Spring RTS Engine

Just a quickie...

ForceAim=1; Boolean. Would force a weapon with Burst==TRUE to fire its entire burst at the original point XYZ returned when the first shot is fired, irrespective of target motion.

ForceBurst=1; Boolean. Would force a weapon with Burst==TRUE to fire all of the shots specified in the burst, instead of stopping after the target dies. The weapon would not acquire a new target, but would continue to fire at the last target XYZ position until the burst was over.

ForceAim would be great for things like artillery or multiple rocket launchers, which are not exactly designed to "walk" their fire onto moving targets IRL.

ForceBurst would be very useful for things like machineguns, which are really used for area-fire in a direct-fire context. IRL, a machinegunner is either firing very short, controlled bursts at a specific target (we're talking maybe 5-10 rounds here, max) or is firing sustained at an area target (large masses of infantry at long range, for example). With a simple Activate/Deactivate and some weapon-disabling scripting, we could have machinegun-like behaviors from our units, allowing for both behaviors.

That seems like a nice idea

I already see it, jumpy, rookie soldiers wasting a whole clip, and elite/veterans not wasting anything...

I say plausible...

Snipawolf wrote:I already see it, jumpy, rookie soldiers wasting a whole clip, and elite/veterans not wasting anything...

I say plausible...

Reminds me of X-com. Stupid rookies. I'd send them into battle unarmed and unarmored and use them as scouts for the guys who could actually aim, so that when they panic I wasn't depending on them anyway AND THEY DON'T SHOOT ALL THE FRIENDLIES IN SIGHT!!!... >_>

Ehh... but yeah, this sounds like it could be interesting.

<laughs>

Whereas, when I played X-COM, I restarted a battle every time I lost a guy, because the uber-troopers with psi training and uber-armor pwnd everything at the end.

I used the tanks to scout, 'specially the flying ones. You can always replace tanks, they don't gain experience, and they can usually take down at least one Alien in an ambush

But mainly, what I want with this is the ability to finally have weapons that aren't completely automated turrets. Firing a burst at an area may sound like a waste of ammo, but it's not always the case. What annoys me right now is how something with a burstfire will fire 5 rounds out've 100 at a target... kill it... and then not kill the 5 guys standing behind the target, because it has to wait for the burst to refresh

Suppressive fire eh? 'Tis an annoying thing, like 30 shots or so, and only 10-15 are used on one guy, but the rest is just chucked out...

Suppressive fire and area fire are two completely different concepts.

Suppressive fire is the concept that when you're shooting at the other guys with automatic fire (or just a whole lot of firepower, period) that he's not very likely to shoot back at you, because it's so much safer to just keep your head down. IRL, this has fairly mixed results. Experienced soldiers know that most of these rounds coming towards them aren't aimed at them, and have a very low probability of hitting them, so they're pretty likely to fire back anyhow. However, the fear factor is definately there, and I really couldn't imagine it being easy to fire back at somebody spraying bullets at me, even if I knew that their chance of hitting me at random was near-zero.

The US Army is not very keen on suppressive fire, after trying it out a lot in Vietnam. Today, soldiers carry around M16s that have only semi-auto and three-round burst modes, to deliberately encourage soldiers to aim more, and spray less. And future weapons systems for soldiers are likely to continue this trend, until we get to the point where soldiers carry smart weapons that literally only fire when they have a 100% chance of hitting their targets... and are guided, proximity-fused weapons that can kill people even when they're hiding around corners, etc.

Area fire, which is primarily what these two tags would address, is an entirely different thing. Area-fire weapons, such as heavy machineguns, are primarily designed to fire at a area, not individuals. If you've ever fired a machinegun, you'd get it... at best, you can "walk the burst" over an individual target, but even with a scope, you're not exactly using one of these things to snipe with. Moreover, you're very deliberately firing a large number of rounds into a mass of men, hoping to hit individuals at random as you walk the burst through the body of the formation. It's not exactly elegant, nor ammo-conserving, and machineguns are built with quick-change barrels for a reason

See, what happens in Spring is that SJ thought it would be cool if weapons cut off after they've killed the intended target. However, this doesn't work very well. Imagine, for a second, that you have a tank with a Peewee-killing machine-cannon on it. This is a great big Gatling, and it can kill a Peewee with, for the sake of argument, 2 hits, but after it fires, it requires 10 seconds to cool off. What happens if this tank gets rushed by 30 Peewees?

Well, in Spring as it is now... if the tank kills the first Peewee in the rush with the first two rounds, then it's going to go into cool-off time, instead of continuing to fire. If it fires quickly enough to have a lot more rounds in the air by the time the first one lands... then maybe it kills a couple more Peewees. Then the other 47 kill the tank, even if they're all walking in a straight line towards it through a steep ravine

Or, as another game-designer trick to get it to fire more bullets, we can decrease the accuracy quite a bit, making the likelihood that it will kill the first Peewee quickly lower, but slightly increasing the possibility we'll kill other ones behind it at random.

Either way isn't bad, but this combined with the other two things is better. Instead of firing at some ridiculous uber speed with very poor accuracy, we could have weapons with medium accuracy and medium speed, that just keep firing at the point where the first thing was... which would be, in the case of a rush, where the guys behind are going to go through soon. Which is, IRL, how area-fire LOS weapons work. Instead of thinking about poor marksmanship (which, I'll admit, is another use of this tag), think about using weapons like this to close chokepoints or to deny movement through an area...

Sniper: Drops it on the ground??? Soldiers are instructed to put their clips back into the pouch (and those are THEIR clips, they're personal equipment). Those things can be refilled after all. You can unload a half-empty clip if you think you're going to need a full one soon (or you just aren't sure how much you have left in the clip, although that can be verified), if you don't you can still load it back or fill the ammo from two half-fulls into one clip later.

With forced burst we might profit from "initialAimOffset" and "aimSway" tags, the former would tell the unit how much to aim to the left or right of the target and the latter tells it how to move its gun during the burst. That would allow sweeping attacks that might be useful for some heavy weapons. A machinegunner with that could easily fell a line of enemy soldiers.

KDR, I was giving an example of how spring shoots

I see, area fire shoot at people, suppressive fire to "suppress" them

Yeah, ya didn't need to give an example though...

300 shot uber gatling gun of doom, waste 5 killin 1 soldier out of 60, then DOESN'T start reload, but continues to gun down the rest...

'tis what we want?

Edit: Or maybe a accuracy per shot or something

Like AccPerShot=.3 (or something like that)
.3 accuracy is added to the gun each time it shoots? (or something like that), then reload resets it back to the original...

I think all these tags would be very usefull. Suppressive fire is a big part of some realisem mods (like any WWII mod I care to think of). Maybe not so much in a modern one.

Snipa: Spring units will switch targets in mid burst but they stop their burst fire once no targets are left.

Acc per shot wouldn't cause the effect I'm going for which is a sweeping burst. That would be more effective than random spraying if the attacker and the targets are on the same height. It would also work great against defenders that stand in a line .

Argh, wouldn't it make more sense to have a tag that just breaks target lock when firing? I mean, as the weapon is firing it should be optional whether the aimpoint moves with the target or stays at the original aimpoint for the entire burst.

Using simple AND statements to decypher multiple options could help. Your settings for the variable could be something like...

0 - default (always lock aim on target's real position, stop when target dead)
1 - unlock aim while firing and continue firing at last known position until shot/burst is finished
2 - continue burst even after target is dead
4 - continue burst until ammo is exhausted
8 - move to new target if possible after shot/burst is finished

Your weapons set at "0" (default) will then behave radically different than one set at "15".

Since scripts can now spawn projectiles this thread is out of date. You can just make your unit spawn the entire burst on FireWeapon and lock the aiming function while that's in progress.

Yes.

Not when it's a missile burst weapon, smoke trails do not appear if you emit them last time I checked.

Ok, that might be a problem. But that's at least somewhat hack-around-able. Should probably be screenshotted and put into Mantis.