IRL stuff continues to make it hard to do a lot of BN stuff, but I did work on and off on something for Arcana I'm self-PRing to tinker with over time:
https://github.com/chaosvolt/cdda-arcana-mod/pull/274In a nutshell:
Basically, I'd been wanting to add a cold-type ranged magic weapon to Arcana that isn't magitech-based for a while, someone was suggesting I should add a transforming weapon at some point, and I realized that of the three main faction arcanist books Sagnuine Codex gets the short end of the stick in terms of weapon and armor items. This pokes at all three of those ideas at the same time. Fitting since a friend's ideas that inspired the general early concepts of sanguine shrikes (the expected users of this item) were very overtly Bloodborne-inspired.
Still tinkering with general details and balancing, plus some other stuff to add before I need to also implement the changes to the DDA version of the mod, right now it's all in the BN version. One thing I've learned about transforming items, always make sure the non-gun state has ammo type and max charges, that way if you change it you won't risk eating the ammo. As it is though, I have it set so that the melee form can neither be reloaded nor unloaded, requiring you to change it to pistol form to do either. The game-balance reason for that is so the player can't cheese the fact that I don't think there's any way to set reload rate of tools. As for in-universe reason, those are flintlock barrels so. My mental image is that the barrels are probably not as exposed and may be blocked in some way (unlike what the model for its inspiration depicts) in sword mode, on top of the lockwork probably not engaging the flashpan. That'd logically preclude accessing the muzzle for a muzzleloading firearm.
The big thing I'm pondering is ammo type. Right now it uses flintlock ammo, and as such the cold-type damage its pistol form adds is fairly low, as the base damage of the ammo will already be fairly high. If I used blood essence, the damage could be pure cold-type and purely from the gun's info. Only problem there is that I've yet to port over the ability to set exactly how much ammo per shot a gun uses from DDA to BN. Since I'd rather my items have parity between the BN and DDA versions as much as possible, that means I'm limited to using 1, 20, 50, or 100 ammo per shot based off the old flags. As it's standard for magic ranged essence to have 20 damage when using blood essence, that limits my damage options to 20, 400, 1000, or 2000 damage per shot. 20 is not really that much more cold damage to justify losing the 50 damage paper cartridges gets (even if blood essence is potentially easier for an experience sanguinist survivor to keep in stock), while the other values are way too damn much. Making it use essence to deal same damage as the base impact of a symbol of judgment is another option but not sure.
I also had some ideas put together I want to test regarding summoned critters, some other time:
1. Convert summoning glyphs into mundane place_monster items instead of using transform hackery. This was needed to make it revert to a blank silver glyph afterward instead of vanishing. But, I can test if revert_to finally works sanely for mundane place_monster items. If not...
2. If needed, set it so summoned monsters drop a blank silver glyph when slain. The big thing is I've found that monsters summoned by spells don't call death drops, so a summoned monster available from both a glyph and a spell can correctly only yield a glyph when the permanent version is put down.
3. I want to test if ONLY robots can be taken back down into item form on examine, or if it works for any friendly/pet monster with revert_to_itype defined. If it does work, then I can help solve one of the biggest annoyances with glyph monsters (AI being garbage in every version of Cata for all eternity), by letting the player just scoop a glyph monster up and carry them up stairs or past whatever other crap might prevent them from following you properly. This can probably be a place_monster item that copies from the base glyph but has a 100% chance of the monster being friendly. After all, to get to that point you already needed to pass an arcana skill roll to ensure you placed it friendly, and making the player need to reroll and risk them spawning hostile any time they get stuck would be an annoyance.
Author
Topic: The Cataclysm games thread. (Read 114107 times)