Spring RTS Engine

So, I always thought it was cool that in the classic Commander and Conquer games that when a tank blew up or a building exploded there was some crew left over, I also do not like the fact that when a transport blows up in spring, it's crew is automatically fubared, it would be amazing to send several atlases with level two kbots into a base, have the atlas get shot down and upon it crashing to the ground with the kbot becoming free to tumble across the landscape and take fall damage and probably die.

Also the ability to Garrison certain buildings was very cool. I do realize that in theory you could load a unit with other units and have the game not emp them, but I think it would be much more efficient if you could click on the unit and then order it into a building or any transport unit for that matter.

Would be awesome, I agree. There's a problem with the air transport dropping stuff on death though. Currently there's no way to limit the number of units a heavy transport aircraft can carry. So there'd be a whole bunch of stuff appearing out of nowhere...

But I agree, all of the above would be great. If not for a TA mod, then for a real-life thing.

So tags like this:

TransportCapacity=8;
Transportmass=2500;

have no effect at all.. hrm.. I dont see how hard it is to have the units which are stored in the transport be dropped off when the transport destructs..

likely youd need to simply have transports use the regular aicraft crash death animation and have it place the transported units around where the aircraft crashes, minus some health.. Im sure its possible and I dont know what you mean by no limit to the amount of units a transport can carry..

Capacity 8 could mean 4 2x2 units, or 2 4x4 units, or 8 1x1 units, or 2 3x3 units and a 2x2... etc. Everyone knows this. It's why a AA heavy transport can pick up like 8 goliaths or something, when I only needed the huge capacity for the sake of picking up individual huge units.

What I'm talking about is the transportmaxunits=x; tag, which worked in OTA but was never ported over.

Since zwzsg does it all the time I think it's possible to detach a transported unit via script. Do that either during the Killed() function or if that's not possible make the transport drop everything once health drops below a limit.

^^ I like that idea. Simple, and flexible.

No idea if the unit is offcially "dead" when killed is called, well you can delay the death now until you return the wreck number in Killed() so why shouldn't it be possible to drop it's load. Has to be dropped in mid air though so it takes falling damage... lets get zwzgs on the case :P

I'm not sure if it doesn't kill all transported units immediately when the transporter dies. Even if you can keep the transporter "undead" there's no way to prevent it from dying.

KDR_11k wrote:I'm not sure if it doesn't kill all transported units immediately when the transporter dies. Even if you can keep the transporter "undead" there's no way to prevent it from dying.

That's true. So there's the drop on health based option... I'd say drop when below 5% or some other value...

The exact value has to be determined for each mod. 5% would probably be too litle for a mod where the transport is downed with 2-3 missiles since it would never actually reach 5%, it'd be above that, next thing you know the unit is gone.

would the engine see it as instantly passing the 5% mark? or would it process the 5% health function before the death?

You can't get an interrupt for that, the best you can do is have your function check the unit's health every so often and if it encounters a health of 5% or less it drops all loaded units.

Um yeah, it's mod specific anyway so the value is up to the user, 5% was just a random number I threw in... if you're really anal about it then you can compare the current health and last health before time x (250 ms for instance) and "detect" when the unit is under heavy fire... lets say if 50% hp are gone in one blow then it might be time to drop the stuff...

I'm wondering if you could make a paratrooper plane that way (put the drop stuff in the FireWeaponX() function or something) :)

Perhaps when an aircraft gets shot down in a realism mod the pilot can eject/parachute out C&C style, wouldn't have much of a purpose but perhaps it could carry experience levels with it until it is loaded in a new unit and become 1337 like in generals :D

I would also like C&C style survivors and have riflemen, crew, etc come out of destroyed tanks and make most occupants of an ACP survive.

That would be great! +1!

Eject Pods - out of Mad Cats....

i probably sound silly, but is it posible just to spawn units in mid air?

Say an Atlas was carrying a Hammer and got shot down. Upon Atlas`s death animation a new Hammer is spawned at the same height.

just curious...

Huh? You can drop the hammer carries in mid air I believe... and no you can't spawn units (at least I don't think so).

PicassoCT wrote:Eject Pods - out of Mad Cats....

After working on it with a Highlander... :P

I like the idea of using the crash function on transport aircraft too - is that possible with the 'gunship' flight model? or rather, is it possible to carry that code across to the gunship model?

I think it would be pretty cool to have units dropped on death, but sometimes (depending if the aircraft crashes or just blows up) get plowed into the ground first

of course, that would probably depend on disabling the automatic kill-on-transport death code, but tbh we should probably remove that arbitrary restriction anyway

rattle wrote:Huh? You can drop the hammer carries in mid air I believe... and no you can't spawn units (at least I don't think so).

PicassoCT wrote:Eject Pods - out of Mad Cats....

After working on it with a Highlander...

Transport drops Elementals--- more Elementals....

O hai ther

I checked the changelog, I don't see anything about this getting fixed. Does that mean it's still impossible to limit the total number of units a transport can carry?