This week’s update is going to focus on some bug fixes and changes made to various weapons, as well as a new addition to the weapon effects system! Keep reading to find out more.
A while ago I worked on a fairly big addition to the weapons system called the ‘Weapon Effects’ system. Since I’ve never written a blog on this before, I’ll explain it a little. The weapon effects system allows us to attach various effects to any of our weapons that are triggered on various conditions. A few examples of weapon effects are Laser Splash, Warhead Splash or Projectile Ricochet and we can specify if the effect should fire on hit, miss, near miss, etc. When I added the system Chain Lasers were also moved into the new system.
Unfortunately, Chain Laser has never worked exactly the same as it did before the migration to the new system. It’s either bounced the wrong direction, bounced off into nothing, only bounced once or not even bounced at all. I’ve spent a large chunk of time this past week debugging the chain weapon effect and have gotten it into a much better state. I think it’s safe to say that when I get this fix patched live Chain Lasers will be a lot more usable and should once again work the way everyone expect them to!
The big reason for taking this time to look at the Chain Laser code was preparation for a new weapon effect that shares some of the functionality of a Chain Laser. This new effect is called the Chain Projectile (or Mutalisk Bullet, but we can’t actually call it that). It will be similar to a Chain Laser in that it bounces between targets but it will also have the advantages of a projectile such as tracking and knockback. Expect to see it used in one of the new Class Superitems that we’ve been working hard on for the rebalance!
Finally, I’ve made a few more additions to warheads and the warhead effect for the upcoming class rebalance. The most notable of these is the addition of support for parasite injection to warheads and warhead effects. Going forward we will be able to do some extremely interesting missiles utilizing this support. For example, this past week I made a powerful fire parasite for warheads and added it to the new Incendiary Missiles as well as Lancer Missiles. We are also planning on changing missiles like Entanglement missiles to inject a heavy sludge instead of doing agility reducing tweaks.
That’s it for this week’s update and this one will be the last of the year. I’ll be taking some time off for the Christmas holiday so I won’t have anything to report next week. As always feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions in the forum post. I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and I will be back in 2014!
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