invisible sprite submunitions

We’ve all read Ender’s Game, and anyone who hasn’t is wrong.

Now we’ve covered the basics, here’s my concept plug-in with an MD Device, for use with stock EV Nova: Attached File MD_Device_concept.rez.zip (893bytes)
Number of downloads: 3

The interesting part of this from a technical standpoint is that weapons with a sprite whose mask is all black—and thus cannot directly impact a target—will still detonate from proximity. Since prox-triggered explosions submunition, and impact-triggered explosions don’t, this provides a way to guarantee a shot will submunition—as long as you don’t mind the shot itself being invisible. You can make it visible-ish by using trailing particles, or a cicn smoke set, or having the weapon recursively submunition every frame and leave an explosion that looks like the shot should look, and lasts one frame, or whatever else you can think of.

Or, for that matter, you can make a weapon play its frames in order, with the first frame invisible so it cannot explode-by-contact on its first frame, then it can be visible on subsequent frames and still be eligible for proximity-detonation and hence submunitioning. That way the new-formed shot will be largely protected from ever having a direct hit with a target.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 10 August 2011 - 03:38 PM