Spring RTS Engine

Sorry to double post, but...



The Overmind ubermech. Armed only with a beam cannon under it's single eye and some guided rocket pods on the shoulders, is it nevertheless feared by Resistance forces everywhere, for one reason and one reason only: the raw power of the thing in melee combat.

It has no melee weapon. It doesn't need one.

It just smashes units apart with it's bear hands, picks them up and tosses them over mountains or simply crushes them underfoot like treading on snails.

The Resistance's only respite is the fact that, due to weight limitations on things that size, adding armour would probably cause it to collapse under it's own weight, forcing the designers to leave the inner mechanics somewhat exposed. Whilst this does give it a chillingly skeletal appearance, it also means it's not invulnerable: put enough firepower into it, and it will go down.

God help you if it's got support units though.

Technical notes: It's fully articulated. The crotch and shoulders both rotate around their points on the spine, giving it a quite human gait when walking (or at least that's the idea). The 'boxes' on the shoulders are the rocket launchers, mainly there for anti-air purposes. Have fun! Oh, and also really, really tall. Figure we might as well make use of the non-spherical hitboxes...



The Battery Replacement Helicopter for the Mobile Positron Siege Cannon Walker. Flies in, inserts battery, flies off, pure and simple. It's by far the easiest way to reload the Siege Cannons, and certainly the only way to do it in the field outside of a specialized hanger, but the Helicopter can still be shot down. The pilots for these 'copters are well known for their expertise in evasive maneuvers and ECMs, but the death rate among them is still notoriously high as they make prime targets for anything and everything that can shoot at them, preventing the Siege Cannon from firing again. It's not uncommon for more than one Helicopter to be dispatched to reload a single Siege Cannon, in the hope that at least one will be able to get through.

Love the character of the ubermech; it's just dripping in it.

I will say that I think you can achieve the exact same result (character wise) with far less polygons though. To some extent the extra polygonal complexity is actually distracting from the really cool lithe proportions of the design.

I love the mini copter.

Any reason it has hands instead of wicked claws?

Because with hands, you can pick things up without destroying them? The idea is that it has no melee weapon because it doesn't need one: it can just pick units up and toss them long distances (transporting + LUA MoveCtrl I'd suggest, rather than transporting + impulse weapon) or just hammer/punch them repeatedly into the dirt, or even just rip them apart (though that would be hard to script).

Works for me.

Hmm. Getting a unit to transport like that would be... eh... painful.

Possible, yeah, but just getting the math right for the reaching motion would hurt. Maybe some MoveCtrl magic could move the unit to the hands, to help out.

But then you'd have massive clipping problems, with anything big- it'd be a lot worse than, say, the sync-kill stuff in DoW, which is invariably either human-size actors vs. human-size targets or giant actors vs human-size targets- there are clipping problems, but they're hard to see. Moreover, it'd require getting really, really close to the target, which introduces other problems. And then you'd have the alignment issues associated with attaching the unit, and other stuff.

Making King Kong, and not having it be visually flawed... certainly seems like it'd be very difficult to pull off. In DoW, they had it pretty easy, because of strict rules about what was allowed to sync-kill what. I don't think that would work here, given the game design. Watching him crush one guy in a Resistance squad, no matter how cool, would involve it having to do so 15 times

I think that the amount of time invested to get it really polished would be better spent on other things. Meh, it's not like adding a weapon would be that big of a deal though.

Im sure lua could do a much better job of it than cob.

Look at the aeon collosus in supreme commander. It has gravity things on its hands that suck up units from a distance into them and as soon as they touch the hands they explode

Feel free to pioneer the way to Lua unit scripts, AF.

Important words there are "suck up units", AF. Using some mechanic that caused it to fly towards the hands, sure. Not exactly painless, but certainly possible. But why bother with hands, if you can just levitate stuff?

Attach to the hands, for further animation, and make it all look like it's being done physically, though? Bit tricky, that.

For example, let's say it's picking up something that's perpendicular to its axis of motion. For simplicity's sake, it'd have to rotate said object at the same rate as other stuff (oh, and the rotation introduces, you guessed it, more massive clipping problems, unless it's hands are scaled so giant that one would wonder why it didn't just stomp stuff to death).

In that case, it's going to have to go through the animation more slowly, to arrive at the same destination, part-wise, as the object it's now "picking up". And you can't speed up / slow down COB animations with floats, which means I'd have to some sort of yucky transformation to integer values and send it to the COB raw...

The more I think about the problems involved, the less practical this feels, tbh. There are just too many issues that would screw up polish. You just can't insta-move large vehicles, like you can with infantry- it'd look obvious and fake. And non-insta-move involves far too much complexity.

If I wanted it to do this, spec would have been for something that looked like a giant junkyard crane with legs- far, far more practical in terms of implementation of this particular idea.

Meh, it's a cool model, and adding some giant weapon to it won't be a big deal, so that's what I'll do.

You should look at some of the stuff quantum and trepan did. CA had a gadget that allowed the commander to use an antigravity weapon where a unit would be catapulted up into the air and then fall receiving crash damage.

Could just make it generally swing its arms about and smash things, though... big low hooks and hammer fists for medium units, stomping for small units and maybe muay thai elbows or mid level crosses for big units - would it be a big deal to vary the attack animation according to target size?

Also, just in terms of the articulation, it looks like it might need some pivot at the shoulder joint to allow adduction/abduction of the upper arm.

Have it swing its hands in big, childish, clumsy wrecking arcs like a five year old in the mother of all tantrums, and impulse the crap out of everything within that sweep. Or smashing fists straight down, kicking up an explosion of "dirt" and debris. It wouldn't have to be very "perfect" to work.

I really think it would add immensely to the game to have a unit acting in a characterful and creepy way.

Though I can't really imagine them building a huge mech type unit and then making it's main weapon melee, just seems illogical.

So? Hopping bombs aren't logical. The bike-tank isn't very logical. Hell, the main battletank (which, I kid you not, can extend it's tracks on stilts to go faster) isn't very logical. The wheelie flame-thrower assault drone of doom isn't very logical. Very little of PURE is logical, but damn if it isn't cool.

If you want a technobabbly explanation, it's weight and power restrictions that prevent any further weapon systems being attached.

Well, I agree with the notion of 'to hell with it if it's cool' - we've taken this path plenty of times with IW. But I think coolness, just as all scifi (which is inherently cool ) needs to be firmly rooted in reality, and then twisted to create a new equally recogniseable, albeit deformed, reality. There's something ridiculous about making a huge robot for use in a world where ranged weapons permeate (most future worlds), and then have it incapable of lifting a weapon (though lifting tanks that can fire weapons seems fine... Perhaps it should pick up your units and then use them as weapons ).

Also, there's modelling to be done GMN! *whips*

Oh, right, hand-held weapons. I was thinking of weapons permanently attached to the arms or chassis

Warlord Zsinj wrote: (though lifting tanks that can fire weapons seems fine... Perhaps it should pick up your units and then use them as weapons ).

That would be ridiculously awesome.

I've got an idea, GMN. Give it a sledgehammer with a telescoping handle. The back end should look like a small rocket. Trust me, it'll be cool. I've been playing with some stuff, and I have some awesome ideas.

Oh, and I assume those shoulders can turn on both axes? If not, can you revise them? I can't see the pivot for rotation in the Z, and that's very important. Same with the wrists- they're going to need to be able to rotate in both Y and X to function right now, and they'd only be able to rotate in X, based on what I'm seeing.

Also, the Anti-Matter Laser Blimp is done. Ooh, did I not say that I was working on that? One of the crazier things DRB came up with, months and months ago...

The long lost hammer brother?!