Idea for a Lightninggun Mod

[GreEn`mArine]

Well, I am aware that the core team of Nexuiz considered the possibility to have a lightninggun (which is about the same as the one of Quake 3 Arena) but they dropped the idea. Anyway, I would really like to see a mod that would introduce the lightning gun.

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For the people who don't know the lightninggun: It is a weapon that shoots a lightning beam (which is just a straight beam, similiar to the nexgun beam). The weapon does a small amount of damage (e.g. "15") per shot, but it has a firerate of 10 shots per second or more. It is similar to our current MachineGun, but it differs in these points:
- You can see the beam (You can't see machinegun bullets ;D)
- it does not spray, which means that you will actually 100% hit the place at which you aim
- you don't have recoil (which means that your crosshair doesn't move up/shake when firing)
- the range of the weapon is limited.

You can compare it to a MachineGun-Nexgun, but you have a constant beam as long as you press the mousebutton, have a firerate of >= 10 per second, it instantly hits, but does very little damage per shot, and its range is limited.
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The trick is that the DP engine has lightning-beam related features (e.g. it will show your beam instantly and not the lagged version on the server. For the beam we can use a static texture which, however, will scroll (I have no idea how it will look).

Anyway, I am not a QuakeC Coder and although it doesn't seem to be THAT hard I have no idea how all the code interacts and no idea about the special things/expressions that exist in QuakeC so I might be out of ability to really do much by myself, this is why I can just provide the idea.

I am thinking about to have it as a mod which can be enabled like minstagib, e.g. "g_lightninggun". I think the Crylink would fit as a weapon because it looks a bit as if it could do the lightning beam, and it uses cell ammo, too. The mod itself could have two modes
a) Mode 1: Replace the primary firemode of the Crylink (secondary firemode can be the same) and let all other weapons untouched
b) Mode 2: Have a "lightning gun only" arena (like in Minstagib where you have nexgun only). Every player spawns with lightninggun only. Every player has a defined amount of ammo. Killed enemies drop their weapons and give ammo, as you can see, very similar to minstagib, just with a lightninggun. I even would like to have the Minstagib-adepted Power-Ups (Speed and Invisibility, Extra lives won't make sense). Alternative fire could be the laser, as in Minstagib.

Unlike Minstagib the weapon does of course NOT kill instantly with one hit, but you will need 1.5 to 2 seconds of hitting the enemy until the enemy dies (approximately same amount as with the current MachineGun). The problem I see with Mode "1" is that it will be hard to judge how many ammo the lightninggun may consume, because other cell weapons ammo usage must still be in a reasonable relation to the lightninggun, which might be hard because the lightning gun is supposed to take 1 cell per shot, and as it should have about 10 shots/sec (or even more) it would take too much ammo away. Well, maybe QuakeC allows the possibility to not take 1 Cell per shot but e.g. 0.5 Cells, no idea about that.

Most of the important variables should of course be configurable (e.g. how many ammo you have on startup, or how many ammo you would get by killing a enemy and picking up the enemies weapon, the damage per shot, the firerate, and of course the range of the weapon) by using cvars.

I honestly have no idea how hard it would be to make such a mod, and I have no idea how hard it is to realise the graphical aspect of this (using a lightning beam, have it scrolled, properly attach it to the weapon, etc.), so I would like to hear your opinions, and whether there are people who are interested in that too (and maybe also CAN do things about it)

[GreEn`mArine]

just another thread with dozens of answers

[C.Brutail]

Can be done easily. Quake1 has lightning gun. Copy paste code, use it, be happy.

And about my feelings: I like the lightning gun, but you need a very good connection to the server, couse high ping and packet loss kills tthe lightning gun. I'd welcome to see the weapon in nexuiz, but only for a mod (replace eg. crylink). I like the unique arsenal, you know

[esteel]

Hmm seems to rather easy to implement. The only problem i have right now is that the lightning beam does start at the weapon in third person view but NOT it first person view..
Though it must be possible somehow as the hook is almost the same thing and it does not shoot from the middle lower screen.