Aircraft beakthrough! Options

[Team Black]

(Yea, I posted it on PPM as well)
Well if you didn't know already, there's a technique where you can make aircraft out of vehicles by giving them a flying locomotor** and MovementZone=fly.
When a vehicle is made into an aircraft, it allows the aircraft to follow pretty much every logic that a vehicle supports -
HVA animation, troop transport, deploying, shp, harvesting (well, sort of...), and turrets, to name a few.

This method has 2 major problems:
1 - the unit can't reveal shroud - this can be more or less overcome by making the unit MoveToShroud=no, as most aircraft are anyways...

2 - the unit is invincible during flight - due to this characteristic, this method has been mostly disregarded, as it can easily cause gameplay & balance issues.

Up to this point, I've said pretty much everything we have already found out. So what's the breakthrough? get a load of this:



I told you in Jah's heli research thread I couldn't take "no" for an answer, and after doing some research of my own, I found that the flying vehicles WERE in fact vulnerable to two things:
>Firestorm defense, but more importantly:
>Railguns!

By making the railgun projectile AA=yes, they can successfully target, damage, and destroy flying vehicles!
Granted, it's not an ultimate flawless solution, as you'll need to make all your AA guns into railguns - but the important thing is that it's that it's possible, and that there IS a way to make hva anims, air transports, shp vehicles, and all that other cool stuff, without sending gameplay and balance to heck.

Dogfights? sort of.
I made these planes play a game of chicken - only one of them fired though, one time, then after that they just sat there floating. I had to order it to attack before it would fire again.


It should be also noted that they can shoot at stuff while landed (though the airplanes themselves don't need to be armed with railguns, of course )


**I've found that the jumpjet locomotor is best - the actual aircraft loco makes the unit get stuck on the war factory bib, unable to move, and disabling further warfactory production.

Selling/undeploying the warfactory frees the aircraft, but I would deem it too unpractical to do that for each new aircraft that you make -

it should be noted, also, that units with the the jumpjet locomotor take a decent amount of time to "get out" of the warfactory, meaning, that no other units can be produced while it's exiting the War Factory. I'd advise giving your aircraft some good speed and/or editing the [jumpjet controls] section, to achieve the most desirable result . This means, that this method would be best for things like helicopters and hot air balloons, but probably not for actual planes.

>If you found any of this useful, please be sure to let me know, it did take some testing till I achieved this info, thanks

[Creagor]

As posted on PPM:

You know,it may not be because its a railgun that it does damage, it may just be affected by particle systems and/or AmbientDamage=

I suggest the follow up research to this should be into that - finding aout what actually does the damage, the particles or the ambient damage. Particlesdo damage through tags in the actual particle code (MaxDC= and Damage=), and ambient damage works through the weapon.

Once we know what causes the damage, it's a case of using it on the AA weapons, either by adding ambient damage to it or by using a particle system to it.

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

just adding the AmbientDamage tag doesn't work (tested)
I've added to [RedEye2] AmbientDamage=15; my jumpjet wolverine was still invincible.

P.S. awesome find TB

\EDIT
it's the railgun that does the damage.
AmbientDamage=15
IsRailgun=true
AttachedParticleSystem=SmallRailgunSys
are responsible for the damage
Hovermissile+Railgun

the problem is that railguns always fire with speed=100. attached on a missile, this means you have a slow flying missile and a fast railgun fired at the same time.
Target on Ground: First hits the railgun with ambientdamage= and then the missile (that takes a little longer) with damage=.
Target in Air: Only the AmbientDamage hits the target. The damage= tag does nothing. (railgun damages, missile doesn't damages)
I don't know how to slow down railguns so that their impact time is the same as the actual weapon. (here missile)

Also worth mentioning: this way a unit can have 2 weapons fired at the same time. Missile+Railgun or Cannon+Railgun etc.

for TCM: lets make an High-Tech anti Scrin Air Defense like a Railgun flak. (flak=ger FlugAbwehrKanone engl AirDefenseCannon)

This post has been edited by Lin Kuei Ominae: Jun 30 2007, 02:24 PM