Alright, here’s something to wrap your head around. I have been playing around with genie and the game’s particle effects in the efforts of possibly creating a working forest fire mechanic that involves some sort of source, and the ability to spread from tree to tree and grow into a large conflagration, OR if there aren’t enough things to burn nearby, the fire dies and goes out leaving some nice little smokey burnt terrain in it’s place.
I’ve been trying to learn as much about the engine and such as I can along the way, so it’s not all in vain but here are some of my early tests.
First test: Giant flaming trebuchet rock projectile impacts tree, dies—> death object is a clone of the BOLT EXPLOSION object used by the ballista ele to destroy trees. From here the goal was to give this object which is class Petard a bunch of projectiles with 0% accuracy, high negative trajectory values so they essentially fly up and around in all directions and land on other trees, lighting them on fire.
Findings: It doesnt seem like class petard can use projectiles, still not certain though, but I know that projectiles that are determined to be misses do not collide with the terrain, they simply fly right through the ground. The regular arrows and spears and such have a enter terrain graphic that looks like they got stuck into the ground but it’s just a clever trick and the real projectile continued to fall into oblivion.
On the other hand projectile misses can still collide with other objects, and those can have death objects that do the same damage to trees, but again, I cannot seem to get those objects to fire off multiple projectiles upon dying.
Second Test: Big flaming rock projectile collies with tree, creates a deer… that has a default task of “graze”, and could be used as a means of randomly spreading the fire to new trees. Problem with this is that I cannot seem to get the deer to then attack the trees automatically. I then tried to get the deer to have a trailing unit of the tree damaging flame object, but when it becomes another object’s trailing unit, it seems to lose all of it’s other properties, simply spawned like a smoke trail, plays it’s animation once, and disappears without creating it’s own death object or anything like that. Best I could do was to get the trail object to “stay” by looping the particle file it used as a graphic.
I’m convinced it’s possible to accomplish this odd goal using what’s already available in the game engine. I’m trying to avoid using scenario triggers or scripts, but it’s looking like im going to have to. If anyone has any ideas or thoughts, please, let me know, i’m curious to see if anyone else can think of something I havent. I’ll post pics if there’s any interest.