I have made a flame thrower weapon using the fine damage effect, it works reasonably well.

I have been able to make the fire stick to enemies and also make a good sfx while it does, so it appears as though the enemy ship is on fire and sounds like it too. the fire also fades after about 10 seconds which is nice.

my question is would i be able to make the fire that sticks to somebody do damage over time until it goes away?

Ive never seen that done before so i'm eager to know.

This is not possible via conventional modding. My guess how you made it stick to the enemy (which I believe there is only one way to), is, that you added it as impact effect of the projectile, and since this is a reference to an effect and not a fuse, there is no way of adding damage to it. It might however be possible (meanwhile?) to add a damage or damage over time line to the effect archetype supported by some plugin or so...

I imagine adoxa could whip something up; but is it possible to make a fuse trigger when a ship is hit with a certain projectile?

I dont think anyone had tried creating this type of immunition, you can try barrier with totally different effect something like rapid fire gun.

I think you're pretty safe with high re-fire rates these days as both servers and connections are quicker and of course player numbers are down.

TNG 2.7.6 for example has "beam" weapons which have an extremely high re-fire rate (1500 shots per min).

It also has swarmer missiles which had a fast re-fire, high turn rate and a relatively long lifetime.

The swarm missiles used to cause some lag back in the day (but that's mostly because a single player could launch something like 300+ per minute). But we never saw any troubles with the "beam" weps.

I wouldn't be too concerned about high refire rates.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Rik

Sorry, before I start this, I'm not wanting to upset anyone or cause any flaming...

FF can you clarify what you mean? What's a lazy approach?

I'm just trying to let Hidamari here know of my experiences with high refire rate weapons.

Sure I agree a high refire rate, long life-time and/or complicated FX may well be a cause of lag.

My experience is mostly taken from the Aurora TNG server which regularly had 30 people+ (most were based in Europe) and for the most part minimal lag time during battles where the Swarm missile were banned.

Now, what I take from from this, as multiple players were using the very high re-fire rate guns (which were simple beam FX) is that high re-fire rates, with simple FX and low munitions lifetime do not cause a problem with lag.

Now please correct me if I'm wrong but most of the occasions I experienced lag related were:
(a) network/internet work connectivity issues
(b) client computers slowing up because they couldn't render what was going on on screen and were therefore not communicating with the server effectively and when this happens on multiple clients, yes you have a massive problem.

A few years down the line, I'd like to think that, particularly with a DX8 engine, the majority of these client problems would no longer be a problem.

I would be very interested to hear your clarification/insight...

Cheers,
Rik

Info gets sent in packets containing x amount of bits or whatever don't they, is it 16bit with FL? So I would imagine you're restricted by the way FL handles those packets anyway. Projectiles must account for a fair amount of info with all the geometry involved, plus the hits generated. It's impressive people have managed to support player levels of 100 plus in the game.

We may be a long way down the line from when the game was released, but all the same, multiplayer servers for most games are still not supporting a lot more players than they did back then. Exception is MMO's maybe, but that's a different type of game mechanic.