[halcyony2k]

I am curious if the armor and or weapons tables allow a damage type similar to what a void ray from starcraft 2 does. The longer a beam is focused on a ship the more damage it does. For example, a beam does 5.5 x weapon damage for the first second, then it doubles the next second until reaching a cap. Just a thought.

[DahBlount]

afaik, this is not possible using tables. However, it is possible to modify the damage caused, or healed, by a weapon using LUA scripts.

[headdie]

can beams use $burst shot: ?
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl#.24Burst_Shots:

[Aesaar]

Yes they can.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I'm not sure how it gives the desired effect of increasing damage the longer the beam makes contact.

[headdie]

Beams fire for the set duration.  what I am thinking is that if the beam is treated as fired by the Burst Fire code at the point of it firing like with other weapons then you can use burst fire to stack beams on top of each other so with a 1 second delay with a beam damage of 1dps and a burst of 3, if I am correct you would have

Firing 1 beam at 1dps
+1 second firing 2 beams at 2dps
+2 second firing 3 beams at 3dps

not exactly the requested scaling but there is an increase.  if Substitute would work on turrets then you could use it to create the exact request

edit

I stand corrected Substitute is fixed so you could use substitute to substitute for beams with a higher dps

[DahBlount]

The above example would work but it would be several beams firing at several different spots so it wouldn't look quite like what is wanted here I believe. I've actually used this for anti-fighter beams in the past and I like the result.

I did some searching through the documentation and it is possible to scale a weapons damage per second based on the length of time it has been fired, but you would be hard pressed to make a script that scales it over the amount of time it has been colliding with the target, if at all.

[0rph3u5]

Well, I don't know about a purely table-based solution but with SEXP you find under "Change">"Armor and Damage Type" you might get a similar effect, though it might not be very dynamic as you would have to make a chain of events* instead of having the behavior appear "naturally"


* starting with a "fire-beam"-event which then has additional events following it (chained or via "event-true-delay") that would modifiy either the damage-type of the beam or the armor-type of the target

[halcyony2k]

Thanks for the quick replies. I am curious about creating better distinctions between race technology: Terran, Vasudan and Shivan. When I play stock freespace race weapons seem too similar. They all have primaries, secondaries and drop the same countermeasures. I saw a few things in the armor tables that I don't see used very often and was curious if anybody uses the tables for more than just regular multiplicative calculations.