Shoot lightning bolts at your enemies, defeat armies, destroy crafts!



--Known issues:
Placing too many of them (I place 3 as a max) will probably cause lag and less probably crashes.
It has a semi-working auto-firing system (activate with F). Use under your own risk.
Upon destruction, it might generate lag. That's why I don't place many towers.

The Good:
It's very powerful. I like it.
It feels like you're harnessing a strange energy.

The Bad:
The sprites aren't so pretty.
It doesn't actually look or feel like lightning.

The Ugly:
It's unreliable. It killed my own brain by burring through the base of the tower and digging towards it. It's also not very sure to kill a target, in fact, more likely to bounce off.

I've tried to make it more lightning-ish, but I can't achieve that feel. And I've been trying to solve the thing of the bounce off, but the only time I did it it created an horribly over-powered lightning.

Make the lightning particle more likely to explode on impact by decreasing GibImpulseLimit.

The particle actually does gib, it gibs into other lightning particles, that's why it looks like it bounces.
I gave many particles to the first lightning it fires when it gibs, but it still doesn't damage too much the target when hit.

EDIT:
Fixed most stuff soupy posted up.

Just use CastMORay for enemy detection.

I don't want to detect if the target is or not on the same team.
Because a lightning is suposed to be attracted to anything that it can be attracted to.

I have an idea. You know those missiles that are shot into the air, then detatches its casing to release a bunch of smaller missiles? Maybe you can do that. Since it only shoots 1 bolt on every reload, the lighting can split and the bolts can track to the nearest enemy unit.

The rational for the bolt not being attracted to all units is that the units are outfitted with anti-tesla bolt implants?

The other option you might consider, and I totally agree with this one, is make the tower shoot multiple bolts in one clip.

Or this: you know when units normally track other enemy units? Well maybe you can make the tower generate crosshairs that lock onto a target and after it locks on, it shoots the bolt. It would make your tower 10.51x more awesome.

And maybe you could also make them adjusted to vanilla bunker modules?

I've already thought of that, and that does actually happens but when the bolt travels very long distances.



Do you mean to make it shoot like 3-5 bolts at once? That would probably over-power this much more, but I will consider that.



I've been working on an auto-targeting system, but I can't make it work as I want to.
When you activate the auto-fire (selecting the coil and pressing F), it aims to the nearest target in a radius of 2300 px, and after a while it fires. I think it works, but the actual AI screws my artificial lua-driven AI.



I would, but I can't sprite by myself =D

Ha, this is really cool Asklar, much cooler than I expected. I do agree with Soupy though ,that it doesn't really feel like lightening, it needs to be more... crackly, like the DS Electrolaser. Apart from that, its brilliant fun.

Also it just needs some simple reload sounds, like charge up effects or something.

EDIT: Forgot; Good job!

EDIT 2; Say Asklar, could I include this in the Wehrmacht? It would go really cool with them.......

Yeah, sure.
I would want credits, other than that, use it for anything.

Then deactivate the AI (self.AIMode = 0)

Dude, I didn't know that was even possible!
I'll fix that and make major changes to the lua AI.

I legitimately had a-lot of fun with this thing. My only gripe is it doesn't feel like lightning. I mean It feels like some weird arcane energy/seeking plasma or something but not really lightning. I would make it non seeking, and add more shots to the clip, and try to add some sort of effect like the D-9 electro rifle. Other than that though its very, very cool.

I know it doesn't look like lightning, I've tried to make it look more like it but it's hard. The best way to make it look more like lightning would be adding a muzzle flash that was like a lighting, but that wouldn't look good, specially with the lightnings chasing dudes afterwards. And I don't want to change that thing, because if I did that it would be just a common turret shooting a fancy bullet.

I'll keep trying, but I'll focus more on the part I really want to be cool, and that is the targeting system.

EDIT:
Crap, I guess I won't be able to modify this further for the contest. I'm going on a school trip until june 22, one day after the end of the submissions. So, I guess I won't change anything else and I'll have to submit this.

Anyway, I love this proyect so after I come back I'll script again the lua AI and make some changes to the lightning and stuff.