[StargateSpankyHam]

Alright...I am making a campaign/mod presently, in which the player gets to fly Shivan ships on a pretty regular basis. For this reason, I'm using new weapons for the Shivans. Since these weapons are going to have a good rate of fire, the shivan fighters will also have the added advantage of not sucking. A Mara on your tail will be a genuine threat.

Thanks to BloodFuzion's "shivanmod", I've got player-flyable shivan fighters and bombers, excellent secondary weapons for the shivans, and some really nice starting points for my primary weapons.

So far, I've got a rapid-fire plasma cannon, roughly analogous to the Subach in terms of light damage and low energy consumption. But for the rest of the weapons, I'm going to need pspew effects, trail effects, and models for the projectiles. Does anyone know of some good ones that would work for shivan guns?

[Snail]

Look in the MediaVPs?

[Galemp]

You should start with Light, Medium, and Heavy cannons, analogous to the Avenger/Prometheus/Banshee of FS1. Those are the default Shivan weapons, and giving them the same special effects and sound signatures as the MediaVP Shivan primaries would be a good familiar start.

Then you'll need a few tactical weapons: a subsystem destroyer (disruptor), a long-range kinetic weapon (flail), a heavy anti-hull cannon (maxim), and a dedicated shield breaker (circe.) Projectiles do NOT use models, they use bitmaps, and by taking the existing sfx and recoloring them or adding effects in Photoshop/GIMP, or adjusting the pspew settings for existing particle animations, you could get some unique results.

[General Battuta]

If you're making unique Shivan primaries, do we need to stick to the usual old categories of little-used disruptor, generally useless/irritating kinetic weapon and shield breaker, and brokenly overpowered anti-hull weapon? Let's branch out a bit! Do some weird stuff! Burst fire guns! ...other creative things!

[Droid803]

Fighterbeams!
HEALING GUNS!
Guns with negative mass!

[Trivial Psychic]

Lightspeed made a bunch of Shivan weapons some years ago, including up-effected versions of the original ones.

[Shivan Hunter]

Shotguns! Leech guns (yeah they're useless but they can be annoying)! Pierce-Shields guns with low damage! EMP guns (yes please)! Can primary weapons spawn child weapons? Flak guns (and a different, Shivany flak explosion)!

Trivial Psychic: weren't those just Shivanized GTVA weapons? Originality would be nice... weird effects, emphasis on energy-based weapons (kinetic weapons like the Flail are SO NOT Shivan) and completely new stuff! And make them powerful... Retail Shivan weapons are crap.

[Woolie Wool]

The Flail is described as a laser that gains its knockback ability through The Power of Technobabble.

[BloodFleet]

If you look at my weapons there I gave the Microwave cannon a high kinetic effect like the Morning Star and the EMD cannon has the Leech gun's drain energy from weapons and afterburner.

The all use different .tga images I guess you want to change them? Could help you with that.

[Snail]

Lightspeed made a bunch of Shivan weapons some years ago, including up-effected versions of the original ones.

Have those been re-hosted? Milliways went down.

[Galemp]

If you look at my weapons there I gave the Microwave cannon a high kinetic effect like the Morning Star and the EMD cannon has the Leech gun's drain energy from weapons and afterburner.

And where would one find these weapons?

[Shivan Hunter]

I remember them being in old MediaVPs (the effects, not the tables, but meh). Maybe they're even in the new versions.

[EDIT] They are. Aloqua, Citra, Phanuel, Vapula, and Vepar, also "Shivan_Laser_Stream", "ShivaStream_Bitmap",  "Shivan_Particle1"/"2", and "Shivan_Impact1"/"2".

[Trivial Psychic]

Lightspeed made a bunch of Shivan weapons some years ago, including up-effected versions of the original ones.

Have those been re-hosted? Milliways went down.

I think that they're HERE.

[Snail]

Lightspeed made a bunch of Shivan weapons some years ago, including up-effected versions of the original ones.

Have those been re-hosted? Milliways went down.

I think that they're HERE.

oh fackin awesame

[BloodFleet]

If you look at my weapons there I gave the Microwave cannon a high kinetic effect like the Morning Star and the EMD cannon has the Leech gun's drain energy from weapons and afterburner.

And where would one find these weapons?

The "shivanmod" I made that StargateSpankyHam is talking about is here http://www.filefront.com/17148090/shivanmod.rar/ it is pretty much shivan fighter and bomber edits (such as adding "player ship" flag of course ) and new weapons. There are also some other random things in there like the Descent 3 ships and weapons.

[Hellstryker]

I might take a crack at it. Haven't touched tbls or weapon sprites since I did the FSport ones two years ago.

[StargateSpankyHam]

Well, my FS2 mod suffered a meltdown and I had to delete it, but it's mostly rebuilt. And I installed photoshop on my machine, so I can view the effects that I plan to add to the shivan weapons. Excellent ideas, everyone (oh, and I'm going to try and refrain from technobabble)

Presently, I've decided to make the shivan weapons significantly more powerful than their GTVA counterparts (as canon says they're supposed to be). Nor will the rate of fire suck. The trade off is that these weapons will chew through MASSIVE amounts of energy. The shivans will have far higher damage in short bursts, but the GTVA will have more sustained firepower.

Here are the weapons I will likely have:

Plasma Pulse (loadout symbol: Prometheus R): Light, fast, all purpose, low-damage weapon. (the only shivan weapon that will not suck down energy like air). "Cycle" enabled, so that it will be more of a continuous stream.

Plasma Scythe (loadout symbol: Prometheus S): Heavy, all purpose weapon. Hotter projectile (will probably glow purplish-red). The shivans' preferred dogfight weapon.

Plasma Nova: (loadout symbol: Lamprey): Heavier, all purpose, plasma-spike weapon. Even hotter and brighter projectile (super-bright violet, fading to red?). Slower rate of fire, way more damage, and way more energy required.

Eviscerator (loadout symbol: Maxim): Ultra-heavy plasma torpedo (inspired by the 'wave' cannon). Bomber-mounted only. Very slow projectile - definitely no faster than 60 m/s. By the time I get done with my pspew effects, it's going to look like a miniature sun flying through space. The only ship that's going to be able to use this effectively will be the SB Yali, as no other ship is going to have enough total weapon energy to fire it more than once or twice. The Yali will get probably six or eight shots in rapid succession. "Huge" and "Supercap" enabled, since this will be the Yali's surrogate bomb payload.

Aurora (loadout symbol: Subach): Combo subsystem disruptor, energy drainer, and shield-wiper. Also likely to have an EMP effect. Rate of fire will probably be about one round every three seconds, maybe slower. Projectile speed will be a bit sluggish, but it will still be possible to hit fighters with it.

Lancer (loadout symbol: Morning Star): Instant-hit FTL railgun - warps straight through shields. Only weapon in the game which will penetrate through shields (since beam cannons no longer do). Decent damage against hulls and subsystems, but a total energy HOG. I'll probably set the velocity to something like 1000 KM/sec so that nobody will notice that it's not truly instant hit.

Ripper (loadout symbol: Kayser): Short-range 'shotgun'. Small, dense, explosive, but sluggish projectiles. Going to use the "$FOF" to give it a distinct firing cone. Excellent anti-hull and anti-shield damage, but useless on fighters beyond about 100 meters. The larger the target, the further away you can hit from. Good for both close-range dogfighters and assault fighters.

IR Laser (loadout symbol: Akheton SDG): Mid-range, infrared pulse laser - an actual beam weapon. Probably going to have damage attenuation, so it falls off at range. Also a good, all around, dogfight weapon. Very rapid pulses will fire with the trigger held down - at least ten per second.

GravShock (loadout symbol: Circe): Gravity-based kinetic weapon. Probably a substantial knockback effect, though a low rate of fire. Very fast projectile. The gravity fields disrupt and tear apart shields very well, and the heightened rate of fire against the Aurora makes it a good tool for attacking shielded warships and incoming fighters alike.

The only reason that the Ripper and Eviscerator have heavy shield damage is because shivan warships have shields as well, and although the player does get to fly shivan craft, they are still fighting against the shivans.

For this reason, the entire purpose of a shivan hull-smashing weapon like the GTVA Maxim...sort of goes away. The GTVA gets retweaked EMP missiles for assault fighters to take out larger ships' shields. Each side deals with large shields differently.

So...what do you guys think?

[StargateSpankyHam]

Alright, all seems to be going well.

For simplicity, the Plasma Pulse ended up being a near-duplicate copy of BloodFleet's "Pulse" weapon, since I liked the general feel of the gun to start with. I tweaked the damage, rate of fire, and energy usage a bit, and it now uses a less-threatening sound (as it is the only shivan weapon that does not do surprisingly good damage).

The Plasma Scythe ended up being a near-clone of BloodFleet's "Quasar". The trail and projectile look much more menacing.

I am particularly proud of the Plasma Nova, as it is a weapon almost entirely of my own creation. I even opened photoshop to make the actual plasma bolt that it fires, and picked out a sufficiently evil firing sound. I'll probably constrain this weapon to bombers and assault fighters. It is much more difficult than I expected to get a completely custom-made weapon to look and sound GOOD.

The Ripper ended up being a hull-damage-only weapon, and the field of fire is astoundingly wide, making it practically useless against fighters. The theory is, if you're attacking a cruiser or corvette, you should likely use some other weapon to drain the shield, so that when you get in range to use the ripper, it actually counts. And, if you're attacking something larger than that, such as a destroyer, you should be using bombs in the first place (which now work fantastically well against shields).

Tomorrow's project: the Infrared Laser!