Spring RTS Engine

Mmmm...Doodads, as I call em, are FUN!

I tried to make a mod based around vehicles that transport 'weapon block', imaginitively names Blox, but there were a few issues, so i didnt bother continuing with it.

But a shelf on wheels... Only Dragon could have thought up something like that...

I just don't get how this is any different from, oh, building a Krogoth, or a bunch of aircraft, Dragon.

From a game-designer's perspective, all you're doing with this design is adding a lot of complexity and lag, when all you really need is properly-balanced firepower. The thing is that Spring's "balance of power" between offense and defense, that certain modders have been complaining about, is essentially a chimera that they created when they became very attached to the game-balance of their mod in OTA. It's not that this is stupid or evil (lol, they shall smite me and call me biased again, but really, that's not how I feel about it)... but it is fact.

Look... in any of the OTA-based mods... guess what? If the mod designers want attackers to defeat defenders on whatever loss ratios they want... um, they just have to design balance that way. What's "fair" is entirely in the eyes of the designer- it's a fundamental choice, right up there with, "I want my Faction to have an Energy-heavy economy", etc.

In NanoBlobs... I have exactly one static defensive structure, the Holder. It's been pretty consistantly mediocre, but worth enough to build a few on chokepoints, or to hold critical zones, but it's not a Bert or Tim- you can't use one as an offensive, game-winning weapon. Nor is it an Anni or MRPC (er, at least the good ol' OTA ones), where you can make whole areas of the map effectively uncrossable by land units... including the OTA-stat Kroggie.

In short, I think that you're confusing a game-design choice with a real problem with the game engine.

Moreover, you're not really looking at this transport's weaknesses properly. For example, how many hitpoints does it have? Because when it dies, so do the units!

"Oh, but we can make it tough enough that it's worth it, but make it cost a lot".

My answer to that is... "um, no, because however tough you make it, Air or a Nuke will pwn it, and if it's tougher than that, then it's not even slightly balanced, no matter what it costs".

"Oh, we can make it mediocre, so that it's maybe 2X the average hitpoints of the units it carries, and pretty fast".

"Um, then I'd just build one of them and whatever was the optimal number of shooty things, and I'd have, effectively, a Super-Unit at a cheap price."

... etc.

And it'd have units shooting through its sides all the time, because their arcs can't be limited.

And making the load/unload animations and state stuff for it would be... erm... painful.

And the hitsphere of the Transport is the only hitsphere that gets used. You cannot kill transported units, short of killing the transport.

And... no... sorry, while I'm crazy enough to think that a rolling File-Drawers of Doom is a fun idea... I just don't think it's a very practical one.

is there a way to jump in (in the cob) before the transport unit dies and instantly unload all the stuff it's carrying before it cops it?
specifically are the units it carries already destroyed by the time the killed func is called?

Can the script initiate an unload command? I thought it can only tell the unit how to deal with such a command but not issue it.

Can the script initiate an unload command? I thought it can only tell the unit how to deal with such a command but not issue it.

Unit loading/unloading is done via script attach peice commands or something, so it should be possible. I think there was even an OTA unit that did exactly that, although ive never seen it. So i think its possible, but im not sure.

I'm not sure it's possible with air transports, at least right now, since they don't seem to use the same functions to pick stuff up as far as I can tell... so they never get passed the unit IDs.

With other transports, you can store the unit ids in static vars, keep a function running that monitors health, and if health is less than a given value then run a for loop to drop them all.

I'd love for Argh to prove me wrong here, though--I really want to make the air transports in SWTA drop all units in one go when an unload command is issued :)

Argh wrote:I just don't get how this is any different from, oh, building a Krogoth, or a bunch of aircraft, Dragon.

From a game-designer's perspective, all you're doing with this design is adding a lot of complexity and lag, when all you really need is properly-balanced firepower. The thing is that Spring's "balance of power" between offense and defense, that certain modders have been complaining about, is essentially a chimera that they created when they became very attached to the game-balance of their mod in OTA. It's not that this is stupid or evil (lol, they shall smite me and call me biased again, but really, that's not how I feel about it)... but it is fact.

Look... in any of the OTA-based mods... guess what? If the mod designers want attackers to defeat defenders on whatever loss ratios they want... um, they just have to design balance that way. What's "fair" is entirely in the eyes of the designer- it's a fundamental choice, right up there with, "I want my Faction to have an Energy-heavy economy", etc.

In NanoBlobs... I have exactly one static defensive structure, the Holder. It's been pretty consistantly mediocre, but worth enough to build a few on chokepoints, or to hold critical zones, but it's not a Bert or Tim- you can't use one as an offensive, game-winning weapon. Nor is it an Anni or MRPC (er, at least the good ol' OTA ones), where you can make whole areas of the map effectively uncrossable by land units... including the OTA-stat Kroggie.

In short, I think that you're confusing a game-design choice with a real problem with the game engine.

Moreover, you're not really looking at this transport's weaknesses properly. For example, how many hitpoints does it have? Because when it dies, so do the units!

"Oh, but we can make it tough enough that it's worth it, but make it cost a lot".

My answer to that is... "um, no, because however tough you make it, Air or a Nuke will pwn it, and if it's tougher than that, then it's not even slightly balanced, no matter what it costs".

"Oh, we can make it mediocre, so that it's maybe 2X the average hitpoints of the units it carries, and pretty fast".

"Um, then I'd just build one of them and whatever was the optimal number of shooty things, and I'd have, effectively, a Super-Unit at a cheap price."

... etc.

And it'd have units shooting through its sides all the time, because their arcs can't be limited.

And making the load/unload animations and state stuff for it would be... erm... painful.

And the hitsphere of the Transport is the only hitsphere that gets used. You cannot kill transported units, short of killing the transport.

And... no... sorry, while I'm crazy enough to think that a rolling File-Drawers of Doom is a fun idea... I just don't think it's a very practical one.

Thank you. Not for disproving my idea, but for being constructive. Much <3.



Oh, and <3 to Maelstorm too, for his comment >_>

I'm currently working on making transports better, faster up/down speeds + new unload methods such as paratroop style drops. So i could add making units drop off and fall when the transport dies an extra tag so its easier to for modders to add in. I could even add in fall damage. Although for transports like the dragon fly i'm not sure it would look right with 15 or so units dropping all at once in the exact same place. Do you think I should add in a survival % rate or min damage done to units within a destroyed transport?

So i'm not derailing this too much, would bunkers or something similar to apcs not be a more viable option? units would be forced into fixed positions from which they could fire without obstructing each other - firing out through slots in armour.

aaaaaw as such a crazy and loveable idea i was hoping to have it included in nanoblobs as it will be unlikely to find a home anywhere else (:'<)

We should have a new mod, we could call it office wars, staplers and pencils could be your level 1 standard 'tanks' - firing paper clips, staples and led at each other, the you advance onto desks and filing cabinets for the huge 'uber' units - these of course can carry lots of smaller 'tanks' as well as having extra weps on top...
Paper airplanes would be your aircraft obviously and....


Have i taken this too far?

Keep going. That sounds amusingly brilliant

The super unit would be Clippy, he could be so annoying all nearby enemies simply self destruct to avoid him...

why are we still talking about this???

shelves ... lol...

guess it was good fun tho..

Well, I think it could be balanced.

Just think of it as a super unit with a set hp but customisable weapons, and make it more expensive for its value than the other super units.

Then you would be paying more for customizability and for the ability to use your now outdated level 1 units and level 1 factory. And it would be worth it in some cases (such as when you know exactly what you will be fighting) but not all (such as when you think that one of the current super units would be good against what you are fighting, and better for its cost than the shelf-unit combo)

a better loading-system it could also be usefull for this deathmatch mod with the mechs: you "buy" weaponsupgrades (unmobile, very low hp units) and "load" them onto your battlemech...
you can drop some small weapons to make place for a bigger,better weapon etc.
(atm you can't unload a specific single unit as in starcraft, can you?)

I recently uploaded Blox 2 and 3 that have cracked your problem:

Blox 2: http://www.unknown-files.net/index.php? ... &dlid=2143

Blox 3: http://www.unknown-files.net/index.php? ... &dlid=2144

nice necro ^_^

EXit_W0und wrote:We should have a new mod, we could call it office wars, staplers and pencils could be your level 1 standard 'tanks' - firing paper clips, staples and led at each other, the you advance onto desks and filing cabinets for the huge 'uber' units - these of course can carry lots of smaller 'tanks' as well as having extra weps on top...
Paper airplanes would be your aircraft obviously and....


Have i taken this too far?

So basically Id be looking at gigantic shelves with laser beams coming out..