Oddball Trigger Guide - Eri's TRIGGER IT OR NOT

[EriErin]

I will bestow upon thee a tutorial series that will hopefully shed some light on some of the more interesting triggers that I've discovered in the past few moons. These tutorials detail things like simulating acceleration in movement or rotation, and creating combat drones without ever touching a ship deployer or demeter pod launcher. I willl only present one tutorial as of now, but rest assured that I shall update with more.

Lesson 1: Go Down in Style
Today we're going to learn to improvise a trigger that activates once a certain section is destroyed, which has numerous uses ranging from suicide bombs to self-replacing armor. If you have to go down, you might as well Go Down in Style!


The first step is to create the section that will activate the trigger upon destruction, hereonafter "Section A". For this example, I've gone and placed a Sectoin26 in front of a simple ship. Start by creating a small section (hereafter Section B) and parenting it to Section A. In practice it would be best to hide this section somewhere, but we're going to make it plainly visible just to make things easier.


Next, modify its ED2 fields as shown here. Enable movement and set target distance, advance frames and return frames to 1. No variation is present or possible here.


Create a clone of Section B, hereafter "Section C", that is parented separately from Section A and Section B. Color it red to avoid confusion. In the ED2 tab, disable movement for this section. Switch to the EDIT tab and change Trigger on action 1 to Frames elapsed (s), and then change Trigger off action 1 to Mov. reach origin. Set On frames to 2. Change the On delay to whatever you'd like-- this will be the amount of time that passes between the section being destroyed and the trigger activating, allowing for things like a timed meltdown sequence where a heavily damaged ship's core must be finished off quickly lest it explode in your face.


Link Section C's Off trigger 1 to Section B. The mechanism is now complete.

--

We will now delve into an example of what this mechanism can do. Create a driver wave gun (180 deviation, 360 burst tachdriver) place it on the core (I've placed it facing ass-backwards and with a small firearc for ease of testing). Set its On action 1 to Movement reach target and link On trigger 1 to Section C. Set the weapon's trigger mode to Force fire. You should have something like this:


Now save the ship and spawn it in sandbox for testing.

Enter destroy mode and blow up Section A, and the god-forsaken contraption should activate:


Hope you find this one useful. It's oh so deeeeeeevious, if I may say so myself.

Fanmail, anyone?

[Squishy]

Damn, how did you figure this out?


It works beautifully.

[Elias_The_Crimson]

That's absolutely genius!

[Nutcase]

Awesome.
Let's start throwing ideas for using this around.
It could be useful if someone takes some debris sprites and stuffs them into a gun. I think...

[Kanosint]

*Praises Eri* Damn, that's just... pure awesome o_O
I'm sure that this allows for interesting new KK missiles...

[Bad Boy]

Damn! Genius, I've been wanting a section destroy trigger for a while, I never even thought about that. Can't wait to see what else you come up with, thanks so much.

[Kaelis]

Well ill be damned.

So basically, Section C tries to move all the time, but gets constantly triggered off by Section B, which moves all the time as well, with 1 (or is it 2?) frame cycle. Once B is gone, theres nothing to stop C, so it can safely reach its mov. target. How clever.

I salute you, sir.

[secure]

I've used a similar system to offline weapon(s) once two main reactors were destroyed. The reactor would have a small, alpha 0, section parented to it that was constantly rotating. The quick rotation would in turn be used to online a weapon, while the weapon would use a frames elapsed(self) to turn itself off. The entire system used a few other triggers as well, but I scrapped the the entire thing because while some triggers were saved correctly, all were never saved correctly at once.
Some triggers connect to certain sections would also always break once opened in the shipmaker again, notably the rotating section that kept track on if the reactor was online + alive.


Fire animation, reactors already online at the start. Using the preview mode in shipmaker without hiding any of the control sections. It never worked fully in BSF.

- Online reactors when enemy within x distance (the center mining beam/target painter has acquired a target).
- Open gun doors and online weapon (delay to let gun doors open) when reactors reached full throughoutput (fade in)
- Offline reactors when weapon fired (+ close gun doors). Reactors would online again immediately.
- Offline reactors when enemy outside x distance (the target painter has lost target). The target painter would be offlined during this procedure as well, to prevent a potential error in what state the system is in.

Just thought I'd throw in another example of how you could potentially use pretty much the same system. Unless EriErin minds, that is.

[Cycerin]

You're a true innovator and just damned fucking clever, Eri. Thanks for this.

[DarchZero]

This is a true huzzahwin! I second that thought, mr Cycerin.