The future of the Rocket and Sticky Jumper

[winstliu]

@shadow93 recently brought to my attention that even stock weapons no longer show up when given to players. This affects the Rocket/Sticky Jumpers because FF2 removes them and spawns the stock launcher in their place instead.

While not a breaking gameplay issue, this does make it a suitable time to think about if we should change the behavior of those weapons. There's a couple of options:

1. Override their attributes and make them act exactly like the stock ones.
   • Pros: Players get to keep their weapon, other players can see their weapon
   • Cons: The orange stripes at this point are associated with "no damage". Bosses may attempt to go for these players hoping for an easy kill and not knowing that they do in fact deal damage now. Similarly, players may still think that the weapons deal no damage and kill themselves while trying to execute a jump.
2. Un-blacklist them and make them usable.
   • Pros: Players get to keep their weapon, other players can see their weapon
   • Cons: These players lose an important source of damage output and can jump around the map with ease to escape the boss. Think the Dead Ringer or BFB scouts but even worse.
3. Leave it as is.
   • Pros: No confusion. Players immediately realize that the Jumpers are banned and will have to deal with using a stock launcher instead. It's also been the existing behavior for more than 3 years I'd say.
   • Cons: Invisible weapons.

[naydef]

I have two suggestions about this:

1. Change attribute 280 to value 4.0. It will override the stickybombs to the stock ones, so the players will see the stock stickybombs. Actually this attribute is very interesting, because you don't have to remove, delete or change projectile models.
   " 4.0 - Stock stickybombs"
   " 18.0 - Sticky jumper stickybombs"
2. Make the server given weapons visible by setting one specific netprop introduced in the Gun Mettle update. The bad thing is that this method works also on hats(Why Valve didn't just remove that netprop from tf_wearable entities). If you agree with the second method, I will give the netprop. I'm even surprised, because no one still hasn't published the code of making server given stock and non-stock weapons visible!

I would recommend the first suggestion

[shadow93]

@naydef, no need for attribute 280. Simply setting the last parameter to true in PrepareItemHandle removes any existing attributes.

Also, might want to be careful about disclosing this netprop to just anyone, as it can be misused, and it's fake unusuals all over again (and subsequently, Valve breaking it again). You can PM me the code on AlliedModders though, and i'll give it a try on my FF2 fork.

[Chdata]

The orange stripes at this point are associated with "no damage".

That's not a con. It's what I do on my server. Bosses hardly really change how they target people. And people catch on to the fact that they do damage... instantly.

#1 is your best bet, because, you can if you want to, also override the itemdefinitionindex in OnGiveNamedItem, to turn it into a normal rocket launcher.