Skeleton in Rad Suit, implementation ideas?

[EPDGaffney]

So, I have the normal rad suit and I have an armour that takes up all body slots but is a skeleton. On removing the rad suit, the skeleton armour is scripted to be equipped by the corpse, and thus it appears that there's a skeleton inside of a rad suit.

 

The problem I'm having is how to handle dismemberment and the particle effects when the player attacks the corpse. I mean, I could just say only a psychopath would do that and let it alone there, but I'd love to integrate this in a way that feels right.

 

Can I just totally turn off dismemberment? Do I want to do that? See, when wearing the rad suit, dismembering the corpse yields these meat caps, which it shouldn't if there's a skeleton inside. I don't know that I care enough to make up new dismemberment for that armour, and if I didn't want to, is there a way to make dismemberment unavailable only when the corpse is wearing the rad suit, and then make it available when the corpse is naked (as in, a skeleton, or from my modder perspective, wearing the armour that looks like a skeleton)?

 

Then there's the fact that shooting the corpse makes it bleed. Without making it a creature, can I make it look as if it were the same as shooting cloth or dirt or something?

 

I think I can disable the blood spray in the NPC form but that probably doesn't stop the blood with the severed and exploded limbs. But still, I can put a small smoke cloud there via script in an OnHit block, which would take care of at least some of this.

 

Maybe it wouldn't be that time-consuming to do new dismemberment for the rad suit, though. I kind of just don't feel like it, I think. Anyway, what do our forum-traversers think?

 

 

 

Edit: I made a new race that uses the skeleton as its body model and the skull as its head and the individual hands as its hands (but the fingers aren't rigged anyway, so I could have just used a 'null' model for the hands instead of actually making hand models, but I may go back and rig the fingers, so I went with this approach). Everything needs to have a model, so I made an invisible texture and new versions of the mouth models and eyes that have that texture and I used those.

 

After that, I decided to make dismemberment for the rad suit, and I'm so glad I did. I wound up using it in some scripts and it's dead creepy. I love it.

 

Changing the Blood tab in the NPC form so that it uses dirt solved the majority of my problems. I'm probably going to leave it like this just to save on performance, because it's mostly fine. Shooting the body causes dirt clouds to come out, which is great. Melee attacks seem to draw blood only if the player is holding the body with the Grab key, for whatever reason.

 

The only problem left is that sometimes the body parts will explode and produce the gore that NPCs normally do, instead of a bunch of bones. Unfortunately, the obvious approach of making this a Creature doesn't work because they can't equip armour. That introduces a whole new host of problems to work around. The cleanest idea I've had is to place a GameMode script block on this NPC to force limbs to be severed any time they're hit, sort of heading off the explosion functionality at the pass, so to speak. No, GetHitLocation is not available in the OnHit block, if that's what you're thinking. It's only for GameMode blocks. So, I'd rather not introduce the performance hit, despite the fact that it would be small, as there's a lot of scripting going on in this location already. I think most people wouldn't be shooting a skeleton anyway, unless they had infinite ammo, meaning they're already out of the confines of what a mod is expected to account for.

Edited February 27, 2018 by EPDGaffney