I'm still alive, plugging away slowly at a mod map that's been in the making for about two months. It's nearly ready for a WIP thread, actually...

But that's not what this thread is for. This thread is for 2 closely related things:

1. I need to know whether a shield-emitting grenade is possible. It doesn't have to be fancy at all, it just has to basically be a throwable droideka shield. The problem is, I've already spent the whole afternoon trying to make this idea work, with minimal success. My main plan of attack so far has been to change the grenade explosion effect from the standard one to the droideka shield one. I've tried this while copying the .fx, .tga, and .msh files related to the shield into sides/Common/effects, rep/effects, cis/effects, sides/Common/msh, rep/msh, and cis/msh.

Sometimes it crashes the game, giving me an error related to being unable to find the explosion file for the grenade (which is called rep_weap_inf_sgrenade and is the child of com_weap_inf_sgrenade). The rest of the time I throw the grenade and it just disappears.

The closest I've come to success is making the droideka shield msh the geometry model for the grenade, instead of rep_weap_thermaldetonator.msh or whatever it's called. However, that just resulted in an ugly shield that was way to small and didn't absorb any damage (ie: I stuck this grenade to a friendly turret and shot at it with my shotgun and ended up killing the guy operating the turret on the other side).

2. I did my research on this topic and couldn't find anything about Shield Grenades, but the concept of a Dispensable Turret with a shield generator popped up in my search results a few times. Would this be the easier, more practical way to go?

jedimoose32 wrote:2. I did my research on this topic and couldn't find anything about Shield Grenades, but the concept of a Dispensable Turret with a shield generator popped up in my search results a few times. Would this be the easier, more practical way to go?

Considering that the first proposal is actually impossible, yes.

You could even edit the turret dispenser's odf lines to make it look like you're tossing a grenade. The main problem with your first idea is that effects aren't solid - they're purely and soley visual. The shield itself is an odf property/weapon.

Fiodis wrote:

jedimoose32 wrote:...The concept of a Dispensable Turret with a shield generator popped up...

...The shield itself is an odf property/weapon.

Yes, I've been experimenting with the actual droideka all day and have gained a certain amount of insight on that.

I just tried THIS concept (the first one on the first post) and could only manage to create a weaponless autoturret with shields protecting just itself (no bubble, just the splash effect every time someone shoots it).

Here are some odf excerpts:

The shield has to be a weapon of the turret.

Okay. That makes sense, but will the turret arbitrarily turn it on or off according to whether it is under attack? EDIT: No good. When somebody shoots it, the game crashes. No Severity 3 errors at all. So I tweaked it a little bit and now it just doesn't give any kind of shield at all. Here's the odf: