Canon Barrel up/down?

[Sephiroth_VII]

This is not a first person view, its sort of a third person view so you see the barrel of the cannon that your shooting. I want the actual barrel of the model to move up and down in realation to pressing the arrow keys. Which would be hard to do I think..

 

[PoZoR]

well the cannon has to be a doodad because units cannot change their roll/pitch angles
but i dont think there is any way to change this via triggers. the best alternatives (not very good...) i can think of:

1. use a unit (maybe a guard tower i dunno wat ur after) as the gun base, and then have another unit as the barrel tip, and use triggers to periodically refresh a lightning effect between these two units. u can then change the location of the gun tip as u wish using triggers, like moving the unit, or changing the fly height of the gun tip.

2. fairly complicated system, and probably looks just as bad. instead of a lightning effect in the first one, you connect the two using many ball shaped completely black dummy units. the dummy units will have to have their positions adjusted whenever the gun tip is to be moved, and you will have to calculate the arithmetics/formulae for the movement of each of these pieces...

cant think of anything else, if there really is a way to alter pitch and roll via triggers (maybe in JASS, i dont know, i dont JASS) then it would be alot easier that way lol

 

[Sephiroth_VII]

Them ways sound not fun, and would turn out bad. I'm a modeller so I can model cannons. But how to make it do what I want?..Maybe alot of animations that it can change through when you press the keys. That wouldn't be very smooth though...