FO3 Trap / Hazard

[Sealurk]

I'm trying to include a feature in a current mod whereby a player can use a specific terminal to open some nearby vents that will discharge superheated steam, toxic gas, cryogenic coolant or something equally nasty that will deal significant damage to any actor in contact with said gas, offered as an alternative to directly engaging several enemies. The problem is I'm not sure how to effectively implement this - should I use a trigger (enabled by the terminal) with an attached script, a flame-like projectile (most likely using the FXSprayJet01 animation in place of the flame if I can get it to work) or something else entirely? Ideally the hazard should work on anything that comes into contact, but I'm not sure how to make this work yet. Any help gratefully appreciated.

[RoyBatterian]

You could do that several ways depending on what you want to implement. For the visual effect you could use the available ones for steam and fire, I'm not sure if the cryo effect is in the vegas files. You can setup an xmarker to be an enabler for it and set the state via script in an OnActivate block from the terminal. The effects are only visual however, but you can probably use a bounding box trigger with a script to apply damage to the player while they are inside of it, also activated via the same xmarker.

Edited October 16, 2014 by RoyBatterian

[Sealurk]

Yeah, I was thinking that too but I'm not entirely sure how to script it since as far as I'm aware DamageActorValue needs to be called on specific references, i.e. "Guard01REF.DamageAV health 10". I might look into attaching an effect if this is possible, or if not an explosion with a PlayExplosion command.

[RoyBatterian]

probably player.damageav

 

afaik you can always use player as a ref

[Sealurk]

Well I succeeded, after a fashion at least - I used an activator based on the gas trap but with a different script. Not perfect, but effective enough and it works on any actor that passes through which was definitely what I needed.

[RoyBatterian]

Ah you needed to damage any actor, I thought you only needed to damage the player. The latest NVSE has a nice command to get all refs in a cell, that could be used for it too. There's other ways too, but you already found a solution.

[Sealurk]

Yeah I've got it working thanks, seems to be working pretty well. Now I just need to work out how to attribute any deaths caused by the gas to the player so they can collect the XP (and maybe so it shows up in the stats), but I have a few ideas to start with.

[africaisstarving]

I recommend looking at gastrap effect. Just copy and duplicate gas trap but replace fire effect with nothing. Disable your copied gastrap effect activators and when person is in the area or steps into the gastrap activate it. or activate it any way you wish. Simply enable it. All the sudden you see gas around you. Add a imagespace modifier probably blur or double vision . And playsound cough . Find an NPC coughing sound. Sometimes they are used as dialogue. I think you can even give it to the player ad dialogue. See playervoice add your cough sound dialogue with a condition. Turn the condition on player.say yourcoughtopicname and will make player cough and or choke whenever you wish.

Ideally you want to have it be reuseable which is why activators are good as you can embed the script in the activators . So you can make a whole area filled with toxic gas traps.

if you know how to edit nifs you can also color your gastrap effect blue or green or red eetc whatever you wish make it all toxic.

[Sealurk]

Sorry for the delay in responding. Thanks for the advice Africaisstarving, I've gone down that route and it works well. I was going to look into attributing the deaths caused by the steam/gas to the player for the purpose of generating XP but a little bit of GECKsploration suggests that's far too complex at this stage and I should either grant a one-off XP bonus for using the steam or leave it out altogether.