Temporarily A_RotateSpikeBall?

I just want to know if it's possible to make an object rotate around another object for a short period of time, then disappear.

If that's not descriptive enough, an example of what I want would be to have a boss spawn 4 spikeballs around him, have them rotate 5 laps, then disappear.

Well... Yes it is possible and I played around with it a little...
It IS possible, but I don't know if it is advisable.

The problem is the "A_RotateSpikeball"-thinker. It only works if the state's duration is 1 and if all states follow back-to-back.
Usually you just take one state with this specific action that tags itself as its next state, so that you have an infinite loop. But if the object should fade after a period of time you need very many states in a row with the last one's next state set to 0.

And if I say very many, I mean HUNDREDS of!
I just tried to let the normal eggmissiles rotate a few times around him. I managed to let them do it 3 times and I used a fade in and fade out effect by giving the first and the last state 50% transparency.

Guess what, I needed 110 states!

So to create only one rotation you need 110/3 = ca. 37 states!!!

Even changing the object's speed doesn't do a single thing, because the duration of rotation always keeps the same so that it only defines the length of the radius.

Here is the testfile so that you can get an idea of what I mean... :-/
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4a1f7s

Hmm, would it be possible to just create a seperate object for the spikeballs to spin around, and then just have the object they're spinning around "die" after a few tics? Maybe that would work better...

But that object would need to use A_Capechase, which brings us back to square one.

As far as I know, it's impossible without either hundreds of states, or A_RemoteAction.

Edit: Oh, wait. Misread your post. That might work, except I'm pretty sure the spikeballs would move to the level center once the object vanishes.

Center? You mean the origin (0,0,0)? Well, that's not much of a problem. I'll just build the level away from it.