Spring RTS Engine

EXit_W0und wrote:You mean while the krogoth or other unit is still moving?

While it's stationary. It jitters around like mad while the transport's flying.

I did a wee test, an noticed that transports jitter shortly after takeoff and just before landing (even if its not carrying a unit). But when a transport picks up a krogoth something else is more noticable - the krogoth is in the wrong place when the transport turns. Also it looks really wierd not banking with the aircraft banking - but i suspect thats to make it easier to land the unit again. Is that what you meant by not syncing?

Here's how I do it:
1. Find a safe route that goes behind enemy lines and wont be detected until it's too late.
2. Set kbot factories to start producing units.
3. Make shitloads of Atlas(50+) and set them on repeat. Then hold shift while telling them where to load/unload.
4. Optional, use lvl 2 kbot radar jammers (maybe 1 for every two other units) to make the attack difficult to detect and intercept.

This works very good when supplemented with decoy attack elsewhere and I've won many a game thanks to it(including beating several opponents alone with it cuz they weren't prepared for an attack behind their front).

I'd like to agree with the sentiment in this thread that there needs to be more ways available to mods to transport units by air.

Personally I'd just be happy if there was a quick way to get the single unit transports to do a fast formation landing - I've always wanted to send waves of them over the horizon and drop Bulldogs onto someone's naval perimeter.

I'd like more ways to adjust air transport behavior, say, the speed it goes up and down (Y) independent of any other variables. But for now I've made a few compromises that work out pretty good.

I still think the key here is, as many people have stated, the manner in which transports select landing locations...surely it wouldn't be *that* hard to change the code so that it places units in the closest available space rather than just picking a random point?

That in itself would vastly speed up drop-offs

another useful addition (but perhaps more coding-intensive) would be a 'load/unload-hoverheight' which would be the height at which the transport would fly whilst dropping units off (ie it would drop down to this height, perform any load/unload actions it has queued (moving up and down only to this lower height) and then go back up to cruise altitude for normal movement.

This would enable a modder to have a transport swoop down, drop off/pick up a bunch of units and then fly back up to cruising altitude afterwards, rather than going all the way up and down for each unit.

Thoughts?

Air units generally need to be altered to pick a fixed height above the highest terrain feature to fly at, and stick to it rather then following the landscape like they currently do. It's too much of an advantage to have a missile tower on a mountain and have it shoot down at an air unit as it tries to climb over the peak. It's also impossible to bomb such a thing.

with the transporting...

would it be possible to have the aircraft go down diagonally rather than straight down the y? just seems better to me... diagonally down and up...

and 2nd point, what about having the uni being transported able to fire (like in supcom)?

just 2 thoughts...

Transported units can already fire if the mod author decides to let them. Gundam allows that, for example.

Would a simpler/more effective solution be to have transports just dump units above ground, give the units immunity from damage for a second or so (maybe with some nifty glowing animation), and then let the push strength of units (sorry, forget the tag for the value) work the problem out? (as in, the units just shunt other units aside if there is no room)
If landing zones are designated as such, couldn't any units occupying them be given orders to get the hell out of the way of them, just like units will get out of the way of a construction?

I think combat drops would be far more effective if you allowed the ability for transports to dump their loads immediately, without significant slowing, too. Most transports in most mods are not big lumbering buckets of armour, but are expected in their respective universes to rely on their nimble nature to get them into and out of a hot zone. Currently, this isn't being reflected in Spring.

That would be very cool indeed. I would also suggest giving transports more armour.

One crucial thing would to make roaches non-transportable though. If you did that it'd get rid of all the potential balance nightmare that more effective transports would entail.

I still think the most important thing though is to change the unload position code from using a random point in the unload area to using the closest available point; this alone would mean that at least the units are dropped off in a line/block rather than all over the place, speeding things up quite a bit

only problem with air transports i see is having a load and an unload zone with repeat on and a bunch of transports, the thing is about only 3 of them transport at any given time not all; so if i move a swarm of units into the load area onyl 2-3 get transported at a time, the rest of the transports are idle.

AFAIK that's cos they get stuck on each other while waiting for units to enter the pickup zone - try putting a move order *after* the unload order (somewhere near the load area) - and make it an alt+move order so they space out and don't get stuck

alt+ move order? i couldn't follow your explanation soulless1

Don't see how they get stuck on eachother in the sense of landing in the load area and trying to pick eachother; they land all over the place and while i can see teh waypoints flicker as a sign they are cheking for targets everysecond or so they aren't picking any. Sometimes not even one caries the order. But ok i wil try to give them an move order so when they return they don't try to pick eachother(if thats the reason).

if you hold alt while you issue a move order to a group of units, it'll send each of them to a slightly different point (its the block formation move order) so that they don't get tangled up while waiting. Hopefully this should help...

However I had noticed now and then that transports just decide not to pick things up after a while, so you're probably right about there being something bugged as well...

Meh i can't even start a transporting cycle unless there is at least 1 unit in the load location.

try turning repeat on before you issue the orders

i was doing that its just bugged, sometime a transporter began doing an erratic aerial dance with a bulldog, was so funny

Then try again. I've never had any troubles with pre assigned airdrops...