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[zaporozhets]

Well, well, a custom gunsmith you say? 

Added it along with some other fixes, thanks again.
Still struggling with a native-like custom sidebar for different categories and metals like the metalsmith's, so I figured I'd just lump everything into it for now whilst I work on it.

Edit:
Just figured out reaction categories are now a thing, I'm an idiot. I'll add reactions for metals other than steel when I'm able.

[Meph]

Will you ever do grenades or landmines?

[MottledPetrel]

What are some of those sprites on the original post that aren't yet in the mod? That harpoon with an (what I assume to be) explosive charge looks interesting.

And for more suggestions, how about a nock gun? I have no idea if you can script a gun that fires seven shots at once, but it would be pretty cool. And if you manage to figure that out, making a duck's foot pistol wouldn't be that different. A blunderbuss could be made in similar effect, albeit much more inaccurate, short ranged, and devastating. To a similar effect, a grapeshot charge would be good for cannons when your target isn't an elephant. For the elephants an elephant gun for excessive caliber needs. A double barrelled turn over pistol could be used for two quick shots followed by an extended reload time. A french knife pistol could be exactly what it says on the tin, a well crafted knife with a usable pistol built into it. But at the very least, I would STRONGLY recommend the German axe pistol.

Having little prior knowledge of scripting, I don't know how many of these can actually be done or are practical to do, but I just thought I'd give some ideas. All suggestions are based off of real fire arms from the 1800's or prior.

[zaporozhets]

Will you ever do grenades or landmines?

My understanding of traps is that they use the trap weapon as a very short range projectile when triggered, if that is correct, an explosive shell used in a trap should be picked up by the cannon script and trigger an explosion.

I can't think of a fast way of testing this, however. I'll use some shells in my traps, wait for a siege and let you know when I get a result either way.

As for grenades, the hand mortar already fires 'grenades' (though I'm not happy with how they currently perform and am experimenting with a cave-in dust concussion effect to replace or go alongside the current bang), but I could add a 'grenade bag' ranged weapon so they could be 'thrown' in fortress mode. I'd have to think through a way to balance it against the mortar and make it distinct enough before adding it.

One possible way would be to remove the original grenade projectile after firing and replace it with a clone that is less accurate and has less range (but that could mean dwarves throwing grenades at too distant targets).
I'm trying to do something similar with the WIP blunderbuss where I need to replace a 'cartridge' with multiple weaker 'pellet' projectiles that can't be re-used.

I've been thinking about the flamethrower you asked about previously, too. Looking at the spellcrafts mod it seems possible to add firebreath to a dwarf when a (secretly melee weapon) flamethrower is in their inventory, but the overhead might be high as the script would perform the check whenever anybody changed anything in their inventory. Not sure if I'll get round to doing this one given the drawback but it's on the to-do list nevertheless.

What are some of those sprites on the original post that aren't yet in the mod? That harpoon with an (what I assume to be) explosive charge looks interesting.

That's the ammo for the rocket launcher, I'm afraid. It looked like a Congreve rocket to me, so I used it for that. All the sprites on that pic are ingame, unless I've made a horrible mistake.

And for more suggestions, how about a nock gun? I have no idea if you can script a gun that fires seven shots at once, but it would be pretty cool. And if you manage to figure that out, making a duck's foot pistol wouldn't be that different. A blunderbuss could be made in similar effect, albeit much more inaccurate, short ranged, and devastating.

As fascinating as the nock gun is (I'd never heard of it although there is something that looks similar in a Mount and Blade mod) I probably wouldn't want too many similar weapons as I'm already working on a blunderbuss, as I mentioned in my reply to Meph. It's firing multiple shots well enough, but currently acts as an infinite ammo generator.
I hadn't considered a blunderbuss pistol but it's so effing metal that I'll have to add it once I work the bugs out of the blunderbuss, might call it a 'dragon pistol' to keep the name concise, what do you think?

To a similar effect, a grapeshot charge would be good for cannons when your target isn't an elephant. For the elephants an elephant gun for excessive caliber needs. A double barrelled turn over pistol could be used for two quick shots followed by an extended reload time. A french knife pistol could be exactly what it says on the tin, a well crafted knife with a usable pistol built into it. But at the very least, I would STRONGLY recommend the German axe pistol.

Grapeshot shells for cannons is a great idea, I'll put it on my to-do list. I'm slightly angry at myself it didn't dawn on me at all when messing about with the blunderbuss. What a brilliant suggestion!
Not sure about the elephant gun and turn-over pistol as I don't know how to balance them against normal muskets and pistols, I wouldn't know how to change reload times beyond deleting every other shot and re-adding it to the firers inventory.
They're also quite similar to the existing weapons, as is the knife pistol, and it bothers me somewhat to have almost-duplicate weapons.
I hope that doesn't disappoint you too much. An axe pistol is very cool and distinct and could be included with the bayonets, added it to my list. Thanks.

Having little prior knowledge of scripting, I don't know how many of these can actually be done or are practical to do, but I just thought I'd give some ideas. All suggestions are based off of real fire arms from the 1800's or prior.

I appreciate your ideas, all these obscure firearms you know about are a great inspiration. I forgot to add you to the actual credits when I added the hand mortar (but credited you in the readme), my apologies, I'll do so with the next version.
I do hope my feelings of wanting to retain simplicity and abstraction in terms of the weapon categories don't disappoint you (or Meph) too much.

[Meph]

Maybe make the flamethrower like the cannon?  Triggers dragonfirebreath in a cardinal direction when used?

Your understanding of traps is correct. I did bombs in masterwork like that using the projectile-trigger script. The other Form of landmine was a creature using a short range interaction. That gave invaders the Chance to disable them with ranged weapons, but also enabled wonderful murder holes just like in RL.

Make gate, inner gate, trap invaders in between. One zlvl above, pit/pasture the landmine down a hatch into the room below. :-)

[zaporozhets]

Maybe make the flamethrower like the cannon?  Triggers dragonfirebreath in a cardinal direction when used?

The problems with using dfhack.maps.spawnFlow are: I don't know how to make directed jets (like firebreath or webs) or trailing flows (might be useful for gas cannisters). Even if I did, if used with a 'melee' flamethrower the flow wouldn't trigger unless the opponent was adjacent to the wielder, and a 'bow' flamethrower would have to much range and dwarves would just sit there impotently spraying fire.
That's why I discounted the idea of a flammenwerfer originally and very much liked your suggestion of temporarily imparting a breath attack to the wielder.

Edit:
Wait, did you mean making the flamethrower a pseudo siege engine like the cannon?

Your understanding of traps is correct. I did bombs in masterwork like that using the projectile-trigger script. The other Form of landmine was a creature using a short range interaction. That gave invaders the Chance to disable them with ranged weapons, but also enabled wonderful murder holes just like in RL.

Make gate, inner gate, trap invaders in between. One zlvl above, pit/pasture the landmine down a hatch into the room below. :-)

If it's already possible to create landmines using the existing exploding shells, would you want an explicit landmine trapcomp even if it was just a copy of the shell? Duplicating an existing weapon goes against my sensibilities personally and I like the idea of leaving it to the ingenuity of the player, but I'd be more than happy to add it in if it makes things nicer for you. That's why I added the settings menu.

Solved the blunderbuss infinite ammo bug by making the pellets a new ammo subtype that can't be fired by anything if they survive impact.
Just trying to decide on the number of pellets to be fired, whether they should be deleted or remain to be melted into new ammo (potentially taking up ammo stockpile space) and whether the spread should be videogame-esque with a very wide shot pattern or more realistic, tighter and deadlier (might be OP).
Anyone have any opinons?

Edit:
This is 4 pellets with a spread of '20' for reference.

[MottledPetrel]

In real life the nock gun and the blunderbuss aren't that similar. The nock gun is intended to allow a single gunner to fire a musket volley that would normally take 7 men, and then it turned into a weapon for taking out men in hallways when boarding a ship. The blunderbuss on the other hand is more apt to just create a giant cloud of shrapnel that destroys anything in close range, obviously depending on whether you use actual ball ammo or just fill it with nails or other random metal, which you can do with little problem. In DF though, I would agree that they are probably going to have to be pretty similar. Blunderbuss pistols are a thing that exist, and they're just called blunderbuss pistols. The closest thing you're going to find to a dragon pistol are the old smooth bores that they used to make, which they loved to put dragon heads on the end of when they could afford it. The japanese were a little late to pick up gunpowder as a weapon, so they didn't make much before moving to more modern designs. Or, you could go all the way back to the chinese who were the first to use gunpowder for weaponry. After they discovered they could use fireworks as artillery, they made the first prototype cannons, which often had dragons heads on them. Their clashes with the western world eventually introduced these prototype cannons to the Europeans, who perfected it and eventually made smaller hand held versions that became muskets. Most of that probably won't help you, but it's interesting trivia. You might be able to make some kind of custom 'siege engine' called a missile launch ground, and have it fire some old style chinese artillery fireworks though.

I would think that the elephant gun would just be a much heavier, more unwieldy, but much more powerful version of the musket. I was under the assumption that you could change reload time and shot frequency with dfhack, but if you can't then there is probably little you can do for the turnover pistol. For the French knife gun, I was just thinking a standard knife with the ability to shoot a very light shot for the stealthy types. It's fine if you don't want it, I'm just trying to suggest some more unique fire arms so that it doesn't end up being 50 rifles that are slightly different from each other, which is mostly how gunsmithing of that time went.

For future suggestions, I'm assuming you don't want me to go beyond the invention of percussion caps, right? Some of them still used loose gunpowder and a separate ball shot, but that tends to mark the point between old style fire arms and the newer stuff.

I'd also say maybe go for a revolver rifle, but if you can't edit firing speed and reload time there isn't much of a point.

[SpeardwarfErith]

The problems with using dfhack.maps.spawnFlow are: I don't know how to make directed jets (like firebreath or webs) or trailing flows (might be useful for gas cannisters).

My time to shine!

I have spent the last several days messing around with flows, first in an attempt to spawn webs for barbed wire (a partial success, but only with the help of 2 different scripts and it isn't effective enough to matter) and then in an attempt to make a 1-tile creature look like a sandworm (works really well, but since it fires every 5 ticks regardless of whether there's a worm or not it adds too much overhead to be practical).

Anyways, I have had the displeasure of getting to know the internal workings of flows better than I would like to. You can create aimed flows by spawning the flow, and then setting the destination of that flow to whatever you want while it's still only 1 tile big. This doesn't work with everything- I know that it works with dragonfire and webs, but not with MaterialGas. I don't know about the other flows, but I suspect you can find out what how to do trailing flows by examining the flows that come out of creatures that have that interaction

EDIT:
also, if MottledPetrel is correct when he says that

you could change reload time and shot frequency with dfhack

I would be interested in knowing how. I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit going through the data structures, trying to find some cooldown variable.

[zaporozhets]

It is interesting trivia, I'm lucky to have someone so knowledgeable on the subject to help me.
Any time period is fine, really, I'm not going for real-world historical accuracy at all and I wouldn't expect technological progression to follow our world anyway, so percussion cap stuff is good too.
For player ease-of-use and my own compulsions everything is quite abstract which hopefully allows people to imagine the level and style of tech they're happy with for their world. In my headcanon the 'muskets' use jacketed bullets filled with the potash "gunpowder" for example (I know it's stupid  ).

I saw a blunderbuss pistol on wikipedia found at a battlefield in Mexico referred to as a dragon, that's the only reason I suggested it, it does conjure up more oriental-oriented visions than I was intending.
I just needed a more concise name as it gets abbreviated on the menus, which I don't like. Probably going to change 'flintlock pistol' to simply 'pistol' for the same reason. I googled 'shot-pistol' but apparently that refers to derringers. Not sure what to call them.

I have spent the last several days messing around with flows, first in an attempt to spawn webs for barbed wire (a partial success, but only with the help of 2 different scripts and it isn't effective enough to matter) and then in an attempt to make a 1-tile creature look like a sandworm (works really well, but since it fires every 5 ticks regardless of whether there's a worm or not it adds too much overhead to be practical).

I'd be interested to see the sandworm script, I was messing about with multi-tile giant snakes by chaining the positions of multiple creatures which worked well but fired every tick and would need seperate raw definitions for the different bits so the snake didn't have multiples of every organ. Your method sounds much better! Are you working on a Dune mod?

Anyways, I have had the displeasure of getting to know the internal workings of flows better than I would like to. You can create aimed flows by spawning the flow, and then setting the destination of that flow to whatever you want while it's still only 1 tile big. This doesn't work with everything- I know that it works with dragonfire and webs, but not with MaterialGas. I don't know about the other flows, but I suspect you can find out what how to do trailing flows by examining the flows that come out of creatures that have that interaction

Ah, interesting! Does maps.spawnflow return the flow then? I've never even checked.
Edit:
It does!
Do you know if the size of the flow matters with regards to maximum range?
I guess I just need to have a play around with it. Thanks for your help.

I would be interested in knowing how. I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit going through the data structures, trying to find some cooldown variable.

I did find something when looking at how squamous made different mechs have different fire rates in his mod Mechanized Warfare, the mechs are creatures and have tags in the raws like [CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:30] I think are being used to control the rate. I don't know if you could change the dwarfs raws on an individual basis though, I'm not experienced enough with dfhack.

[SpeardwarfErith]

On mobile so I gave up formatting quotes.

Sandworm: I don't have the script immediately available atm, but I got out the easy way using this script- Sandworms are burrowing creatures, and only ever leave their head exposed above the sand. The worm itself is a simple (albeit massive) creature, but it spawns a long wormsign behind it that looks really cool as it moves. The wormsign is just a bunch of gas flows that are immediately altered to not expand, and their density is constantly multiplied by a factor that controls how long the wormsign is. Note that the wormsign is usually much longer than it is in the picture now, probably 15-25 blocks. The wormsign is sadly only visible when the worm moves, though you can change that very easily by storing the individual flows that make it up in an array and giving them a constant density. I'm not working on a full-blown dune mod, mostly just the sandworms. Because sandworms are cool. 


Range of flows: I don't actually know that much about how the spawnflow function works so idk exactly what size does. I know density of the flow controls range, but returns very much diminish. I suggest constantly multiplying the density to make it go down slower since it doesn't decrease linearly.

As for the mechs, I'm not that well versed in raws but I'm pretty sure that's an interaction token, so it isn't actually relevant for bow/gun firing rate (though you can simulate a machinegun or whatever by just giving the creature an interaction)

[zaporozhets]

I'm not working on a full-blown dune mod, mostly just the sandworms. Because sandworms are cool.

Yes they are. I can't lie that I'm not disappointed, it would be amazing to play Dune Fortress. I have visions of assigning collection zones over a spice patch.
I'd think about doing it myself but raw editing has been a pain even for the limited stuff I've managed to do for the guns, I'm not capable of something as complex as a full overhaul.
Your approach to the Shai-Hulud is very clever, thanks for sharing.

Range of flows: I don't actually know that much about how the spawnflow function works so idk exactly what size does. I know density of the flow controls range, but returns very much diminish. I suggest constantly multiplying the density to make it go down slower since it doesn't decrease linearly.

You're clearly are more informed than myself on the subject, I'm thinking of changing the muzzle smoke to use directed flows if it works like I think it does. My current system of spawning undirected flows of increasing-size is so primitive in comparison. Edit: Doesn't seem like I can direct smoke but with what you've told me, I can make chemical cannisters for the cannon more effective (and more importantly, cooler-looking). Again, thanks for the help.

As for the mechs, I'm not that well versed in raws but I'm pretty sure that's an interaction token, so it isn't actually relevant for bow/gun firing rate (though you can simulate a machinegun or whatever by just giving the creature an interaction)

I see. I vaguely remember reading a certain skill might have a bearing on fire rate, whatever it was could be temporarily manipulated to modulate the rate to the desired amount.
Failing that, you could take the naive approach and use something similar to the blunderbuss script I'm working on to increase the rate by having multiple projectiles be created (but with a delay between each one), or lower it by deleting every other (or every third and so on) and adding ammo back into the inventory.
Sorry I couldn't be more helpful to return the favour.

[scourge728]

Very Interesting...

[zaporozhets]

I'm an idiot, I didn't realize gas cannister liquids had to have the [SYN_CONTACT[ or [SYN_INHALED] tags for them to have any effect. Makes chemical weapons pretty useless when used with almost all of the native liquids.

I guess I'll eventually have to try and add some raws for new ones and a maybe a laboratory to make them in. There are plenty of effects to choose from, but deciding on names and reagents will be difficult.

[Prismaa]

I take it this works with Meph's launcher thingy?

[Meph]

Oh god.

DF. Dune Fortress.

Dont give me ideas.

(yes, i meant like a siege engine flamethrower, maybe triggered by a lever or pressure plate)