[New Weapon Request] – Infection beam

[Sand Raven]

I want to create a new one off Xenon ship that can carry a new weapon the infects any capital ship.
The new weapon should be based on the Ion Disruptor which reduces to shields and infects the target ship with a virus. This virus takes over the ship and crew and turns it again any commonwealth ship.

I also want to create a mod that will let this new ship loose in the X Universe. An MD script can be created to seek and destroy this ship before it devours the commonwealth.
I will be grateful if any script writer can help create this new weapon for me.

[ManiakNL]

Sounds fun, nice idea!

You should make some sort of cure laser as well, since whole sectors could get infected. Would be sad to have empty sectors in the game

Or destroyed infected ships get respawn as normal ships, that would be acceptable as well ^^

Hope you can pull this of

[Sand Raven]

We could have all the infected ships revert back to their original race onve the ship is destroyed.

[Ketraar]

I know Observe played with this back in the day for Transcend, he called it nanites a spreading ship wrecking thing that eventually would kill the infected ship. Also ships flying close to infected ships would be infected too.

Not sure how you actually would want this to work in that regard, but in general its possible, even though it would need to be scripted in. Possible issues are mission ships getting infected, wrecking missions/plots and heavy duty processing if infections spread too large.

MFG

Ketraar

PS.: Jobs would spawn uninfected ships, so that should balance things out a bit.

[ManiakNL]

Perhaps make another version, a BORG version that would be so awesome having a Borg cube flying around assimilating everything.

Maybe even let it broadcast messages like "We the are borg, resistence is futile"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZEJ4OJTgg8

[Sand Raven]

I know Observe played with this back in the day for Transcend, he called it nanites a spreading ship wrecking thing that eventually would kill the infected ship. Also ships flying close to infected ships would be infected too.

We can perhaps reduce the rate of infection by only allowing the new Xenon ship carry out infections and restrict that to Capital ships, Excluding TL,TS and TPs. We can also limit the range and power of the weapon and trigger an infection once the shields have gone. We just need to find a way of protecting mission ships or have them re-spawn.

The mission will be to find and destroy the ship quickly before it accumulates a large fleet of it's own. There will also be a tactical element to the mission once the ship is found.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Advanced Firewall Software from the vanilla Wares?

[EDIT]To protect ships from infection[/EDIT]

[Sand Raven]

So far there are some good suggestions and challenges.

I would also add that if a player's ship is attacked and taken over, then the player should be ejected automatically and the player's ship will turn against their own ships. Leaving the player to get to safety in his space suit.

Once the Infection ship is destroyed, all the infected ships can either be returned to their original races or become abandoned ships for claiming.

It will be easy to assign an M7/8 to spam the Infection ship with missiles. I would probably put anti-missile defences on the ship for this.

I would probably confine this ship to a single sector, preferably an Unknown Sector that has a lot of traffic to feed on. Any suggestions?

[ManiakNL]

Make the confinement optional perhaps it's fun that it actually tries to take over the universe

How would you kill the ship anyways if he hits you, you are infected
Perhaps you can only get infected when your hull is < x% and your shields are 0-5% ?

An newly infected ship should be restored to 100% after that or else it would be way too easy to destroy them.

Perhaps even if an newly infected ship gets another ship down to x% hull it will infect the other ship. This way you can get a real cool spread of infection Just like a disease!

Perhaps you don't even need that "Infection Beam" just make add some lore about the first infected that that it has little bugs that can penetrate ships when they have no shielding and a nearly broken hull.

[Sand Raven]

This appears to be heading towards a mod rather than a weapons request.
That could come once the weapon is working in game.

I'll keep the thread on track and see if there is anyone that can help me with the script. I have already created a TLaser entry based upon the ION Disruptor at ID 40. The question now is to find some one that will help with coding the weapon effect or at least point me in the right direction.

Can any one help ?

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

If you are changing weapons (e.g. TLasers/TBullets/TMissiles) then it is a mod.

If you are just using MD/MCSI scripts then it is a script.

[EDIT]AFAIK you can not script an effect on weapons hit, you can however check for the status of a target ship and initiate the desired effect based on target status.

Have a look at my ATCS script for how to monitor target status.[/EDIT]

[OOZ662]

No mention of Homeworld: Cataclysm in all this? making such a weapon sounds really troublesome...the HW:C weapon behaves like the Ion Disruptor, but getting the game to "infect" ships hit by it could be difficult. As far as I know, the only tools the game gives in that regard are generic "I've been attacked" signals, which wouldn't determine whether the infection weapon were used in the attack. But, I'm not a scripter by any means.

[Sand Raven]

OOZ662 Says:

No mention of Homeworld: Cataclysm in all this? making such a weapon sounds really troublesome

I cannot confirm that there is a Homeworld mod in progress I also think 'Xenon Naggarok' will be an ideal name for the experimental Xenon ship.

I know very little about modding or scripting. Which is why I need the help of the modding community. I'm willing to learn modding and scripting if it helps complete the Infection Beam Mod.

The Ion Disruptor would be the perfect template for bring down shields, but target script needs to recognise an Infection IOD was used and invoke the ship takeover script and call the Attack All Enemies Script once the shields have been reduced to 0.

[EmperorJon]

In that case there's no way to identify what weapon is attacking. I suppose you could simply have a scripting "hacking" attack of some sort from the infected ship, attempting to gain control of the target while the shields were down or something, and not shooting at it during this time.

[Jack08]

a custom turret script could be used to start the hacking script, just modify an existing attack turret command.

Basically, dont attempt to detect the hit, detect the fireing.