Yet another doomed fantasy mod?

[JohannesH]

BA player-base is made up of 12 year veterans from the days of TA

Nah it isnt, very few people have played TA competitively from the beginning and then switched to here. And those are not the best players anyway (and BA balance is quite different from TA). There arent really many good players here, and its very possible to take games off those top players with just a few months of experience.

[wilbefast]

Yeah, probably exaggerating a little as I've never lost embarrassingly badly, and even when I'm not familiar with the mod I can figure out how to play fairly quickly. But "just losing" doesn't get you stripes either. I suppose I just need to play more.

In other news, I have a small problem:



I couldn't figure out what the cause was, until I found this line in my weapondef:

Code: Select all

ClusterFuck = true,

Seriously though - these guys have real trouble targeting things that get too close to them, so you end up with situations like this where 3 bot-players worth of trojans surround one enemy but won't attack it because the ones on the inside are too close together.

Is there any way of setting a minimum range for weapons?

[maackey]

I can't imagine that making a minimum range for units would solve anything. Instead, try making their footprint larger, so they cannot be so tightly packed. the footprint should always be at least the same size as the hitsphere/box, so they don't overlap like I imagine they are doing now. Units wont fire through eachother unless avoidallies=false, or something like that.

[smoth]

if a firepoint crosses into another unit's hitsphere the unit cannot fire at it's target. yeah it is gay I know.

[Argh]

Only if avoidFriendly==true, IIRC.

[wilbefast]

They don't avoid allies - I had that turned on at first but the problem is a hundred times worse when it's on. Trouble is they have a habit of constantly killing their allies - is there a way of making their shots go through allies without stopping or damaging them?

I did some tests and realised that they won't fire at anything that's too close to them. In many RTSs units automatically move back if they're unable to fire but for the moment my trojans just sit there staring at eachother: the AimWeapon1 script isn't even being called. I'm thinking that that might have something to do with MaxAngleDif because they're tall enough that units close to them require them to pitch their fists down an awful lot. Then again that may just be for the angle around y (heading), not the one around z (pitch). Tolerance is absurdly high so I don't think it's causing the problem. I'll try making the footprint bigger, that may provide a quick fix - thanks for all the suggestions

edit: yeah, MaxAngleDif solves the problem... sortof. If I set it super high they can attack just in front of them but also behind them without turning around
110's about as high as I can go, and that still leaves a small blind-spot.



The angle of the fist is always math.rad(90) or else they punch each other's feet which looks a little strange. I've been fiddling around, turning on and off things like TargetBorder and cylinderTargetting without a great deal of success: only problem so far is the impact effects are drawn at ground level, not where the fists are actually going, not to mention the angle problem

[smoth]

Only if avoidFriendly==true, IIRC.

Hmm I will have to try it but IIRC it didn't work with enemy spheres(I am half awake so I cannot try it right now)

[Pressure Line]

try adding some -y into the weaponmaindir1 vector

[Argh]

They don't avoid allies - I had that turned on at first but the problem is a hundred times worse when it's on. Trouble is they have a habit of constantly killing their allies - is there a way of making their shots go through allies without stopping or damaging them?

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collideFriendly=0;

Plus using a Gadget to intercept damage from friendly HTH, so that you can actually use area effects big enough for most purposes, etc.

As for aiming stuffs... Unless they are super-giant vs. everything that isn't super-giant, you don't need to worry about correct angles. Just set up a twist-torso animation to the correct heading, then trigger the swinging animations at the time you're actually opening fire. Don't use the fists for actual shooting. Use the chest, and use an invisible beam weapon. Don't stress a lot about correct angle in the X at all- while you may want a little bit of tilt to make it look good, it's nowhere near as important as with, say, a flak gun- this guy's engaging ground targets that are literally point-blank, it doesn't need to be all that perfect. The fists swinging, etc. is just for show- it doesn't have to have anything to do with what's actually happening to be totally effective.

Lastly, in general about guys with forward arc'd weapons: they ignore stuff outside their arc unless they're on Roam. And I generally use 120 degrees, 0 0 1, and it's OK unless it's super-tall and something gets directly underfoot. Really has to be fricking huge, though. Don't use Tolerance- that will screw up the aim-the-chest behaviors and lead to weird behavior. Either raise the arc, or do like PL said, give it maybe -0.1 to -0.2 in the Y.

[wilbefast]

I've been trying to implement all these suggestions and they've been gradually improving the behavior, little by little
I set WeaponMainDir to (0 1 1) this morning and apparently I can now target enemies right up underneath the Trojan. Your "-0.2" worries me though - wonder if there are any side effect.

For the record, the aim animation works as follows:
- Straighten and raise arms to horizontal* (x axis)
- Turn arms to face target (y axis)

and the fire animation is:
- Extend fists outwards towards target (z axis) (exactly like the "Worm" from Kernel Panic) **
- Draw fists back into aim stance (z axis)

*NB: I'd rather the fists point and the center of the enemy being targeted, but for now they only ever seem target the feet. Maybe I'll offset pitch by about 60 degrees and see what happens

**NB (bis): I'm not going lower than 100 for range to avoid too many of the aforementioned C.F. situations: all the melee units will have some sort of sting/tongue/appendage that they extend to attack. Going to do some stress tests later on tonight

I'm using the simple Laser weapon as a base rather than Melee or whatever it's called. If I need to debug I set the thickness to something visible by mostly you only see the impact effect, which times well with the animation (I'm actually thinking of coding the animation speed to be a k * the unit's weapon1 velocity) so that damage and impact effects synchronise with the actual extend-o-fist-ification.
I'd rather get the impact in the right place from the beginning because later on I do want to actually draw explosion and such in the right place at the right time. Explosion are very important!
Of course, I could just do what maackey's done and use the shootee (HitByWeapon I think - see Chickens) rather than the shooter when it comes to melee attack. It's great working in tandem like this, because as Car and maackey's assets get more complex so does my understanding of how they work

[maackey]

if you haven't recently looked at the berserker.lua file, I would strongly urge you to do so. I fixed a lot of problems you mentioned (the damaging of allied units is intentional; after all, he is swinging a huge sword around) and the animation file forces the damage and animation to synchronize, independent of the laser speed or reload time.

To reiterate what Argh said: it really is better to have the aim point be a centralized location (my units happen to be the head -- the torso or pelvis is just as good though) lots of complications can arise if you put the aimpoints of the weapons on the extremities.

I use blood on the units when they get hit because mundane weapons don't have any effects -- swords don't cause catapults or buildings to shoot blood. You can add special effects to weapons, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you want that effect to be shown on every unit it hits.

[wilbefast]

@maackey - I'll take another look, mostly I try to work things out myself and turn to your stuff as a cheat sheet

Btw: thinking of changing the object's hierarchy a little - at the moment the root is the torso, and the leaves are the fists, feet, head and tail. Trouble is I have to do a lot of corrections since the torso moves everything else (the breath animation is about 60% corrections). Also it means I can't aim from the torso as Argh suggested but rather have to use the head.
I think a better idea would be to use an empty root called "all" or something - that's what I did with the cube and it worked out pretty well.

Speaking of animation, is there a quick code for resetting ALL pieces to their default angle/position around/on every axis at a given speed? My "restore" script is rather bloated (15 pieces with 6 degrees of liberty = 90 lines of code)

edit: should cylinderTargetting help? It doesn't really seem to do an awful lot

edit2: by "stress tests" I mean spectating games with bots on +10 speed and seeing whether they get stuck at all, and how the games played out. Thanks to the "no friendly fire" option large armies, which previously had a short lifespan due to their tendency to kill eachother, will actually smash their way through the enemy base - the game is much more decisive unless... this happens:



Not as bad a case this time around, and involving a much shorter unit. I'll give it a bigger footprint and see if that helps. All in all though, more tweaking will be needed

[CarRepairer]

All told I've played pretty much every RTS of note released in the last decade so my understanding of tactics and strategy is shallow but broad, for better or worse.

I wasn't questioning your understanding of RTS. I was suggesting you play Spring to better understand Spring. It would help you immensely for your modding if you could see the way units interact in real multiplayer games and then take a look at mod sources of games you actually played. I see that you're playing s44 now so that's good.

[Pxtl]

cylinderTargetting refers to firing range - that is, the range only considers the horizontal axes when determining if the weapon can reach the target - the vertical axis is ignored.

Default targetting for most weapons is spherical (that is, the range considers all 3 axes), or cone/sphere hybrid (spherical when shooting at a target above you, but when firing at a target below you, your firing range increases the further below you it is.

[wilbefast]

I wasn't questioning your understanding of RTS. I was suggesting you play Spring to better understand Spring. It would help you immensely for your modding if you could see the way units interact in real multiplayer games and then take a look at mod sources of games you actually played. I see that you're playing s44 now so that's good.

I wasn't questioning your suggestion either I agree with you, I should be playing more. But people do make assumptions about you when you're on one stripe, and I don't really think that's fair. Your point is perfectly valid though.
In a perfect world I wouldn't spend 90% of my time attending lectures, doing course-work, buying groceries, cooking, cleaning, tutoring English, eating and sleeping. I'm not including sport either, but in a perfect world I'd still do sport - sport is good

@Pxtl: gotcha - I'm having a problem with them climbing onto cliffs and trying to hit units below them: I think Cylinder Targeting would probably make this worse, not better:


Might make the laser visible again and see where these guys are actually shooting, because they're not doing any damage, and of course the fists and shooting out horizontally because I haven't worked out the k for may pitch*k yet.
Other than that it seems to be working pretty nicely, with no more units getting stuck (now that the footprints are bigger) not much strategy involved of course, except the build order and reclamation, and unfortunately mobile units can't extract metal (they become immobile if the tag is added). Still, it's not the finished game so what are we worrying about?

edit: Dang - I thought that wind generation rates were based on height by default, but that's just CA I played a lot of CA to begin with so took the overdrives and wind generation for granted: I'm realising that they're actually rather nifty feature.
I was looking for a simple way of making my mini-game more interesting (generation based on height => move cube to the high ground, protect with trojans and fuglies) so it's more fun to work on as I add more and more stuff to it. Board control is a very key part of any strategy, and at the moment all you do is spam units at each-other

[Argh]

I think Cylinder Targeting would probably make this worse, not better

Absolutely yes. About the only good use for that that I've found is v-launch stuff.

[Pxtl]

I think Cylinder Targeting would probably make this worse, not better

Absolutely yes. About the only good use for that that I've found is v-launch stuff.

CA uses it for anti-air weaponry. Works fine there. The problem is that firing over ledges with direct line-of-site weapons is damned tricky, and cylindrical targetting encourages that behavior.

[wilbefast]

Pxtl: is this cone/sphere hybrid the default? If so can I change it to a sphere only - might help with the attempts to use melee attacks off the sides of cliffs.

[Pressure Line]

unfortunately mobile units can't extract metal

Not entirely true.

[wilbefast]

oops - didn't realise that was a link. I'll have a read of it

edit: awesome, this is exactly how I was planning on doing extraction
Totally using this - may I?