Tiberium (fictional substance)

Adding Tiberium (TD Style)

By [b]Allied General[/b], p.s. you someone tidy this up :p -- Tidied up -- DC

This tutorial allows you to simulate the damage effect of tiberium which was present in TD but also overcoming the following problems

I. damage only occuring in one cell

II. indiscriminate, unbalanced damage every frame

III. excessive lag

The beginning

You need the template for tiberium in the first place, some good tiberium can be downloaded at RA2 Argentina (look at SHP, Other) Note these files need to be placed in a expandmdxx folder

RULES(MD).ini

a. create a new particle under the [Particles] heading b. Use the following rules for your new [Particle]

Image=none ; its invisible
MaxDC=15 ; how many frames before damage occur, keep it small so damage occurs quickly
MaxEC=60 ; how many frames this last for, keep it small to reduce lag
Damage=150 ; how much it hurts, this damage ignores tags such as immunetopoison even if the attached warhead is poison=yes
Warhead=YourWarhead ; the scissors, paper, rock of the damage
StartFrame=0 ; best not to mess with this
EndStateAI=20 ; best not to mess with this
WindEffect=1 ; determines how far this particle moves from its starting position (defaults to 0)
BehavesLike=Gas ; best not to mess with this
StateAIAdvance=4 ;; best not to mess with this

d. Use the following rules for your [YourWarhead]

• advisable to add your warhead to [Warheads] heading

CellSpread=1 ; area effect damage
PercentAtMax=1 ; keep damage high
Verses=300%,300%,300%,1%,0%,1%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0% ; this is what makes this type of tiberium less indiscriminate1
ProneDamage=300% ; multipler to apply to damage when infantry use prone sequence in art.
InfDeath=4 ; flame death like in TD 2

¹in this case the particle will do fatal damage to infantry and tiny damage to light armour and heavy armour and no damage against medium armour (ore miners), structures and units which utilise special_1 & special_2 armour. Alter this to the balance of your mod.

²could be modified to any other anim and if PD Patch enable then possiblity of using mutation tags although gendeath (i.e. brute death unadvisable due to remap issues)

ART(MD).ini

a. use the following rules for [TWNK1]

LoopCount=-1 ; this animation plays forever 
RandomLoopDelay=120,300 ; this gives a delay on the anim playing
HideIfNoOre=true ; dont play this anim if no ore present
SpawnsParticle=[Insert name of your new particle] ; the particle you made
NumParticles=1 ; the number to spawn, keep this low to minimise lag 

Yuri's Revenge is required as SpawnParticle= and NumParticles= can not be used in RA2, this logic is based upon Virus killing victims and leaving clouds of gas. The effect of this rules is for green tiberium overlays to constantly generate invisible particles which do damage but quickly fade away.

Now start up a game of YR and when infantry walk over tiberium patches, they should be a very high probability of them instantly dying.

NOTE: the slave miner generates slaves which use none armour, at present these slaves will instantly die when mining. It may be advisable to change the slave armour type to special_1 or classify an armour type as immune to tiberium damage e.g. plate by ammeding the verses characteristics.

Also note that references to ore e.g. audio comments and ore purifer should be modified and possibly oregath.shp (the "hoover" anim when a miner harvests, but note this anim must be in a similiar format to the original to display correctly)

"Explosive" Tiberium

Unfortuantly this has been disabled and even renabling the tags for this will lead to no such action.

Update: CellAnim causes reconnection error, you could alter the probablity of twinkles appear to improve the chance of spawning the "burn gas"