That little bucket of ideas.....

[MarkoSan]

And why the hell every vehicle body can carry ONLY ONE weapon? At least tracked vehicles (i.e. tanks) should be able to be equipped with secondary weapon, like gun turret ...

[Watermelon]

And why the hell every vehicle body can carry ONLY ONE weapon? At least tracked vehicles (i.e. tanks) should be able to be equipped with secondary weapon, like gun turret ...

that's not a problem anymore,you can have 3 for unit and 4 for structure in the svn,and the number of weapon per unit/structure can be adjusted easily by changing few #define and assignweapons.txt.

[Giel]

that's not a problem anymore,you can have 3 for unit and 4 for structure in the svn,and the number of weapon per unit/structure can be adjusted easily by changing few #define and assignweapons.txt.

Be aware though that this feature will not appear in the 2.0.x versions. It will first appear in the 2.1 versions. You can however find it in the current developer trunk.

[MarkoSan]

Again asking (question seems to be forgotten):
How do you want to simulate the effects of sonic weapons, kage? -> "as an anti-infantry weapon (by making them go insane)."

I think it should be possible to create a blast with a sonic-weapon, such that the hit infantry is rendered unconscious by it. Similar to a flash-bang right on your head. Harder than a usual (indirect) bang, because of the direct hit of the sonic-blast. Indirectly hit units may get a bit confused, because of the sound...
That's my idea for sonic-weapons... Now to the interesting part: How to simulate this in WZ?
Make hit infantry units drop prone and get a little '?' over then, indicating that they are unconscious and can't take no orders?

Ok, the effect of being hit by sonic weapon are:
1) disobeying and orders
2) moving randomly across the map and randomly shooting (foe AND friendly) - beserk mode
3) simply disintegrating the unit, which was hit

Are there any other ideas?

[kage]

when i was saying "go crazy", i meant at low levels -- the right kind of sound can do that, as in purely accoustic with no destructive resonance (think of a really high pitched sine wave, that alternates with just enough randomness to keep the brain from adapting). at much higher aplitudes, or at certain frequencies, you pretty much die instantly if you're lucky (severe aneurism), with maybe a 30 year coma if you're unlucky, and normal armored vehicles wouldn't provide any protection at all depending on the delivery mechanism -- they'd have to be very specifically sound-proofed

[DevUrandom]

Maybe we can add an additionaly type of damage for this kind of weapon: Mental.

Low damaged units are only running around, only sporadically reacting to orders.
High damaged units get unconscious, like I described.
And full damaged units die instantly.

Auto-repair from this type of damage would come with even the basic units and it would be repairing relatively fast. This way low-powered weapons won't do more than the crazy-stuff, while high powered weapons can make someone unconscious easily and, if applied longer, even kill them.
This would require the early weapons to fire constantly, possibly with a splash-damage upgrade to make them effective at all.
If a unit is unconscious, it can't take any orders and the mental-self-repair is slowed down a lot.
This makes high-level mental weapons really effective. They don't have any (or at least only very minimal) splash-damage, but fire at a good rate while knocking out enemies with 1 or 2 shots, possibly depending on the armor and mental strength (mental "armor"). Additionally they don't need ammo. (-> Watermelon's latest patch makes ammo-requiring-weapons and rearm-droids possible...)

In case we really want those weapons to knock out vehicles:
It renders the vehicle "unconscious". In this state every own infantry unit can highjack the vehicle (0 range weapon, only usuable against unconscious enemy vehicles).
I fear that the highjacking, even though it is fairly similar to the Nexus-Link-Turret, will require a lot of work, especially in the UI part...

[MarkoSan]

Ok, the effect of being hit by sonic weapon are:
1) disobeying and orders
2) moving randomly across the map and randomly shooting (foe AND friendly) - beserk mode
3) simply disintegrating the unit, which was hit. The difference between unit destroy and disintegration is if the disintegrated unit is technologicaly advanced in comparsion with unit that disintegrated it, then disintegrated unit leaves artifact, for example!

Are there any other ideas?

EDIT(DevUrandom): Did you forget to tell us something???

[MarkoSan]

What do you mean with "Did you forget to tell us something?"

[DevUrandom]

You posted nothing but a quote...
If that was intended and you wanted to point us to your ideas again:
I think I tried to incorporate them into mine. (Well, not 3, as that sounded a bith tough...)

[MarkoSan]

You posted nothing but a quote...
If that was intended and you wanted to point us to your ideas again:
I think I tried to incorporate them into mine. (Well, not 3, as that sounded a bith tough...)

The 3rd choice seems though to you? Well, you might be right, but it is an excellent way of getting artifacts, don't you?

[kage]

I fear that the highjacking, even though it is fairly similar to the Nexus-Link-Turret, will require a lot of work, especially in the UI part...

most of the work on that may or may not be already done: somewhere in the beta campaign, you have to rescue civilians, and they run towards your ground units and disappear when they get to within a certain distance, but i don't know if that's purely scripted, has game engine support, or is a combination of both. as for the ui: we can just leverage game logic instead... if you have infantry, then telling them to attack a unit will cause them to fire at it with standard weaponry unless it can be captured, in which case they run towards it and hijack it (no ui changes should be infantry). this can be done more easily by changing an "unconscious" or "dead" unit into a neutral unit, where infantry will always attempt to hijack a neutral unit upon the attack order (including your own, if it's been disabled). if the occupants are simply "unconscious" instead of dead, we can just add a timer for something like 45 secs that will perform the following when the time runs out:

if unit is neutral then change unit team to original_owner.

pretty simple code that "awakens" the occupants after a certain time, but only if the unit hasn't been captured.

[themousemaster]

Just for the record...

As far as the beta campaign mession is concerned (its beta 5 if memory serves), those civilians do not have individual "hitboxes".

There have been times I've been no where near them and I hear the "units rescued" voice, and other times they've run right through an army of my tanks just to get picked up by the Collective.

Further, whenever I hear "untis rescued", chunks of 10-20 of them at a time dissappear.


So whatever is going on in that stage, it's not simplay a collision detection

[kage]

if we work on a dedicated server, then it doesn't matter whether it uses collision detection or not: there'll only be one authority on the matter of what counts and what doesn't, and if someone makes an accusation that something unfair happened, the only one to blame would be the server owner.

[DevUrandom]

The neutralization idea seems good...

If we go the unconsciousness idea way, I think could even check for ( unit.unconscious > 0 ) and do the highjack order if the expression is true. But to make this really usable, we should provide a button to "disable auto-highjack" and one for manual "highjack".

[Watermelon]

The neutralization idea seems good...

If we go the unconsciousness idea way, I think could even check for ( unit.unconscious > 0 ) and do the highjack order if the expression is true. But to make this really usable, we should provide a button to "disable auto-highjack" and one for manual "highjack".

I think we should create a property uint32 'effectFlags' of base_object and store effects on unit/structure(either positive(like a moral bonus) or negative(on fire,slowed down due to heavy damage etc)) there,then update them in droidUpdate/structureUpdate functions in main loop,this way we can add/remove specified special effect(s) with some cheap AND/OR operations and make the effects-on-unit more manageable.

the way wz tests whether a droid/structure is on fire or not is a bit hacky,it will become horrible if we have tons of effects on a single unit at one time(each property will need at least an additional BOOL in unit/structure struct)