[Idea] Interstelar drop ship

[ozonex]

I came up with the idea over three years ago, on vacation, drawing tanks, commanders and other SciFi stuff. I wanted to make that mod, but when I returned, Planetary Annihilation was announced and I forgot about that.

So, let's imagine, that commander can't be teleported directly into planet surface, because of gravity well. Instead, its teleported somewhere into planets orbit in drop ship and then land on the surface. I don't want to add that animation or transport ship, idea is about something else.

Now, at start of the game we have 2 units - commander and drop ship. I want to be able to use that ship and convert it into any T1 factory anywhere on the map. It will work like a drone, that can only build (for free) only t1 factory. Converting will take like 2-5s, and drone need to fly there.

This can change a lot in game. What we do on start of the game right now? We build factory, some simple build order, "GL HF" in chat and then we wait for factory to finish. After many games I see that I usually wait for about 20s doing nothing, just waiting. This can speed up begin of the game. We can build mex/pg/hydro faster. Also it opens the way to new strategies, because you can drop that factory somewhere else on the map.

I don't have time and modding skills to test that idea, but maybe there is someone who knows how to do it.

[Exotic_Retard]

certainly an interesting idea - and certainly possible to make - at the start of the game we can spawn any unit we want really, so we just do that. or we can write code in the acu nit script to do that in case option 1 doesnt work, or something.

anyway then we have this air unit and we just tell it to build 1 of 3 things which we can also set. this is where the interesting part would come in. depending on how you want it to behave on building, the script could be pretty complicated. for example we could have it land and give it a transformation animation and have it build from the ground, we could have it build from the air, which is the easy way out, or we could have it transform and spawn the factory in its place which is the most complicated way.

in either case you would end up either spawning or building your factory and then a script in the dropship would make that disappear in one way or another, again depending on how you want it to be done.


could take quite some work really, depending on what quality of the mod you want, and what behavior you want.

[ozonex]

certainly an interesting idea - and certainly possible to make - at the start of the game we can spawn any unit we want really, so we just do that. or we can write code in the acu nit script to do that in case option 1 doesnt work, or something.

anyway then we have this air unit and we just tell it to build 1 of 3 things which we can also set. this is where the interesting part would come in. depending on how you want it to behave on building, the script could be pretty complicated. for example we could have it land and give it a transformation animation and have it build from the ground, we could have it build from the air, which is the easy way out, or we could have it transform and spawn the factory in its place which is the most complicated way.

in either case you would end up either spawning or building your factory and then a script in the dropship would make that disappear in one way or another, again depending on how you want it to be done.


could take quite some work really, depending on what quality of the mod you want, and what behavior you want.

I think we can for now, just to test idea, use building from air. It can also build in 0.5s, destroys self, then that building will auto convert into factory. This should be easier to make.

[Ithilis_Quo]

transform and spawn the factory in its place which is the most complicated way.

I dont think so. We can use sacrifice for this.
Starting drone will be able build only factory. Dron itself is invulnerable and visual is small red dot (laser from transport ship) and script will say that imediatly after he start build factory use sacrifice that will finish building.

As a result we will have some units "cursor" that can move and scout, and build single building in 1 sec.
-> we need add some reclaim to be posible clean area under building.

[Exotic_Retard]

oh dear ithilis, stop trying to be clever xD

i said its the most difficult for a reason. when i said transform i mean literally transform into the factory. that would mean from a model perspective we might have to have the bones of all the factories inside it and hide the rest during the animation.

whats more is that for it to work it would need to land and flatten the ground into a build skirt as well, which i can kinda see with a proxy unit or some such, or making it build a factory in that spot or something,

the interesting part would be to make it only land in exactly the place the factory is going to be built and making sure you cant build on hills, ect.

using sacrifice is silly for this. it has no features that we want except self:Destroy() which we can just script in instead. now go back to your balance mods!

[Ithilis_Quo]

This post is about testing idea, and with sacrifice its easy to do.
Sacrifice have more as only self descruction have also finishing building in no time. And use 90% of code that should be write for same funkcionality.