Time Limited Boost effect

[Bloodbane]

 I am making boost spell with script to increase offense power temporary. I know how to increase and decrease offense.
 The question is: how to give time limit for this boost effect?
 It crossed my mind to set another script to cancel the effect in another animation but I would have to set the script in many animations since I can't be certain at which animation, the effect should wear out. I am hoping there's better way .

[utunnels]

Hint:

You can spawn another entity as a supervisor if you don't want to put too many things in your character's update script.

The supervisor can do various things, include checking defense/offense. When the job is down it can just kill itself. Just assign it a task by specify a special alias or set some entity variables (for example, the handle of your character).

[Damon Caskey]

I'm a big fan of the controller entity technique, and with it you can often kill two or more birds with one stone. For example, I have a character that can throw dirt to blind opponents. Since there is no tracking variable for perception, I spawn a bound entity on the blinded victim.

This entity does double duty of providing a visual effect for players and acts as a timer. When its lifespan expires the parent's perception parameter is set back to reflect the amount it was affected by the blindness entity (I do this in place of static values so I can have compound effects if I want). IOW:

Blindness entity spawn: Parent perception = Current perception - 10.
Blindness entity expire: Parent perception = Current perception + 10.

This technique is also a boon when you want to manipulate the effect later. Let's say in my case there was a cure spell for the blindness. Instead of trying to work up math on the perception variable which might be tracking several vision effects in a complex RPG, all I have to do is look for the "blind" entity and kill it.

You don't even need to have the other entity be bound. Maybe you don't want anything visible on your "boosted" entity but players should still have some kind of visual confirmation. So maybe the control entity could be down by the HUD displaying some text like "BOOST!" or whatever. Lot of different ways you could do this.

DC

[rafhot]

it will be very useful to marvel wargems and the powerups im trying to do

[BeasTie]

Yeah I been wondering about how to do this kind of thing too.  For doom powerups on timers like bezerk.

[Bloodbane]

Let's say in my case there was a cure spell for the blindness. Instead of trying to work up math on the perception variable which might be tracking several vision effects in a complex RPG, all I have to do is look for the "blind" entity and kill it.

 Hey! that's brilliant! thanks for sharing Damon!