Increasing RoF of Siege weapons

[OJ33DA]

How is it done?

[z3n]

If you're referring to the units like onagers/ballista, the animations control that.

Fire rate of towers defending the walls during a siege and other things is probably controlled by descr_projectile_new or something related. (link to tutorial below)
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...-Tower-Aspects

There is an extra fire delay as well called stat_fire_delay in the export_descr_unit that may or may not be used depending on the mod. (see tutorial below)

http://rtw.heavengames.com/rtw/mods/...it/index.shtml

[OJ33DA]

Can animations be sped up to increase RoF of siege units? Maybe the “stat_pri” can make animations faster.

[z3n]

I've seen some people do negative values for stat_fire_delay, but I'm not sure it works that way. Stat_pri also has a delay but I thought it was for melee weapons, maybe it works for ranged too.


Animations should speed up the RoF, from what I remember some mods have an 'fs' (fast) skeleton which is solely meant to increase the RoF for slingers (ranged units).

stat_fire_delay - An extra delay between missile attacks over that imposed by the animation.

[OJ33DA]

I've been doing some research and it seems like the rof is related to at least two things: animation files and projectile velocity.
Faster frames (or whatever) make unit fire faster while faster velocity means less wait time between shots.
I don't know how to manipulate animation files and honestly, I'm convinced that the rof of siege weapons is hardcoded.
I did find a guide on descr_projectile so that'll help.

I've also been trying to find a way to slow down movement of siege unit(s) so that they aren't the same speed on the campaign and battlefield.
How would I go about that? I've read that I'd have to dig into the animation files, create a new skeleton to slow one down.

[z3n]

Sounds about right. RoF of siege weapons is probably directly tied to animations. (possibly hardcoded in some ways to do with skeletons but, skeletons were cracked in 2010, just with some difficulties in understanding the data)

As for your questions, aside from modding the animations, slowing down movement of siege units would probably be quite simple in M2TW (it's just a EDU setting there called move_speed_mod which acts as a multipler i.e. 1.2 is faster by 20% than other units, 0.8 is 20% slower)

There is a total conversion mod called Europa Barbaroum 2 and one other called De Bello Mundi, which both turn M2TW into a more advanced RTW. Might be simpler to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish there?


Otherwise, it seems like you'll have to learn animation modding, which I hear is time consuming and actually not a very well researched area. Last I knew some modders cracked open the skeletons.idx and found lots of uncommented data -- which allowed them to do some things but not all of the data was understood.

Look here for more details:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...letons-CRACKED!!

Here is their mod which has their animation files. Which may help
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum...-(LotRTW)-(ALX)

[Gen.jamesWolfe]

Sounds about right. RoF of siege weapons is probably directly tied to animations. (possibly hardcoded in some ways to do with skeletons but, skeletons were cracked in 2010, just with some difficulties in understanding the data)

As for your questions, aside from modding the animations, slowing down movement of siege units would probably be quite simple in M2TW (it's just a EDU setting there called move_speed_mod which acts as a multipler i.e. 1.2 is faster by 20% than other units, 0.8 is 20% slower)

There is a total conversion mod called Europa Barbaroum 2 and one other called De Bello Mundi, which both turn M2TW into a more advanced RTW. Might be simpler to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish there?


Otherwise, it seems like you'll have to learn animation modding, which I hear is time consuming and actually not a very well researched area. Last I knew some modders cracked open the skeletons.idx and found lots of uncommented data -- which allowed them to do some things but not all of the data was understood.

Look here for more details:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...letons-CRACKED!!

Here is their mod which has their animation files. Which may help
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum...-(LotRTW)-(ALX)

Well, they said it was cracked, but it wasn't--at least, not entirely: been doing research on the subject, and it turns out that for it to be truly cracked, it needed to also display the coordinates of each attack animation, as well as impact frames and so forth. The reason for it is that the skeletons are (theoretically) supposed to be generated by a text file called Descr_skeleton (or something to that effect), which you can find in the RTW/data directory. additionally, a proper cracking of the skeleton files should produce both the text file relevant, and the .evt file separately (what the cracking does is to put the evt file's contents and the rest of the stuff in a single text file). I'd mentioend in in the EBH Forum a while back: had everyone absolutely confused.

There is a possibility that the cracked stuff does have the information in it--just encoded differently. What it would like though, is another matter.