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

[Team Black]

So you can make the railgun itself invisible, and make the weapon look like flak or a machine gun or something (something that would look good with speed=100). Maybe this might reduce railgun lag as well. . .

For sure though, this puts flying buildings back into the TCM as a full possibility - that, and air transports, and moving rotors, and all that other jazz B0

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

For sure though, this puts flying buildings back into the TCM as a full possibility - that, and air transports, and moving rotors, and all that other jazz B0

correct
a Railgun with
ParticlesPerCoord=0.0001
Laser=no
is complete invisible and the railgun doesn't lags the game anymore. (tested)

\EDIT
i've tested now quite a lot of different strategies with the particle system to get it work only on impact.
The poor result, i didn't got it.

first: Weapon Particle
i tried to get rid of the IsRailgun=true tag and added UseFireParticles/UseSparkParticles instead. Both doesn't work. If they made damage, they only did this on ground. In air the Jumpjet Wolverine was still invincible.
I also tried to use some different ParticleSystems but they all only worked on ground units too.

now that this doesn't work...
second: Warhead Particle
i tried to move the damage towards the Warhead. removed the ParticleSystem from the Weapon and added Particle=SmallRailgunSys tag to my [FRAGHE] Warhead that is used from my Hover MLRS.
The result was, it doesn't works too. Damage tags on the Particle (not the ParticleSystem) only affected ground units.
But the quite funny side-effect was, that after the missile has hit the target, a laserline came down from the middle of the northern border of the map, because the Laser had no point of origin (because the weaponprojectile is gone).
Maybe useful as some kind of Orbitallaser if the projectile is invisible. But be sure you have a very low number of Particles. A railgun drawn over the entire map uses a lot of particles.

then i went back to the IsRailgun= tag and it seems to me that exact this one, in combination with the AmbientDamage= tag, makes it possible to hit the flying vehicle.
Extra damage tags on the RailgunParticle only worked on ground units too.
So AmbientDamage= seems to be the only one that can damage flying vehicles.

I've failed finding an alternative for the Railgun, but that doesn't mean that nobody else finds a solution.
I just want to mention the Disruptor system, that i haven't tested. \EDIT (tested and does not work)
I also don't have a clue what makes the Firestorm hit the target, where it has its damage tags and how its Particles work.

This post has been edited by Lin Kuei Ominae: Jul 1 2007, 10:30 AM