Detecting Target's Name and/or id

[danshive]

I'm new to the GECK and am looking for ways to determine which actor I've just targeted with my scripts, such as from a weapon. I have a few reasons I'd like to be able to do this.

 

For example, I did what any seasonable person would do and made a gun that turns people into rad roaches. Okay, from a code perspective, it shrinks, kills, and spawns a rad roach where a target was while some flashy particle effects flash, but whatever. Point is, I'd like to be able to alter the behavior of the script depending on who gets roach-i-fied, possibly making it possible to reverse the effects by resurrecting the PC, turning them into something else, whatever. I personally think it would be funny if the Roach King became a deathclaw belonging to the radroach faction and the antagonizer into an ant queen, but my point is merely that there are applications for knowing who you're shooting.

 

Any advice is greatly appreciated. I haven't checked out the possibilities with FOSE yet, but at this rate I'm already pushing the limits of the GECK from the standpoint of stupid crazy weapons.

 

And so long as I'm asking for advice, the roach morph code. As I said, I'm new to GECK, plus the special effects are snagged from another script, so there's a good chance this could be improved. Certain conditions that are currently being used in the object effect should probably be hard-coded into it, such as not being able to target children and characters who won't die (it effectively just turns them invisible). I also have an addition script on the object effect that removes all items from the actor before the change, as this method of "kill" leaves no corpse to loot.

 

scn TFRoachSpell

short RoachMade		; 0 = no roach, 1 = a roach
float timer				; For timing the roach appearance with actor disappearance
short init					; Make sure timer is set once
float shrinkVar			; For keeping track fo the shrinking.

Begin scripteffectstart
SetCriticalStage DisintegrateStart		; The visual effects are pretty much taken directly from the alien disintegration spell. I honestly don't know how necessary this is.
set RoachMade to 0
set shrinkVar to 1
setscale shrinkVar
PMS AlienCritGlowFXShader			; Fancyspecialeffects
PMS effectAlienDisintegration
End

Begin scripteffectupdate	
if init == 0 
	set timer to 1.8
	set init to 1
else
	if timer > 0
		if shrinkVar > 0.25
			set shrinkVar to shrinkVar - 0.01
			setscale shrinkVar
		endif
		if shrinkVar < 0.25
			setscale 0.25
		endif
	else
		if RoachMade == 0
				if getinfaction RadRoachFaction == 0		; If it's already a rad roach, we don't need another one, do we?
					PlaceAtMe TFRadRoach 1				; This is a custom rad roach set to not respawn.
				endif
				set RoachMade to 1
				DamageActorValue Health 3000	;Killactor has resulted in glitches, has did a single 10,000 damage command. 12,000 over four quarters seems to work juuuuust fine
				DamageActorValue Health 3000
				DamageActorValue Health 3000
				DamageActorValue Health 3000
				SetCriticalStage DisintegrateEnd
				SMS AlienCritGlowFXShader
				SMS effectAlienDisintegration
		endif
	endif
endif
set timer to (timer - getSecondsPassed)
End