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This guide teaches you the basics of proximity sensors.
Basically, what you need to know when starting out.
So don’t expect much-this is mainly an auto-cannon tutorial, we’ll glance over another use for sensors though.
The Basic Basics
Let’s just start with a basic, simple autocannon.
To begin, place a 5x1x1 rounded brick down, and put a 1x1x1 actuator (with the top piece) in the middle, like this.
Make sure you set the activation button on the actuator to what button you want your autocannon to be on. Next, click on the rounded brick and copy, press d, and paste until you end up with a circular shape as shown below. (Press c to copy selected brick)
Place a sensor on one of the bricks as show above. Make sure to set the settings as follows:
Sensor type: Proximity
Output channel: 1
(Make sure it’s output channel and not input channel)
Don’t mess with the “min input” and “max input” things just yet, it’ll funk up your sensor if ya don’t know what you’re doin’.
Under the “Activation Input” tab, there will be a thing called “Input axis”. Set this to whatever button you want your autocannon to be set to.
Now, copy and place the sensors across the circle as far from the actuator as possible, increasing the output channel by 1 every time. It starts at 1, increases by 1 every sensor (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.).
Do this until you have a full sensor circle. If you’ve followed the directions correctly thus far, the largest output signal number you’ll have should be 16.
Now for the finishing touches. In order to actually fire the autocannon, you will need two things: Something to activate the sensors and, well, cannons. If the instructions have been followed correctly, you will need 16 cannons. This can also be done with large guns in order to make a faster firing big gun, though I haven’t tested that yet, so beware.
For the activator, there is the perfect brick in the deco tab: it’s a small antennae, it should be at the top of the middle column. you’ll see it as soon as you open the tab.
To make the actual “Cannon” part of the autocannon, place a connecting rod to a seat, and then to a block that will connect the cannons. That’s the easy part. Now for the trivial part. Place a cannon on the desired location, set the input axis to custom, and the channel index to 1. Copy, place, and set the index to 2. Copy, place, and set it to 3. Do this process until you have 16 cannons, with the highest channel number being 16-matching perfectly with your sensors. make sure to check this before we move to the next step. if you have followed these steps correctly, you should have something close to this, creative liberties aside.
Note: I added some tungsten weight blocks so that my gun wouldn’t just fly away when it fired-I recommend you do the same for testing.
Testing and Tuning
Now that you have made the basic autocannon and (hopefully) have gone back and checked your work, it’s finally time for the testing phase.
To test it, simply spawn it, and press whatever button you set the cannon to.
Huh, that’s odd-it seemed to have some sort of backfire at the start where all 16 cannons fired at once. It works fine afterwards though, so why’d that happen? What does it mean?
I’ll be honest, it’s just a dumb feature of Brick Rigs. But let’s not allow that to get us down-I know an easy fix.
Go into the editor, select one of your sensors, and press B (this will select all sensors on the creation.
Then, set the “Min Input” to 0.3, and the “Max Input” to 0.02, as shown below.
And, if you test it again, you’ll find that, oddly enough, that fixes it! I’ll be honest, I have no idea why, it just does. Remember this trick if you make an autocannon and don’t want the weird “Backfire” thing.
And that’s the autocannon done! Of course, this can be inserted in many ways. You don’t need all the sensors like that-for example, you could have the sensors arranged like this:
This will let your cannons fire in a quick Burst each, allowing for an interesting design. You can go a step further and do this:
By doing this, you have it set so that every time the antennae hovers over a sensor group, it will fire half of the cannons. This does make some recoil, so consider adding a sliding spring actuator. If ya don’t know what it is, ask someone else-this guide is about sensors.
As for the speed of the cannon, the fastest I could get it to go was setting a 1.4 on the actuator’s speed. Any higher speed, and the cannon won’t work properly.
Oh yeah, you can also do this.
I DID say at the start we’d glance over another use for the proximity sensor, so I did this as an example.
Using the same parameters, I set this sensor rig up:
Reasoning: This Ford Pinto is pretty accurate, but there’s an issue: It isn’t NEARLY explode-y enough. So, I set this sensor to activate a detonator that’s attached to a fuel tank to make the car explode if something touches the rear bumper.
Example:
When I backed the Pinto into the wall, it exploded! And it’s hardly any more complicated than making an autocannon. Heck, the hardest part was attaching the sensor in a good place. I know this is only a small acknowledgement, but it IS just to show that sensors have more use than autocannons.
In Conclusion…
And that’s the basics-I know, mainly an autocannon tutorial. Well, here’s the thing-that IS the basics. I know there are harder things you can do, but I’ll be perfectly honest-I actually don’t know how to do most of them. The speed sensors are too confusing to make a guide on, though I have used them. In order to get them to work at the speed you want, it’s a lot of trial and error messing with the max and min input amounts. Anyways, just enjoy what you’ve done. This can be used anywhere, and you can always make it bigger to allow more cannons! Anyways, that’s all-good luck with your weird auto-cannon-ey creations.
Happy Shooting!