Laser Targeting as a gameplay feature for units

[polaris_silvertree]

Guys,

I'm new to the forums. Please forgive me if this has already been hashed through (but I did a search -- and to the best of my knowledge did not see it discussed).

I know I had posted this years ago on the TA-mods discussion (before the inception of TA-spring). I am wondering if any of the mods are considering or working on developing a laser targeting system?

Here is a hypothetical:
A mobile unit (kbot) with some limited cloaking ability and relatively un-armed, relatively quick can traverse terrain and position itself in LOS of a target. Kbot lasers target and must sit there until the target is hit -- if it breaks LOS or ceases to point at it -- there is a chance incoming missile will miss.

A missile that can provide significant damage can be fired from either a ship, aircraft, or from the back lines (like a Tomahawk) and basically be pointed in that direction. The missile should be slow enough that it is possible (but difficult) to shoot it down with AA. The missile would could be set to fly low or high altitude. Once it finds a laser target -- it attempts to "lock" on and hit.

Tactics to prevent being hit:
Destroy LOS targeting kbot
Smoke/fog screen
Extreme movement

Regards,
Polaris

[AF]

hmm this sounds more like a game mechanic behaviour, and easily solved by a simple raycast at regular intervals. You would be more likely to find an answer by going into the lobby and joining the #lua, or posting in the lua forum

[polaris_silvertree]

Thanks!

[smartie]

I'd suggest looking at the carrier drones in CA. With the drones you give the attack order to the carrier, and the lua script sees that order and gives it to all the drones which aren't selectable.

If you made the missile like a blast wing (kamakazi plane) but with the same scripting as the carrier drones, a non selectable unit, then aa would still shoot at it like it was an airplane, but you wouldn't be able to tell it to attack units on its own. So to get that effect to work you'd have to have the script detect when the ship is shooting it's missile (make it a dummy weapon), then spawn in the airplane missile unit right there with a move order to the location the attack order was at. You'd probably have to play around with the rotation and velocity of the unit when you spawn it to get it to look right, but it'd be doable.

Then you'd have to figure out how to get it to find the laser target. I think you could do something like that by checking for that weapon type's explosion. Take a look at the explosion spawner script (also in CA) for how to do that. It's basically a script that looks for weapon explosions of various types and spawns units at those locations. Instead of spawning a unit you'd want the script to check the location of the laser hit and compare it to the locations of your missile planes. When a target is found within range then you'd give the attack order to that location to the missile and i'd fly in there and blow up.