About

Every now and then a thread on the BioBoard sends you on the scripting equivalent of a rollercoaster ride.

There I was minding my own business happily working away on my Fog and Color libraries when Beerfish asked about trying to make one of his scripts more efficient. The script in question was intended to create a series of ghostly footprints which would appear before the players without any visible source.

Since I've always liked playing with vectors this was the sort of thing that grabbed my attention. However it was actually Sir Elric (a long suffering friend from the HCR team) who realised there was a far more elegant solution. His idea was to determine the location of a creature with the Null Human appearance and use it to determine the location to create the footprints. The great advantage is the builder could easily control the path using waypoints and much more user-friendly scripting.

I set to work and over the weekend produced a solution for Beerfish so that he could happily create a trail of footprints behind a creature (invisible or otherwise) that would slowly fade after a few seconds. There were a few clever things in the original code but I wasn't entirely happy with it. Then seven days and one 4am epiphany later I actually came up with the approach that would ultimately become the official version of my Footprint System. Nevertheless it would be a few more weeks until in late March the system was sufficiently polished and documented for public release.

Sunjammer's Footprint System is a simple yet highly configurable method to produce a temporary trail of placeable "footprints" behind any PC or creature. The system allows almost every aspect of a footprint to be configured using a variety of custom properties. In addition some special custom properties can be used to apply effects to the footprint's creator.

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• Sunjammer's Footprint System