RELEASED Avali Rocket Launcher + Misc Stuff 1.16

Hey, Ulithium, would you be interested in a rework of the missile launcher? I've made a new sprite, as I've mentioned before, that's a little closer to the avali mod's style,
and I've tiered the weapon for 4-6, but, what might really interest you is that I've managed to reverse engineer the ability code from the adaptable crossbow (and have already put it to use in my Weapons of the Imperium mod), and have incorporated it into the launcher. It can now switch between 6 different kinds of rockets, 1 default, 4 elemental, and 1 frag. It's tested, works, and everything for it is included in the .zip. Plug it in, give it a try, and tell me what you think.

EDIT: To anyone else downloading this, it's not a finished mod by itself, it needs to be plugged into the Rocket Launcher mod, and some manner of overriding and editing work would need to be done.

 

I'm really off Starbound at the moment, but cmon - I made the first sprite off of some concept art that YOU drew - what, it wasn't good enough lmfao? :]

I can look over it when I care enough to do so again, but I will probably keep both sprites - I put a lot of work into the one I made, and it was a royal pain to line it up well with the avali's arms.

*Your sprite does look very nice. I just spent a lot of time on mine and don't want to just ditch it, as I am quite happy with how it turned out.
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Also, did you check the height of the sprite ingame at all by the way? I'm pretty sure it looks like than triangular-dimensional rise on the upper middle part of the barrel (above the trigger) with the 3 holes in it is gonna be WAY too tall.
Meaning it will block the wielder's line of site if they bring it up to eye level or higher to aim.

I had the same issue when I was designing the first sprite - that's why I included that "holographic reflex sight" at the tip of the barrel: so it would be easy for me to tell what was too high (looks like you just made it into another aerogel spike that will also block line of site).

Example of what I mean:



I made sure there was nothing vision-blocking that would make it look bad. I mean, a true RPG would be rested on the user's shoulder and the sight would be on the side of the gun level with their eye, but as Starbound lacks the animations for that kind of thing[1], these are treated more like grenade launchers in how they are held.

[1] It would probably be impossible to have a decent shoulder grip animation state with just arm rotation - you'd need to make new arm sprites that have the elbows bent for that. I'm guessing this is why they did it the way they did.

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EDIT: 6 people already downloaded your files before I did, probably thinking they could just use it as it is lmfao.
You may wanna write a note - I'm not responsible for anything they blow up by trying to overwrite my mod with your WIP files! :F

Oh and right, sorry - the fact that you got the elemental rockets working is pretty neat (from the adaptable crossbow). Much better than the kinda hacky shrapnel rocket that I was using (and could never get balanced properly lol...).

 

That's perfectly understandable. The only reason I made a new one to begin with is because the current launcher doesn't quite fit with the Avali sprite style and, as I've since gotten much better at Starbound spriting, I wanted to see if I could cannibalize some Avali sprites for a launcher that retained that look straight from the source.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. It's raised up so that it sits more or less properly on the shoulder, and the whole idea was that of a true-RPG-like side-mounted sight in front of the face. You just can't see it because it's on the other side, but it can be holographically projected on either side of the weapon, accounting for the weapon flip and ambidexterity at the same time (That's my story and I'm sticking to it).

That's the important bit right there (finally gave me a way to use all that variant ammo I sprited back then too), that I was hoping you could implement, even if you don't use the sprite, and the frag rocket's still in alongside the elemental rockets. I left that mostly unchanged, as it's honestly really cool.

 

Meh, I still think they both fit the theme about the same, but ok. :F

Hmm, if you say so. I just know from my own experience trying to get the damn sprite I made into the least "cliptasticular" position possible that it looks off to me. Also do the arm animation look "right" with the thing up at shoulder level? Cuz I can't imagine how they possibly could, since, ya know, arms ATTACHED at the shoulders and the arm sprite is always straight as a line. :]

I'll probably keep my old one as it is and add in an alternate version that uses your rocket launcher sprite with the elemental rockets.
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Oh, maybe you know the answer to this: any idea how to increase the hitbox on a projectile? Is it just "increase the sprite file's dimensions"? Because the rockets I have right now are AMAZINGLY hard to hit things with. I mean, that was partially my intention - have them do slightly more damage, but the projectiles are a lot faster and hard to aim with, but this is just WAY too small... :L

Also I was still never able to figure out why the hell the rockets have ZERO knockback... But I gave up on that a looong time ago. n.nU
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I may have to try and figure out how those "leveled recipies" work too... I hope it's not too hard to set up. Y_Y

 

It must be all in the image dimensions, I can't think of any other factors. Hm. Maybe by making the dimensions much wider than the projectile itself you could say it's a proximity warhead. That could be useful on the frag rocket.

As for the leveled recipes, that isn't hard at all. You just have 6 different recipes that each produce a different (in this case leveled) variant from the same activeitem file. At least, that's how Avali Triage does it.

I took that and made a slightly different method for Weapons of the Imperium, with the addition of 6 different activeitems for each weapon so that each crafted weapon can be an ingredient for the next leveled variant, which makes it feel more like an actual upgrade system. This also lets me make abilities"unlockable," so to speak, like the bolters only have the adaptable ammo ability at tier 4-6. It's a bit more tedious (12 different files, 6 activeitems and 6 recipes, each, for 20+ different weapons makes even minor changes and fixes no fun at all), but it gives me a bit more flexibility with what I can do at the same time.

 

Yeah, I'll try just adding some more empty space to the sprite by increasing its dimensions and see if that does anything.

 

Also do you mind if I rename your version of the rocket launcher? I was thinking "Chameleon" would be a fitting name for it. :]

Or maybe "Chimera" (yeah that one sounds better).

 

Sounds good to me. As for the dimensions idea, that's apparently a bust. I tried a projectile with a greatly expanded sprite and frame size, and it still only collides with the projectile itself. Maybe the game won't collide with the transparent sections of an image, I don't know.

 

Ok. Also I guess that explains why the vanilla rocket projectiles are all so fat. :]

I'll just cut the speed and acceleration down a bit more then. *Shrug*

 

Ooook... It seems to all be working fine. Recipes show up correctly too:



As you can see I got my version partially recipie'd up too.

I like the colored texts, partially because it makes them get sorted to the top of the list and thus easy to find and easy to spot. :]
I want to make recipes the rest of the tiers though, and also do them for the spear.

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Oh but one more thing - as I was going through the fire modes (all of which work great btw), I kept thinking "what does the Adaptive Crossbow have that this doesn't?" and then I realized that it has a unique "dark elemental" type attack that I haven't seen on any other weapons. I kinda wanna see about adding that lol.

I'm not sure if you'd want to do that or not - pretty sure I could paw through the code and edit the sprites myself easily if not. It's stupidly late now though (it's morning actually ffs lol), so I'm off to bed for now! n.nU

 

Actually that "dark element" is apparently gravity, according to the code, and there's two versions: hgravity and ngravity, though both use the same visual effect. Whether it's dark element or gravity, I wonder if that might be a little too far outside the realm of the Avali style, but I can make it.

 

They aren't the same effect actually. I thought that for a while, till I realized that one had a small AoE explosion and the other did not. :]

Also why not just say "it's antimatter" - that would make it "fit in" a bit better I'd think. :F
I think people who are crying "lore" for the Avali in the case of Starbound need to stop and think about the fact that any race that's being injected into another universe's lore will ultimately bend to their canon a bit anyways. n.nU

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EDIT: One more thing - does the "normal" rocket need to have a fiery explosion effect as well as the standard avali explosion? It does make them look a bit indistinguishable from the "fire" elemental rockets.

 

Wait, why do your rockets have knockback and mine don't... I tried so damn hard to figure out WTF was wrong. Is it the explosion file?

 

I think it might be. The explosion files I used all had "knockback" in the name, so that might very well be it.
EDIT: Yeah, it is! The explosion file has knockback as a variable. It must override the knockback variable in the activeitem.

 

The f*ck... that WAS one of the things I tried originally FFS! I tested adding it to the avali explosion and it did nothing... =.=

EDIT: I'm positive I tried that - it's still in my dev archive in a backup folder - I commented out the variable cuz it wasn't working... Maybe I had it in the wrong section or something. >_<

 

Ulithium_Dragon updated Avali Rocket Launcher + Misc Stuff with a new update entry:

Crafting Recipe Fix

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

Ulithium_Dragon updated Avali Rocket Launcher + Misc Stuff with a new update entry:

Attempted Projectile Type Fix

Read the rest of this update entry...