Spring RTS Engine

Don't know if this applies to you at all gnome, but I noticed with AA that if you have a targetmoveerror any higher than about 0.3, this can cause weapons not to fire when they ought to, on the odd occasion.

...I think a gungan would be a good counter to droids if it could be made

http://rapidshare.de/files/9187807/badgungan.zip.html
that was a gungan...
the only thing i like is the swimming script but actually I hate that unit...
(unless someone create a new energy shield feature in Spring)

Yeah, didn't use that tag at all.

Here are the changes I have scheduled:

- Thanks to Arch's suggestion, we can make fighters much much more efficient. By making the lasers turret=1 (and giving them aim scripts), they can actually hit targets with lasers now. I think that's definitely something we want, since otherwise fighters are nearly useless right now.

- We're probably going to tone down the adv bombers' (Scimitar and K-Wing) armor a bit, but keep their power and costs the same. That should help make it more possible to defend against them, but they'll still be quite strong.

- Going to go ahead and give the Commando the sniper rifle, should make him a bit more interesting

- I think I'm going to mess with the sandbags a little, and make them more durable so they absorb more fire/can't be walked through so easily. Infantry can just filter between the bags, and walkers just bulldoze through them. I'm not actually sure how effective they are in Spring since everything aims for the center instead of the feet now...

- Increase Atgar's size vertically a bit to resolve sandbag issues

- I think perhaps we should make the TUGs and CUVs (the aircraft con units) require some energy to remain operational, maybe 25-50e a piece. Alternatively, increase their buildtime, and take away/severely cripple the resource production abilities they have. This is to try to discourage massing them as much as people seem to be hellbent on doing in every gametype of spring...

- Return of the LAAT/c for heavy vehicle transport.

- Droid captain uniquization, with texturing and probably a different gun

- Increase altitude of LAAT, V-Wing, and especially the Cloud car and Airspeeder

- Fix misc bugs like the few textures I missed (I swear to god that fucking onoff texture will be the death of me... Spring requires them all to be there but doesn't even animate the fucker!) and other little things of that nature.

Interesting about the line of fire thing, i'll keep an eye out for that next time ^_^

Let me say this: If you're imp and he's reb and it's a small-medium map, Imp has a guarunteed win with the droid rush. I'ev played about a dozen games against several people, many of them very good, and I've beaten every single one of them with a droid rush. I've even won in some 2v1s, me alone versus two rebs. I'm not really a fantastic player, so I think that balance is the issue



The droid's only weakness- that they need lots of energy to sustain an army- is not really a weakness, because even if you have 0 energy, the droids still move and fire. Yes, your expansion is hampered, but it doesn't matter because by that point there's enough droids to demolish the enemy.

As realistic/star-warsy zwzsg's suggestion of killing the lab means dactivating the droids, it wouldnt be good for gameplay. Instead, why not just have droids rendered immobile if there's not enough energy to sustain them (is that possible?).

If that doesn't work, then maybe zwzsg's suggstoin would be best- but only if the droids energy drain were removed. Having all droids immoblized if the lab is destroyed, AND having big energy drain, would be unbalanced.


Edit: *waves to Gnome *


Few more nitpicks:

1) The infantry walk animations are jerky (well oin the droids anyway)

2) Commanders desperately need to be remodeled


Not a nitpick: People need to contribute to SWTA's Strategy bit so that people stop complaining about how much the mod sucks

ehm... actually the atgar laser battery is a light laser defence; in "reality" it's an anti vehicle so it's a long ranged heavy laser and probably the golan an anti infantry turret

ps. this is really interesting for their models (battlefield mod)
http://www.swrebellion.com/forums/postx3024-0-0.html
and First Strike forum http://bf2firststrike.proboards33.com/index.cgi

Gnome wrote:- Thanks to Arch's suggestion, we can make fighters much much more efficient. By making the lasers turret=1 (and giving them aim scripts), they can actually hit targets with lasers now. I think that's definitely something we want, since otherwise fighters are nearly useless right now.

I hope these still make fighter dogfight, having to align target to fire, and often missing. It wouldn't be starwarsy to have fighter fire laser 360° without ever missing.

Return of the LAAT/c for heavy vehicle transport.

IMO you should use a totally different model, such as a Sentinel-class imperial landing craft. Doesn't seem good to have two variants of the same vehicle when there's so many Star War vehicles to choose from.

Dragon45

You could make droids effectively harmless when energy is depleted by having their weapons require some trivial amount of energy to fire. Not enough to make a firefight really kill your supply, but enough to make droids useless when energy is depleted. They'd still be mobile, but unarmed. Would that be enough?

I think they are neat...but they get annoying when overused (=
Could the aircraft (especially fighters) have lower gravity using the new FBI spring tags?

I hope these still make fighter dogfight, having to align target to fire, and often missing. It wouldn't be starwarsy to have fighter fire laser 360° without ever missing.

Well, in Star Wars the lasers are slightly turreted anyway, for the setting of the laser's convergence distance. On the 360° thing, thats what those maxangle tags are for.

I noticed a few problems with sounds in SWTA. First, Spring don't seem to read unit sounds other than first. Most of your custom soundsets have several variants of one action sound (select1, select2, select3, etc.), but only the first is used.
Second, Imperial Droid soundset has these lines: The file impbdroid_select1 is missing (but other 2 are present), so, in combination with first mentioned problem, units using this soundset don't have any selection sound at all.
I'm not sure if this is the only missing sound, haven't tested Rebels at all.
I hope that info was useful for something other than wasting time reading it :)

I did know about the multiple sound thing not working in Spring, but decided to leave it in case they do in the future. We must have deleted that one sound on accident in our cleanup process when we removed the sounds that weren't used anywhere. Thanks for the notification, it will be fixed.

I noticed one more case of missing sounds. Rebel Fleet Trooper has this line in FBI: But REBTROOPER soundset is missing from sound.tdf. Rebel's Mobile Medium-Repeater Blaster soldier and Bothan Spy also use this soundset (and so are silent, good for the spy, but strange for the trooper). Sound files with names rebtrooper_* are part of REBRKT soundset and are used by Rebel Missile Trooper, but not the basic trooper.
And one not sound-related thing. Rebel Mobile Torpedo Launcher vehicle has a large black rectangle under its tracks. This is not noticeable when its on level ground (the rectangle is below ground level), but is easy to spot when the vehicle is going down- or uphill or crossing a bit of deformed terrain.
Hope that helps in making SWTA perfect :)

Alright, thanks.

We knew about the Mptl doing that, but I honestly can't figure out why. All the other units that did it followed a very specific pattern, and were easy to fix... the Mptl doesn't though, and it has no faces that appear out of place, so I have no idea how to fix it. I'll investigate it again, but I don't know if there's a way to fix it.

I looked at the Mobile Torpedo Launcher model in 3do Builder and found this extra face there. It's clearly visible if you remove the groundplate face from the base object (preferably in Shaded view mode, I'm not sure if it has any texture), but it's facing down and so shouldn't be visible in most cases. It don't seem to be needed there, so maybe it can just be removed?

Ahhh, there are two groundplates indeed! That's why I didn't spot it, it looked like a part of the model at first... Thanks again! *scratches a bug off the list*

Once again I discovered a missing sound. This time it's the Rebel Barracks. It has this line in FBI: This should probably mean Imperial Barracks soundset. But Imperial Barracks itself has this: And sound.tdf has this: As a result, Imperial Barracks has a soundset and Rebel Barracks don't.