Finger of Death

Has anybody found a way to change the lightning-bolt effect for either finger of death, or chain lightning?

I was trying to create an ultimate version of chain lightning where it shot red lightning instead, but there isn't an .mdl listed under finger of death NeutralAbilityFunc.txt that seems to allow this or even tell me what it is. I tried messing with the Targetart=Abilities\Spells\Demon\DemonBoltImpact\DemonBoltImpact.mdl mdl, but all it does is make a little fuzzy-red lightning effect at the target itself, and doesn't change the bolt effect.

Thanks in advanceemote_confused

P.S. I got the red lightning to go in place of chain lightning by extracting the .blp from the main files and renaming it from lightningred.blp to lightning.blp and putting it into the map file under replaceabletextures\weather\ which looked pretty cool. Unfortunately then there was no way to have one chain lightning that was blue and one that was red, they were just all red from then on.

emote_confused

I really really want to make an "ultimate"-type chain lightning that is red, while leaving the normal one at blue. I just can't figure out what line to put into the .txt files for orcabilityfunc.txt that allows it to use the red effect instead of the blue effect.

:bangH: :bangH: :bangH: :bangH: :bangH: :bangH: :bangH: :bangH:

This is driving me crazy!!!

In mine it says this.

// Finger of Death
[ANfd]
Art=ReplaceableTextures\CommandButtons\BTNCorpseExplode.blp
Researchart=ReplaceableTextures\CommandButtons\BTNCorpseExplode.blp
Buttonpos=3,2
Researchbuttonpos=3,0
Targetart=Abilities\Spells\Demon\DemonBoltImpact\DemonBoltImpact.mdl

Hope that helps.

UPdate**** NM i guess you tried that already. Ill take a look some more.

Well im lost. Even if you take out both the animation from Targetart and Missileart it still make the lightning.

Yeah it kinda sucks. The only workaround I have done is messing with lightning.blp, which while looks nice, doesn't allow me to do different attacks like I wanted to - it makes any lightning type art go red (chimera lightning, chain lightning, but not the lightning doodad).

It's odd because most spells you can change what the spell effect / bolt looks like, but chain lightning, mana burn, and finger of death all seem to automatically use their own effect when cast, no matter what settings you enter (which can add additional special effects on top of the enery stream that's already there).

If you wanna see something comical, rename manaburn.blp to lightning.blp and put it in your map :ggani:

Yeah lightning, along with some other spells, are coded so you can't edit how they look. The Demon impact in the .txt is just the explosion looking that that appears when it hits someone. I don't know how to help, except that there is an .slk that is called Lightning.slk. Might be something in there to help you.

Hey, thanks, thats a great file!

It is actually called Splats\LightningData.slk, and it appears to contain some cool parameters about the lightnings, e. g. skin, color, appearance parameters, ...

I will try out playing around a bit with these when I have a bit more time and post the results here.

AAAAAHHHHH I didn't notice that LightningData.slk in the mpq file!!!! Before all the .slk's I looked at were under units, it didn't occur to me to look there.

Now I find something very odd. There is a reference in the abilitydata.slk under the creep chain lightning in data23 for CLPB and a reference in data33 for CLSB, which correspond to the fields in LightningData.slk.

The weird part though is that there isn't data for those fields in the farseer chain lightning.
:abomHUH?:

Very confusing. So I tried to experiment with it. I changed the fields in the creep chain lightning to reflect AFOD (from finger of death) instead of CLSB and CLPB, but nothing happened, so apparently it was once an option in the spell but no longer. They probably originally had it so that you could put the spell graphic in the file, but later changed it so that the spell had multiple levels and decided to hardcode the lightning data.

On a positive note, I can now change the chimera lightning to give a character a red lightning attack as their regular attack, which looks really cool. I was also able to mess with the width etc of the lightning bolt using the lightningdata.slk which was fun. Some of the things I was able to do using lightning attack as a testbed:
- reduce the transparency of the lightningbolt, the lower the numbers in the data the more transparent it became, so I could make it almost see-through
- change the color of the lightning bolt, using the RGB channels, so I was able to do a green chain lightning!!! Kinda funny
:cool: :dance:
- change thickness as mentioned above

So it gives me some room to play with without having to edit the lightning.blp in photoshop to get the different colors.

Thanks Czelaon for the suggestion. :yup: