Don't forget to congratulate Rampage and Wotan. It's them who made that awesome model.
I'll try to give it a constantly firing weapon with the firing point moving from feet tip to feet tip. Currently the stomping effect is just scripted, it absorbs units near its feet and show an explosion.
The unit has been uploaded, as an attachemnt to some TAU posts, just follow the tinyurl. However it's not finished yet, it's still a work-in-progress. Plus I had to change a few things for Spring. And yet I haven't Springified it completly. For instance I wanted to replace the pseudo beam made with a custom shot model with spring beamweapon=1, but it seems that beamweapon laser don't use the thickness and intensity tags, and anyway the intensity tag is limited and 2/3 of the shot always remain transparent.
I can only think of it as a Core unit:
- By tradition it's always only Core who's got to play with the big toys. The Krogoth, Sumo, Goliath, are all core units.
- The texturing style is Core.
- Like Gnome says, the twinned individuals concept is so reminiscent of the mind patterning that we can't help but think that the Cybran are the Core-like faction of SupCom. Even the agressive and inhuman looks of their units reminds me of Core.
The only argument to make it an arm unit would be the briefing of the third arm mission, where it says that all terrain six legged units are an Arm specific technology. But later in the campaign Core get the six legged roachs, so!
Yes it's possible to read the ground height and the slope from a script. Yes I've done it already, like
on that old AT-AT. I've even made
a unit that read the ground height below another unit. The problem is not knowing what the slope is, it's knowing how to turn the legs articulation so the feet just touch the surface.
Some time ago I've been thinking about taking my
tracking slug script, multiply it by six and mounting it on each leg, and then give them the consign to keep tracking a given fixed point while the body they are attached to move. And to perform the leg coming back and choose a new fixed point to track when it's no longer possible to reach the current point. But there's a few problem. First, I can't just retract some segment to give the leg the appropriate length like I did for the slug. The leg only has cylindrical joints, with fixed lenght between them. Maybe I could write the inverse kinematic model on paper, but coding it in the limited unit script language won't be easy. I mean, I can't even use cos and sin and root in scripts! Also, if the body tilt, the transformation between the local coordinates system and the global one becomes over-complex.
And then, if each leg run its own track-a-fixed-point script, there's also the problem of making sure legs don't loose their synchronisation, it would look odd if after a while you start to see it lifting all the legs of the same side at once because legs movement became independ of each other. And I also have to make sure legs never collide. Already, with the current predefined metronomically precise walk script legs nearly hit each others. If each leg is allowed to choose how to turn by itself, how could I prevent leg collision?
So I'm not sure it's a good idea to start scripting such a complain and uncertain script.
Maybe I could just script so they turn up and down to follow ground surface, but otherwise keep following the predefined walk animation and still slide along the surface? Still, I'm afraid of the complexity added by the body tilting.