I've got a question for all you clever people out there in Internet Land.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make a dual-fuction weapon (like the Assault Rifle / Grenade Launcher) that "disappears after use" like the Alien Weapon, but ONLY after BOTH sets of ammo are depleted. As best as I can tell right now, if a weapon is "disappears after use", it will disappear as soon as either trigger is out of ammo. If there is ammo for that trigger (i.e. you have clips for it) it will reload, but as soon as there's no clips to reload from, for either trigger, the weapon disappears out of your inventory. It's still in your hands, but if you switch away and switch back... well, you can't switch back.
Having both triggers share ammo kind of solves this problem, since you're never out of ammo on one trigger but still have it on the other... but for a combination weapon like the AR / grenade launcher, sharing ammo doesn't really make much sense.
All this is cause I'm still trying to figure out a better way for Eternal's alien weapons to work. The way it is right now in Alpha 2, you can pick up one extra of every weapon type, and some fancy Lua scripting will remove that from your inventory and give you ammo for that weapon instead. This however has the problem that if you've picked up your maximum ammo amount (assuming you're not playing on TC), then any new weapons you pick up just disappear. I can't (to my knowledge) make it so that if you have full ammo, you cannot pick up more of that weapon type.
This also has the problem that, as almost every monster you kill drops it's weapon, there's way too much ammo available. You never have to switch to a less powerful weapon or anything, with the exception of the Fusion Cannon which burns through the scarce fusion batteries you come across like the Day Fire is burning through my old stomping grounds. If you wanted to, you could run through the entire game using the Havok Rifle and almost never have to switch weapons if you didn't want to. That kinda sucks. Having you only able to carry effectively one clip of ammo for each weapon - but having plenty more weapons lying around - adds some more strategy and difficulty to it.
Anybody have any ideas? Besides making the Havok Rifle single-function, or allowing the player to carry an insanely huge amount of ammo, or letting the Havok Rifle disappear after one trigger is out of ammo, or any of the other things I'm trying to avoid doing...
