Fireball firing weapon

[llamabeast]

I'm trying to make a weapon that fires a fireball.

I've already concluded that

1) I can't actually make it fire a fireball
2) I just have to make it a projectile weapon and have small area fire as a secondary effect (since #aoe doesn't work)
3) I can't guarantee the weapon will hit, and the small area fire won't get a chance to hurt anyone if the weapon "misses" (I can give it prec 100 to make sure it hits the right square, but it might not hit anyone there).

I can sort of deal with all these things. But I am really finally stuck with the fly sprite. I can't get anything remotely decent, unsurprisingly since they are all little sprites rather than particle effects. So my real question is: how does the fire breath weapon do it? And does anyone have any helpful suggestions?

[lch]

I don't know much about modding, but can't you copy from / equip the Wand of Wild Fire? That would require that the unit does use an item effect instead of "attacking" / "fire", though, so I guess you want the latter?

[Sombre]

I don't think you can even assign aoe effects to #secondaryeffect anyway - and as you know #secondaryeffectalways doesn't work. I tried it with various poison cloud aoe weapons and #secondaryeffect and none of it worked properly.

I'm afraid I can't help much - right now modding such weapons is a pain in the *** because the commands are broken.

[lch]

Sombre said:
I don't think you can even assign aoe effects to #secondaryeffect anyway - and as you know #secondaryeffectalways doesn't work.

*hint* *hint*, Sombre: http://ulm.illwinter.com/dom3/dom3progress.html

[Sombre]

Hmm, last time they 'fixed' something like that was #clearmagic and they actually made it worse as far as I can tell.

But we'll see. I was hoping they'd fix #aoe as well.

[Saulot]

I use a combination of tactics to go around this problem. None of them are optimal or perfect.

For some units, I simply use a weapon that seems similar to it, firebreath being a common example.
For other units, I simply use an already made weapon as a secondary effect as you do. A good trick to make sure secondary effects take effect, is to make the primary weapon have the following qualities:
1 damage
armornegating
dt_cap
100 precision
secondaryeffect XXX

What this in effect does, is throw the effect you want at whatever square you want, 100% of the time. It has the minor unfortunate side effect of forcing 1 armornegating damage on the target in addition to whatever you wanted to do (set them on fire, paralyze them, whatever...).

So far though, for a more realistic fireball weapon, I would wait till august when the next patch is expected. The AOE and secondaryeffectalways commands should be fixed then.

As for flysprites, I can't help you with that, I've had no luck getting anything above what was suggested in the modding manual.

Edit:
Oh, and aoe effects do work as secondary effects, one of my traps is the aoe effect leg chop, which affects the whole square.

Edit2:
I'm pretty certain copying wand of wildfire would do nothing, just give you the base weapon (some sort of scepter which hits ethereal units)

[llamabeast]

You can't copy weapons anyway can you?

Anyway, thanks for all the responses. Saulot - why 1 capped damage and armor negating, specifically? That's helpful though, I might end up using that (I can always update it in August if there are new fixes).

Flysprites do indeed seem very strange. I also can't get any to work which aren't in the manual.

[Sombre]

Re: Legchop - Are you sure it actually hits the entire square though? AOE weapons like snake bladder stick, poison ink etc etc don't work as AOE if you put them as #secondaryeffect, they just hit the one target or don't work at all.

[Saulot]

Why 1 capped armornegating damage? So the weapon does damage, and triggers the secondaryeffect (which only is triggered when the weapon deals damage).

Hopefully the modding manual will be updated with more sprites. It's one of the limited factors behind another nation I've been considering.

Edit:
Yep, I've seen 3 units with the crippled affliction in a single square, with only 1 of the units having lost a hitpoint. (Works almost exactly as I want it to).

[llamabeast]

Aha, I begin to understand why the #secondaryeffectalways command is so in demand.