Righto, so as a part of my mod, I'm hoping to have a siege, where an army attacks a settlement, which the player must defend. Now, I don't want the player to just stroll on down to the gate and then hack away at a few baddies, that'd just be plain boring. No, I want the player to run down the the hill with arrows and rocks impacting around him (And destroying his CPU in the process).

The arrows have quite a bit of potential to go haywire, but I may be able to make it work with some experimentation using the AI (Perhaps making a few archers stand outside the walls and fire at some references in the air (A simple UseItemAt package could probably do this).

My main problem will be catapults firing stones. Now the lack of destructible scenery makes the use of trap stones a bit useless on the immersion side of things, so instead I'm thinking about shooting fire spells with a range effect on impact over the walls. And herein lies my problem: Spells travel in a straight line.

So. In order to make this work, I will either need to fire spells from up in the air (which would look fairly average) or I find a way to make the spells fall back to the ground.

Which brings me to my question. Is there a way (Through scripting, hacking, praying, etc) to make spells gradually fall to the ground in an arc?

EDIT:

After some preliminary testing, I have also discovered that archers will only fire horizontally with a UseItemAt package. I fixed this by tossing them on top of the walls (possibly accompanied by a ladder for the player to climb). However, I've also noticed that the NPCs will stop firing arrows if any other NPCs or the Player move in the area in front of them. Is there a way to stop them doing this, or am I going to have to get creative?

Could you not make Fireball-looking arrows? Then use timed-X-marker casts to make it seem like they were actually exploding on impact? Might not be perfect, but if you have enough, and the danger is high-enough, the Player probably won't stand still long enough to notice the inconsistencies?

My suggestion for the catapult is to make it a creature that is set on destroying the pc. Its weapons could be rock and the "beam". http://www.inframez.com/papers/images/xsi_catapults_parts.gif the beam could act like a bow, and the catapult could use "bow" and "arrows" similar to the way a skeleton archer does. It wouldn't be that hard if you knew what you were doing. As far as making it arch, I don't think there is any way to do that unless you had invisible npcs in the air that when they got hit by a first fireball fired from the ground, they would fire a second to another target, which would eventually arch out into an arch, making it look like it was arched all along, but that would take a ton of time and work. Also, for destructible scenery, you should try to make a gate "creature" that the opposing force could attack with a battering ram and men creature. Once the gate creature looses all health, it's death anim would play, creating the "falling" effect. The only problem with seige, is that you would have to know how to make new creatures, or animate old statics.

This is something I hadn't considered. Thanks for the idea.

I was hoping I could avoid having NPCs up in the air firing at the player, as they have a tendency to be uncooperative in terms of staying still when they attack, but it looks like this is how it 's going to be. Cheers for the help guys