Re-using Abilities

[anUser]

By Abilities I mean those defined by XGAbilityTree.BuildAbilities, and by re-using I mean using them for a different purpose than for what they're used in the game.

 

I haven't done any consistent research on this subject, most of this are ideas that I've been having for a while, but I've accumulated a few that could benefit from some more digging into the matter, so I guess in time I'll be giving it a look. I'm posting it to share what I've learned so far, to ask if someone else has attempted to edit this, and just to share the ideas for feedback.

 

--- Background ---

This abilities are the ones that appear in the tactical game in the bottom of the screen, each with a number. Thus those define actions that may be available to the player. Some of them depend on the unit having certain perk and/or having equipped certain item in order to use it (fire rocket [action] requires both "fire rocket" [perk] and a rocket launcher or blaster launcher). That I know it hasn't been found yet where those prerequisites are defined, probably they're hand-hard-coded somewhere in the upks. Either if we can change those prereqs or if we can't, I still hope that not every of them will be hard-coded in every possible manner, so perhaps some ability can be re-used in a more interesting way. Moreover, there are many "abilities" defined that the game isn't using. Probably most of them will be non-functional, but with luck some of them may just be a copy of another ability, and thus we can use it for other purposes.

 

--- Abilities ---

- Shredder Rocket: The idea is to use this ability with flash grenades. Unfortunately I couldn't test that yet, my game is behaving a bit crazy lately.

- Flush: Just for fun, I'd like if I could make it were the standard ability for rocket launchers. With increased AoE it may be hilarious to see all the aliens running for cover and then blowing up anyway.

- Disabling Shot: My thought on this was to make it an arc thrower's ability, and make it so it can target only robotic units (the latter can be done in the BuildAbilities function), kinda overloading the robot with a discharge.

- Electrocution / Arc Thrower Suppression: There are a couple of deprecated suppression abilities that could be functional. If one were made so it could only target non-robotic units (this is just a parameter in BuildAbilites) it could be used as that.

- Two barrel shot: only there were an unused ability that fired the weapon this could be latter scripted so the shot consumed double ammo and caused double damage, for shotguns. In comparison with rapid fire, where you have big chances of hitting once, but smaller chances to hit twice, this would be a double or nothing in one shot, so higher chances to hit "twice" and higher risk to fail.

Edited May 3, 2013 by anUser