This all looked so straightforward until I got into it, then I found out it's a complete and utter mess!
The story so far.....
Making a flame thrower for the MM mod, nad all was looking sweet. I had made a new projectile based on the flame arrow, but hand thrown by hastati.
I went into descr_projectile_new and made a copy of the flame arrow, and called it flame_gun. Gave this to the Hastati in place of their javelins, and it worked exactly as expected. Burning arrows flew when the javelin launch anim played.
so..I moved on....
Instead of the weedy little arrow, I wanted to make it a bit bigger, so I used the effects from the flaming boulder, and the explosion effect from the Ballista. Gave me a good balance of effects, but the bulk of the 'trail' was made up of the grey smoke texture. The missile worked as expected, and with a bit of tweaking to power and velocity values, I got the level of lethality I wanted.
So...to make it more flame like, I swapped the texture of the 'smoke' in models_effects/textures and made the fireball flame texture replace the fireball_smoke one.
I now had EXACTLY the weapon I wanted.
Next step was to make it more 'stand alone' so I could use the flaming missiles in their normal manner as well.
Complete and utter nightmare time!!!
I have made a copy of the effects I was using in descr_arrow_trail_effects_final .... there are 3 versions of this file, and this one seems to work.... but I CANNOT figure out where it is getting the model and textures from to make the visual effects I am seeing.
The model seems to be the firey version of the ballista bolt... there is NO fireball_smoke texture listed for the fireball model I thought I was using in the effects text file. The actual model listed in the projectile file is a ballista bolt...
So, I wondered if that forced a default to the firey ballista...so I made a backup of this, and made a new texture which I applied to the ballista flame cas file. No change.
I can't figure this out, and none of it seems to make sense... ~:confused:
doesn't help that there seem to be redundant versions of several missile related text files either!
