Battletech

[bobthedinosaur]

well if thats the case, why not help out gmn. his game seems to be similar to what you are talking about.

[Moe479]

i have some questions:

are destructable parts already included in spring-engine (for example just destroying the left leg of a k-bot/mech or the right trak of a tank) ?

the emp/stunn could be used for heat, can weapons project emp to the unit firering them?

can u set the ai of a unit that i stops firering when emp reaches a critical level?

can u dice for events like ammo-explosion, reactor breach or pilot blackout when emp(heat) goes beyond the critical level?

can u make units keeping a specified distance to thier targets (in mechcommander_1_ this was a quite usefull feature, why closing in or keeping more distance when u got most firepower at a specific range u just need to hold)?

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sugesstions:

make 3025 first, the 5 great houses, dont care for omnimechs and clans until u know how that can be accomplished in a way that dont screw up gameplay (uber configs vs stock).

keep the classic stats, designs and artwork original ... bt-fans like me dont care about stylish mechdesigns (the arent made to win beauty contests) or wear super weapons like the uber-rotary-plasmapulse-rail-cannon ... please just ugly machines of destruction, thats fairly enough.

no poduction, just let the player drop units instantly until its assigned battlevalue (eg. 5000m) runs out.

[zwzsg]

can u make units keeping a specified distance to thier targets

Not really, at least I don't see an easy way for that.

are destructable parts already included in spring-engine (for example just destroying the left leg of a k-bot/mech or the right trak of a tank) ?

Graphically, it's easy to represent: just use the two script command to hide and explode pieces. The gameplay effect of disabling the ability of the blown piece depends on what ability, but most of the time it's doable. Not firing a weapon is easy, halving the firerate of a weapon with two emit points is more fiddly, changing the max speed is easy, so is disabling cloak, radar, stealth... Of course most of it is non-standard script, so it's easy only as long as you understand how to write unit animation.

Finding out which part of your unit got his is doable, but afaik only me and maybe FLOZi have ever done it, even though it's just atan'ing the HitByWeapon arguments. You'll soon find it's not very precise though, unless you've huge units and slow weapons.

Targetting specific part of a unit is not very possible. Maybe one could rewrite the whole targetting system in Lua, or make mech composed of several units, or other hacks, but they'd take lots of work, lots of debugging, and have ton of side-effects that'll take years to iron out. So in practice, not possible.

the emp/stunn could be used for heat, can weapons project emp to the unit firering them?

What? Do you mean can unit be paralysed with their own weapon? I think yes with the proper weapon TDF tags. But anyway you should use Lua Lua Lua Lua gadget Lua instead of making the unit firing a weapon on itself.

can u set the ai of a unit that i stops firering when emp reaches a critical level?

Easy to do, both in gadget and in unit animation. If EMP is just standard paralysis weapon, then it's done by engine. If you want your custom EMP, you'll need your custom code to keep track of EMP and call whatever custom function you want when it reaches whatever level you want. Not hard, but again, you need to know how to code basic stuff.

can u dice

Yes, there is a math.random(6) in Lua, and a Rand(1,6) in BOS.

events like ammo-explosion, reactor breach or pilot blackout when emp(heat) goes beyond the critical level?

Spring is not MechCommander engine, so it doesn't have events such as those hard coded. You will first to think about how you want to represent them in term of gameplay, graphic, etc... then how to implement them, then write the code yourself. Maybe it will just be three lines of code, but you'll still have to write them yourself, in a gadget or animation script. Spring is generic RTS engine, that started of by using the content of TA. Spring units don't have heat levels, don't have nuclear leak, don't have pilot, don't have ammo. At least not by default

So first ask yourself: Pilot passing out: How do you translate that into game terms: Do you make the whole screen goes black but otherwise everything function as normal? Do you make the unit stop moving and stop firing for 5 seconds? Do you make the unit carry on current order but not accept new order? Do you just tilt the pilot head (assuming you have a tiny pilot modelled and ringed in every mech)?

Then same question for the other events. Ask yourself what kind of impact and representation it has ingame, then find a compromise between what you want to do and what can realistically be done, then code it.

[Moe479]

thx for the information, i was expecting that sping dont have what it takes in evry aspect, but its good to know where u need to work.

the section of a mech in bt contain equipment so if the section gets destroied the equipment like weapons but also heatsinks need to get rendered the same, means the heat dispersion of a mech is suffering if a heatsink was at the section.

this means a mech can build up more heat than it it can compensate per turn, even if its not overusing its weapons or moving what generates heat too.

my ideer was to use the stasis lvl to represent heat, but a simple shutdown (unit is stunned for until the stasis bar is gone) isnt enough, in bt a high heat lvl can have varios side effects, like slower movement, reactor leaks (means the mech is generatng even more heat in future turns), pilot backout through heat, means the unit inst do anything until its pilot recover (dice), shutdown (means the mech is in stasis until the heat level reaches a non critical point, but not that the stasis bar is 0/gone) to a reactor breach what means the mech gets destructed instantly in a fancy atomar explosion that damage nearby units.

[Pxtl]

Yes, you could implement all that stuff (well, some of the more obscure status-effects like losing pilot skill would be tricky)... but you'd have to do it all in Lua script, which means coding the logic yourslef of tracking how many heatsinks are in each body-part, how each heat-sink dissipates heat once per slow-update, and the various status-effects caused by high heat.

Using the existing EMP system probably would be a waste of time.

[zwzsg]

but you'd have to do it all in Lua script

You could do it all in BOS/COB script >_>

[bobthedinosaur]

arch angle made a heat an ammunition lua system, so units would over heat, run out of ammo, can get refills. so if any one is interested just ask. yeah you wouldnt want to have an emp weapon for heat, but the current heat system cant take heat damage via weapons, but im sure it could be added to the system.

[Pressure Line]

but you'd have to do it all in Lua script

You could do it all in BOS/COB script >_>

Yup (bos/cob), with a modified version of the healthbars widget to show the current heat level.