-effect to make the exact positioning of the trace apparent to the player, I didn't think it was appropriate not to have a hit-effect, especially given that the weapon was being specifically made/altered for a dedicated server. After trying many different approaches and completely failing to get the hit-effects to work under the specified conditions (it should be noted that the Shock Rifle also does not display hit-effects under these conditions), I hacked up a workaround by utilizing the emitter from the Lightning Gun. Since the Lightning Gun emitter (NewLightningBolt) always displays a certain portion of the texture it uses (XEffects.LightningBoltT) at both the start and endpoints, I figured if I changed the emitter to utilize a texture with an "explosive" effect at the end I could get at least a nominal "hit-effect" to work when a player gets a dead-on hit on an enemy pawn while playing on a dedicated server. This wasn't an ideal solution but it does work. Someone who is more ambitious about this could probably try a similar approach and tweak the emitter to make a much nicer visual effect than I bothered with.
-'Truncated for now. Going to add some code and think about how to link this together with the MinigunHE stuff, since the aim of my project here and the MinigunHE are very similar.'
Blip2: ^^
Wail: >:O