Spring RTS Engine

My aircrafts like to clump into one big ball when they are all send to the same spot.
The aircraft has "starcraft style" air movement, ie it does not do this continous flying like in most spring mods but instead hovers in place when it is idle. That makes the clumping especially noticable. In the mods I looked at, gunships or units with "gunship like" movement ie CT's cruisers do this too.

Is there a way to stop them from doing this?

nope

IIRC turning on collision for aircraft (it used to be on, they just chain blew up anyway from being close) makes them not clump.

adding
collide = true,
collision = true,
did it! weee!
it looks a bit strange though haha

Hm, next problem:
The aircraft should drop bombs while hovering in position over the target. ie like the China Helix Helicopters in C&C Generals or the Kirov Blimps in Red Alert 2.

When I set
hoverAttack = true,
it does this brawler gunship-style sideways circling of the target, nose pointed to target, and only sometimes gets in range to drop a bomb.
During attack it seems to ignore maxBank
and maxPitch.
With hoverAttack = false, it tries to do these fly-over attacks like bombers and also becomes very unressponsive: takes ages to turn around, somehow flies in very wide circles etc.

Beherith wrote:IIRC turning on collision for aircraft (it used to be on, they just chain blew up anyway from being close) makes them not clump.

isn't this still MASSIVELY expensive?

Making them collide is IMO a bad solution and looks and plays weird.
Try taking the SA fighter movement widget,you'd need to patch it up a bit but it should sove your problem.
What it does it makes all movement commands turn into movement + alt commands thus making all the selected aircraft move and line up in a formation thus not having a chance to clump much.

The only problem is the custom formations widget that allows to draw formations (so you have to click fast and not draw a formation when giving move orders or it wont register as a move command and the units will line up in the formation you drew) which the SA widget is yet to negate.

apart from faster speeds for aircraft, why should it be that more expensive than collision of ground units?
(in b4 200 fighters on patrol over fusionfarm)

hm i wish aircrafts would not push each other so much it looks even sillier than pushing ground units. oh well.

thanks Gota, will look at it.

knorke, there is a tag to disallow gunship strafe.

http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_UnitDefs wrote:UnitDefs[216]["airStrafe"] = true,

THis page is your best friend. Bookmark it.

http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_UnitDefs

If you want better aircraft behavior, set maxAccel = 0.3,

No, this page is my biggest enemy, it does not explain anything or tell what tags work in combination etc.
will try airStrafe, thanks.

Edit it and make it your best friend

Beherith wrote:IIRC turning on collision for aircraft (it used to be on, they just chain blew up anyway from being close) makes them not clump.

With current pathing gunships block each other and become stuck if collision is on. See CA.

knorke wrote:No, this page is my biggest enemy, it does not explain anything or tell what tags work in combination etc.
will try airStrafe, thanks.

Yes it does. It tells you what all tags are available and shows what that tag's default values are.

Licho wrote:

Beherith wrote:IIRC turning on collision for aircraft (it used to be on, they just chain blew up anyway from being close) makes them not clump.

With current pathing gunships block each other and become stuck if collision is on. See CA.

I could see blocking each other, as they all vye for a clear LOS to shoot the target... but stuck? How so?

Forboding Angel wrote:

knorke wrote:No, this page is my biggest enemy, it does not explain anything or tell what tags work in combination etc.
will try airStrafe, thanks.

Yes it does. It tells you what all tags are available and shows what that tag's default values are.

No it shows you the tags that lua can read, some tags there don't exist in unitdefs as they are added while loading units. Other tags in the unitdefs don't show themselves to lua directly. It also does not show the default values

So because the UnitDefs tables are very large, I simple print here an example of it (BA5.8 core commander):

https://github.com/spring/spring/blob/m ... nitDef.cpp

Anyone who doesn't have it bookmarked is doin it seriously wrong.

What I always do when I get aircraft clumping is to use customformations widget and draw a line for them to move to. Alternatively, if your planes are spread out already the way you want them to, you can use ctrl+move, which causes them to end in the same formation they were initially.

Sorry, I'm sure you're asking to a developing question and I'm interpreting this as a gameplay question... if this isn't the answer you want pls ignore or delete.

FLOZi wrote:https://github.com/spring/spring/blob/m ... nitDef.cpp

Anyone who doesn't have it bookmarked is doin it seriously wrong.

<~~~ Seriously doing it wrong.

http://springrts.com/wiki/Units:FBI

That's my go-to page for dealing with unit defs. Grossly outdated? Probably. But the explanations are handy. It's gotten me this far.

Will definitely keep that link though Flozi, for future use.

collide = true,
collision = true,
hoverAttack=true,
airStrafe=false,

kind of does what i wanted :)
Thanks.
I know all the wiki pages btw and they are all equally fail.
You will also notice if you open up any mod, the units have tags that do nothing or do nothing for that unit.
ie there are aircrafts with all the tire tracks tags set and whatnot.
That is because one is basically forced to do trial&error and mindlessly copy stuff over until something works.

No, that's just *A being the normal level of fail that is accepted for *A.