Okay, I ditched the rlë8's, eliminated extraneous frames from an rlëD, and used .sit instead of .zip, to finally bring the file under 100k. Here's Abilities.sit.zip, containing Inflight Abilities, which gives I think 5 abilities to choose from, and you can have as many as you want. My original version of this sort had about 19 abilities, each of which only did one thing. This version has abilities that do many things, so each ability grants a "weapon" of some sort, for starters. If you use this as a plug-in for playing it does qualify as a cheat, but I didn't make it for cheating, only to show what can be done. The version that had 19 different abilities I set so you could only have one at a time, and they weren't really good enough to warrant taking the time to use other than as curiosities. The abilities in the attached version, though, are sexy enough that you'll wish you could keep them all the time. <cryptic grin>

Try this and also Booster, because while they're similar in many ways, the manner in which the abilities are triggered is vastly different, and Booster is easier to use. The advantage of this version is the abilities can be selectively granted and used, so more than one type of ability is feasible. Have yourself a looksee. Yes, it's a .sit.zip, because I needed .sit for better compression but the forums won't let .sit files be uploaded, so I Mac OS X-archived it to a .zip. This should work. I hope it expands all right.

Abilities.sit.zip (87.37K)
Number of downloads: 9

EDIT:

Okay, the bugs I found.

A weapon with reload 0 will fire every frame even if it has a long count and "one shot at a time" is flagged. Setting reload to 1 or higher lets the flag work properly.

A weapon with "one shot at a time" flagged (and working, reload > 0) that submunitions into itself will not fire again until the last submunition expires. If it subs into something else (I've only tested where that "else" does not have the same flag checked) then as soon as the original shot ends (and submunitions) another can be fired. I haven't tested if A subs to B and both are 1-at-a-time whether firing A and waiting for it to sub into B still stops either A or B.

I can across these behaviors when making "Supermines", which fires every 5th frame, stays for, uh, 95 frames I think, and explodes when something comes near. I couldn't just use reload 5, count 95, because of the next bug, so I had to go with reload 1, count 5, one shot at a time, subs at end of life into a nearly-identical weapon with count 90 and no subs.

When a weapon is being fired as the outfit for it is being removed, the reload time keeps counting, but the weapon stops firing. If you then reobtain the weapon before quitting the game, it won't fire because the reload never hits what it needs to: it's already past it. I also had one setup wherein the weapon would keep firing after the outfit was removed, until you landed, and I think that was a 0-reload, 1-shot-at-a-time thing.

I used the neat little "uses ammo at end of burst cycle" with burstcount 32767 for the Sanctuary "ship", so in effect you never run out of ships in the bay even though nominally you only ever have one. I think everything works, please let me know if you find something that doesn't. Sanctuary provides protection from all projectiles and any missiles with the "any ship triggers proximity fuse" flag, so long as the RLE collision detector functions properly.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 10 January 2007 - 12:47 PM