Factorio Forums

I had this idea in my head to create a weapon that would shoot trains. I ended up getting ahead of myself and worked on the code first, thinking the actual animation would be simple. However, it took me quite a while to realize that since the train is a 3d object I can't simply just rotate it like with the 2d bullets. Is there a way to find the angle at which the player is shooting to orient the train correctly? I've also considered creating a custom entity just to render a train over the actual projectile, but I'm not really sure how to do that and if it's worth the effort.

Oooooh... now I get it.

on_script_trigger_effect is the standard event for detecting projectile launches, but this does not provide any target information that you could use to calculate angle.

You could make the weapon a capsule and use on_player_used_capsule, which does provide the target position. Then use surface.create_entity{} to create a proper projectile.

Note that all of this must be done in control.lua, which operates rather differently than data.lua.