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It's been quite some time since I've tinkered with Fear and Loathing (and I was never particularly good at it before!).

I decided I'd settle back into things by trying to make the Warlock shoot out something other than a fireball. Why, what better object to launch than the hapless Fisherman?

I started out by duplicating the Warlock's fireball projectile and object tags and then changed them to use the Fisherman from "01 Scenery." I also told it not to mirror vertically. Aside from that, all is as normal.

Mind you I repeated this process for the "Warlock (net)..." versions, too.

Now, when I go to a map and try to hurl a deadly Fisherman, the Warlock lobs it through the air a very short distance - not unlike the way a Dwarf throws his bottle. As a result, it's a very suicidal attack.

I can send files, post more info, etc. In advance, I greatly appreciate any assistance on this. Perhaps changing the fireball was too big of a first step after years of not using Fear?

Probably you just changed the object in a way that scares off all the fish.

Set it back to the warlock fireball object (you don't need to touch it if all you want is to change the travel sprite) and see if it does what you want.

Hmm. That did the trick. What I don't understand, though, is if my Warlock Fisherman object was a direct copy of the Warlock Fireball object... Why did the behavior change?

I'm not sure if this was the particular case, but in some situations in Fear, I've noticed values can actually get 'rounded down'. So lets give a random instance here, lets say you have to set a value between 0 and 1.0, so you type in 0.374. Save the tag, and open it up again, check the value. Often it will have decreased itself by a few points, maybe now reading 0.370.

It's a bit of a longshot, and I'm not a fear guru myself so I'm really just guessing here, but ff you duplicated your warlock fireball, and somehow fear managed to round the gravity number (which is usually -0.004 i think) might be trying to reach 0, and rounding itself up, closer to 0 (giving it less gravity/inertia/momentum) and consequently not being cast far enough....

Like I said, total guess here, but it's a possability to what's going on with the seemingly 'identical' object tag.

Graydon wrote:It's a bit of a longshot, and I'm not a fear guru myself so I'm really just guessing here, but ff you duplicated your warlock fireball, and somehow fear managed to round the gravity number (which is usually -0.004 i think) might be trying to reach 0, and rounding itself up, closer to 0 (giving it less gravity/inertia/momentum) and consequently not being cast far enough....

Myth "floats" can get evil reductions, but the fireball has no gravity (I believe zero won't round outside Loathing). (This was more common in TagEdit, I think, but I've seen it in Fear too.)

It sounds like his object somehow had gravity (the fireball maintains a constant height, with no effect of gravity, and blows when it impacts or decays). If it's a direct copy, my guess would be that he accidentally hit the wrong object when duplicating or when assigning it in the fireball projectile (and Fear is slow enough that it's easy to outrun it with simple mistakes like first hitting the wrong key and having it select another tag in the list, even though Command was held down and shouldn't register as "the F key was pressed" thankyouverymuch , to then duplicate).

I'll triple check how I set it all up, but thank you all so much for the info!

The fisherman object is probably not the same weight or gravity as fireball, I could be wron gbut check objects. I think the post above said something close to the same affect.

the fisherman is thrown at very small distance because it has gravity and the shooting velocity is too small. By default, warlock fireballs are thrown at 0.1, dwrfs are set at 0.2 or 0.25... Just go into the monster tag/attacks and change the velocity to something between 0.2 and 0.35