So I wanna make this really long-legged crab. Like so:



But I'm having a lot of issues. Is there a way to do this properly? Maybe with some sort of invisible proxy legs.

It would help if there was a functional version of the mod. And knowing what your issue was.

My apologies, I extracted the actor from the mod as a whole. I forgot that breaks everything.

The mod in full.

The main problems are that the crab actor sinks into the ground when stationary and tends to trip when moving. It's minimally edited from the Dreadnought so far, but what I have done is:
- Replace the turret and leg sprites
- Slow the walking speed
- Reduce the main body mass
- Fiddled with atoms?

I've done searches here of course and I can't really find much info on it, other than one person suggesting a Lua script is necessary.

Fiddled with it a bit, here are some things I found.

Your walkpaths and standpaths are too low. Make sure you're editing both the left AND the right standpaths, and make sure the PushForces are the same. You should also probably rename them to something unique, and not use the vanilla PresetNames. 12 for the Y value seems to be okay for the standpaths.

Lowering the crab's weight (including the connected parts - that turret is pretty heavy) helps a lot with preventing it from digging into terrain, but you'll also probably want to use larger atomgroups for the feet. Try using non-crab atomgroups like one of the AHuman foot atom groups. Using the basic "Foot" atomgroup lowers the terrain digging by a lot.

You'll have to do a lot of fiddling to get a good balance between weight (of the ACrab and all of its attached components) and the walkpath PushForces.

Hey contrary, got linked here via IRC and figured i'd try to help you out.

E: That said, most of this has been said by cave above anyway.

The trick is to set up the legs properly. You need to draw out enough frames, set up the offsets for the joint and foot and movement in between right, and iterate on those after you inevitably have things "a bit wrong" from the start.

The editors can be helpful for this.

Then, it's a matter of
- building a suitable foot atomgroup (big enough to spread the mass of the crab, however much that is - making your body lighter can help if he's sinking into the dirt too much)
- setting up the standing/walking offsets correctly (you're gonna have to measure pixels tbh)
- getting your push force right (basically this will decide where the crab lies on the spectrum from anemic infant to steroid-soaked terminator).

Hope you get it right!

Hey boss, fancy seeing you here.

Thanks for the advice, both of you. Hopefully this shambling mess will be playable soon enough.