Pilottobombadier's Mods aka Lock and Load and Shit

[pilottobombadier]

Okay, for those that don't know my...umm...legacy, I make Lock and Load. I am currently working on the 5th one. I have no screenshots for you, and I might be changing the weapon roster. A little.

Right, what Lock and Load is.

For starters, it's an EDGE weapons mod.

Specifically it's a collection of weapons as well as balance changes, sometimes some new stuff. And the 5th version looks to be the last before I break out into full-blown TC stuff.

When I first started with Lock and Load back with EDGE 1.24, I threw everything I could into the mix - including Blood 2's Mac 10's (I think that was the 2nd release), and it all kinda looked like shit, but it was pretty cool to play with. Although those MAC-10's were too bright (actually just about everything I ripped was, but I blame a bent monitor pin for that. Actually, a broken one, but anyway...), I loved them.

Lock and Load 3 was my magnum opus of the old disjointed generation - provided you had EDGE 1.24 because EDGE.scr somehow didn't get popped into the wadfile when I used DDFINWAD. At least I know what caused it not to work now. And I actually have a backup of EDGE 1.24. HintHint.

Lock and Load 4 came in 3 releases - 4, 4a and iirc, 4c. Or was it b? I'm not at my computer and it's irrelevent. LNL 4 was awesome.

I'm trying to do a lot more with 5. Since learning hex, I now know how to set DLight colours, so my projectiles won't suck quite so much ass

I've learned how to make a proper railgun, and knowing that, the railgun will make a triumphant and bloody return.

Anyone who played LNL4 also knows that I like alt-death, so the alt-death animations I have won't be disappearing.

Anyway, the status of LNL5 is "In Progress".

I have five weapons left to do and one left to redo (both in terms of graphics and concept) and then reset the alt-death stuff.

The weapons left are:

Railgun (it's happening, dammit!)
Automatic shotgun (going for a different concept here)
Flamethrower
Breach-Load Grenade Launcher
Magazine-Fed Grenade Launcher
Plasma Rifle

After I'm done with the weapons and alt-death, I just need to do some rebalancing (I promise, no resistances or immunities on the current monsters) and figure out how the hell I'm going to delegate ammunition. That won't take more than a couple hours, though.

When wil this be finished? When it's done. Oh, and for all the douches that whined about casings, they're there. They just don't bounce and make clinking sounds. They look like shit, but this mod isn't about bullet casings, it's about big goddamned guns and the havok they cause Without, of course, the super weapon residing here and there. Other than the Incendiary rocket, that's about all there is.

Also, if I get more than 5 requests, I might be inclined to fix LNL4 so it works properly with EDGE 1.29.

[wildweasel]

Sounds good so far, just make sure to make each weapon different enough to give the player a reason to use one or the other (mainly talking about the two grenade launchers). Unless you were planning on making the magazine-fed launcher an upgrade of the breech-loader?

[pilottobombadier]

Thinking about it, because I don't know if I can do scatter grenades that will send the projectiles backward. Plus I used up all the ammo slots and I need one for the Railgun.

And there's a lot of weapons that I need to manage. Here's teh list:

-9mm pistol

-Magnum pistol

-Security SMG
-Upgrades to military-spec SMG (same gfx, different sound, lower fire
rate but higher damage, although very little performance difference from
what I can tell)

-Pump shotgun

-Automatic shotgun (being changed to pistol shotgun with a dual-wield
upgrade)

-Security Assault rifle
-Upgrades to MilSpec assault rifle (same rate of fire, same sound,
improved accuracy
and secondary firemode added that fires sniper ammo and has zoom)

-Battle Rifle (Pulse Rifle)

-Minigun

-Mini-missile launcher

These are what are done.

These are what need to be done:

-Flamethrower - I will be combining railgun effect with splash damage and limiting splash damage range for this, so the damage on the projectile itself will be raised.

-Railgun - I was thinking of making it bounce off of walls as a secondary and make it bounce around for a few seconds Other than that, traditional semi-automatic railgun.

-Breach-load GL - going to make it upgradable if I can't do what I want to do with the secondary; need to make it differentiate from the incendiary attack from the rocket launcher after all.

-Magazine-fed grenade launcher - semi-automatic. I'm going to try to make it fire as fast as I can without getting any wierd gfx issues so that the player can outright saturate an area with a magazine

Note that all grenades will bounce (the Pulse Rifle's launcher is already set up to do this but won't be the template; I think I'm going to revert it back to impact to make it different from the other launchers, and to make the player think before firing).

-Plasma rifle - the token energy weapon, I'll be keeping the splash damage on the shots, and will be adding splash damage to the projectiles themselves. Splash damage will be limited in range (I fucking love the way splash can be modded in EDGE). I will also be adding a secondary fire; I'd like to make it fire as a shotgun-like weapon as well, which seems to be pretty easy to do. Well, I'll have to see.

-Automatic Shotgun - I'm pretty much changing the medium here. Originally I was using the OICW graphics (which I altered a little here and there), and until I make the changes, I still am. I'd like to use NmN's Susan pistol instead, put the black-glove hand on it and then set it up for dual-wielding. Performance differences will be noticable because the weapon will kick like an SOB and accuracy will be pretty much gone. The magazine will also be smaller, at least until a second one is picked up. No secondary fire.

Anyway, this is all mostly for the TC I have in mind, so Lock and Load 5 may not have all of those weapons; it might just turn out to be a greatest hits, if you will. But it will have all the alt-death stuff from the last release whereas the TC will not. I mean, unless someone wants to do som altdeath graphics frames for me. Actually, the burn animations will be the exception; they're universal enough.

Regarding dual-wielding, when you pick up that second weapon, it will upgrade the first now; no more choosing between the two; I think we can all admit that that choice was a redundant one. Dual wielding isn't just cool, it gives you a bigger clip.

[hitmanx]

The animations and sounds need work, i'm sorry if i'm coming off like a bitch, but all your other work felt like an old wad, like back in 1.24 days, even LNL4. I'm hoping this one will be more "next - gen" like weasels work. Or chrono.

[pilottobombadier]

Reload animations aren't changing...sound effects most likely aren't either. I will try to smooth out some of the jerkier frames, though.

Now then, progress update:

There hasn't been any. I'm still loading all my files back onto my computer; I set up a triple boot with Windows 2k, 98 SE and Ubuntu Linux - and I have to redo it (2k's installer screwed up my hard drive size configuration - the OS supports large drives, the installer does not. Go figure. So I need repartition, make a 2K image and then install it from that), but it runs perfectly fine.

Don't expect too much to happen over the course of the next month due to family gatherings and, of course, hard drive and OS restructuring (which I'll need a weekend to do; multi-booting is rocket science when you want your OS's in their respective file systems).

Plus I'm in college taking computer courses to learn how to become a techie, and I have 2 hours of homework a night or more - more right now because I have to get my notes caught up, because I do them in Excel.

However, if the asshole bus drivers and their Cosa Nostra - I mean Teamsters Union remain on strike, I might actually be able to accelerate that. Which I'm actually not looking forward to.

I haven't seen my family and friends in a month, and while I'm not exactly homesick, I'd like to see them. And it's thanksgiving up here.

So, the agender:

I will be reloading my document files this afternoon. Which includes all of my Doom wadfile work, my downloads, resources, PNG's converted to BMPs, stuff like that. Any work I get done will be zipped and probably sent to-email. I need my CD's to burn my Ubuntu disc for my classmates because it has GParted on it, which is a damned good start for a partitioning tool.

If I'm here for the weekend, I will redo my hard drive and should be back up and running within a day, which gives me two days to get caught up in everything and maybe get a weapon or two done.

If I'm going home, expect very little progress for the next three weeks.

[pilottobombadier]

Alrighty, things are going a little slower than anticipated. I think. I just got my doom resources (all 2.5 gigs worth) reinstalled onto my hard drive, and so far no file corruption. Very good.

Anyway, there's a high likelihood I won't be able to get back on track until next week as I'm 3 chapters behind still in my notes and I'm just getting my shit together now.

Actually, come to think of it, I do have one more thing to install, an old version of PSP that I use to swap palettes; that's really about it.

So, thought I'd give you all a status update to let you know what's going on and now you do.

[pilottobombadier]

Yet another update: I have finished putting black glove hands on the pistol shotgun, I just have yet to implement it.

The base is Paul's Susan Pistol.

I'm not going to make it full auto; it'll be semi-automatic with a genuinely high rate of fire (unlike the disaster that was a semi-automatic one in...Lnl4, I think - unless that was just 1.29 not liking the some of the fire commands...), but I'm going to set the magazine capacity to seven rounds, which will become 14 once you get a second one.

Reload will be quite rapid because it loads from a magazine.

That is all.

[pilottobombadier]

Stardate: Who cares because Star Trek sucks.

Okay, the shotgun pistols are done (at least in terms of graphics and alignment; I've had no time to work on any code), just found out I forgot to put a sound in there for the railgun. Whoops. Obviously that's been sorted.

Might be restructuring my hard drives again because I have to install Windows XP Pro next week (we start learning XP According to Microsoft ), although I have some pretty nifty bootloaders care of the UBCD to make the addition of a 4th OS relatively painless.

So yeah, that's going to slow things down. Not like they aren't crawling already.

[pilottobombadier]

Update 10/19/07

I have finished my shotgun pistols, I will admit, I like them very much and I think they will fit in very nicely. It seems that I got the spread, etc. right the first time, so the most time consuming aspect was getting the shell ejection to my liking on the dual-wield model.

I have also pretty much finished the Railgun. I mostly just really need to give it an ammo type and possibly a magazine capacity, but it works, and well.

Next up, breech-action grenade launcher.

[pilottobombadier]

Okay, the railgun is almost finished, I just need to add a magazine capacity to it and an alt-attack.

Not that I have to, per se, but the one I have in mind is really cool. It's an EMP attack that can nearly kill a spider mastermind, but it needs 200 cells; in short it'll require full cell capacity to use, and you'll only get one shot. I'm looking at making it do about 2000 points of damage.

The only enemies that it will affect are cybernetic ones (so, for the moment - remember, I'll also be making a TC and all of the weapons in the mod and then some will be showing up in it), and there will be no splash damage, but I will make it tunnel.

Also, the scatter grenade is pretty much done, it just needs to be rebalanced and the explosion animations need to be dealt with, but beyond that, she be done.

I also need to retool the animations for the breach-load grenade launcher, then on to the semi-auto grenade launcher which will be a slightly different concept altogether because it will fire time-delayed shots that you can damage.

After that, all that remains is adding in akimbo magnums (that I'm actually going to pull for the TC) and completing the flamethrower and plasma rifle.

[pilottobombadier]

That's right. I just have the plasma rifle and dual magnums to finish!

Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial or a reference on how to make a projectile weapon that fires shots in a pattern similar to the Supershotgun?

[wildweasel]

Projectiles? Well, there's a couple ways...

If you just want it to be a random spread, just add ACCURACY_ANGLE and ACCURACY_SLOPE to the projectile in Attacks.ddf and then use EJECT to fire several of them without wasting the player's ammo.

If you want a specific spread pattern (like Serious Sam's two shotguns), you'll have to make copies of your projectile with SLOPE_OFFSET and ANGLE_OFFSET on them and then EJECT each copy. For an example of how much of a pain this is, look at the Helix Cannon in ww-bni.wad, in which I actually made 17 copies of the Helix projectile.

[pilottobombadier]

Thank WW, I'm actually going with random, I'd like an effect similar to a shotgun though I'm actually starting to get some ideas that are bordering on wild.

I should have the weapons finished hopfully by Friday night, and then I can start delegating what goes where, set pickup messages stuff like that. I also have to resort my ammo types because I got confused somewhere along the way what the frick was supposed to be for what.

And that should take maybe half an hour. Hopefully I'll have a first beta release by weekend after next.

[Nick_Perrin]

Hopefully I'll have a first beta release by weekend after next.

Sounds good, look forward to playing/testing!

[pilottobombadier]

I'm also going to try to circumvent Geocities bandwidth issues by turning one of my partitions into an internet file server.

Kind of a personal project. I just have to find out what my ip address is (ipconfig /all is just showing my router ip...), change the network id on my computer to something easier to link to, and then set up some folders for web sharing. Allegedly. Oh, and open up a port on my firewall.

I'm adding a weapon effect that's requiring me to hunt some graphics down and do a little trial and error with code - plus I couldn't get anything done last weekend due to having to restructure my computer again...s

o it might be delayed by about a week - but that's a worst-case scenario. At the least, you'll be able to have a download server that doesn't limit how many users can connect - at least until it's uploaded to /idgames, at which point I'll shut it down. I'll just be running it for the beta testing.

Oh, right, beta testing! Who wants to sign up?