Here's the deal... I have a weapon idea somewhere in my head, but the thing is, it's badly underdeveloped. It has a name and a few features, but I feel that they're just not enough...

So let's brainstorm on this one: pour all your ideas in and I'll see how I can combine then into a weapon worthy of the BW name.

Lemme get the first off: it's name is the Blackadder. It was supposed to be a Strobe-light (y'know... those flashlights that are long and heavy enough to smash over peoples' heads) that has an added feature of being able to spray a chemical that makes people hallucinate. The hallucinations can be one or more of the following:

-Being set on fire
-Seeing your health drop for no reason
-Seeing "ghosts" of other players pass by in front of you
-Seeing a "ghost" of yourself pass by in front of you, and if you accidentally shoot it (maybe out of surprise), you damage yourself
-Various screen effects (blurring, distortions, color changes, inverts)

At first I was thinking that it should be Pepper Spray, but that would be too tame (besides, the Blackadder's light is blinding enough for that).

I like the hallucinations idea.

players and vehicles suddenly look like giant mushrooms....

I like this idea but wouldn't something like this create lag when duplicating the models to make ghosts.

Put the hallucinatory effects on the Toxic Grenade. As it is, it's useful only for destroying the framerates of opponents with less powerful computers.

hallucinations now thats a kick ass idea

I'm not too sure about it being that useless, but it is something that kinda has a more specialized usage.

I don't think it should have hallucination effects though, it'd seem kinda funky.

Anyways, for hallucination effects, there should definitely be some motion blur effects, but unfortunately motion blur isn't too reliable on UT2004, so there should definitely be extra stuff too. Maybe there should be some slight lag when looking and moving?

Useful only as a visual barrier, really. It's not something you can really kill people with.

Although I guess a smart player would be able to control the flow of the battle by discouraging certain paths from being taken. Still, you could easily just dodge-jump through it with minimal damage.

Hallucination would indeed be odd. It would be interesting if prolonged exposure scrambles a few of your controls temporarily, making you very vulnerable unless you can adapt to the weirdness quickly enough.

It can pretty effectively cut off a hallway, as prolonged exposure to it can in fact kill you quite quickly, and it can easily take out emplaced guns.

Messed up controls could be an interesting feature, but I think simply something that makes you maybe slow down quite noticeably could work too, that way you couldn't really rush through it as easily.

Its probably a pretty damn awesome weapon if you really spent a lot of time to get to know it, but it does seem kinda useless to me too.

But maybe this should be discussed elsewhere.

This is a brainstorming session, anything that can be discussed about weapon features and improvements should be done here.

For the hallucinations, maybe making the sounds echo so the player is confused and can't here properly. The radio might also change pitch, if that is possible.

Perhaps changing the FOV to the max and making it a placebale weapon (like the landmine but smaller) , enemy runs over it or get near it and sets it of .

Another thing like Xav said you could change the controls of the player randomly to avoid people getting used to the "wierdness" of the messed up controls.
Making them an easier target to hit.
But thats maybey a litlle bit difficult to script.
(like forward becomes left and backpedal a sec later)