Map suggestion.... for airships

Discussion in 'Mapping' started by Misfire, Aug 12, 2018.

  1. Misfire

    Misfire Always Lost

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    Part of my bot stuff has included modeling, mapping and..... vehicles..... animated ones, like tanks and jeeps. Air support for empires has always been a long running joke. I'm going to see if I can end that. Both teams already have air ships, they just need some detail work to compile a piloted ship.

    With Steam engine limitations, jets and such are not part of my goal. I'm imagining more like helicopter flight. I don't believe most current maps would be good fit for such ships though, too small or the terrain isn't compatible. So I have two ideas for maps that might be a better fit.

    First is "archipelago".... Large-ish map mostly water with a string of islands that must be capped and built on. Some smaller, some bigger. Smaller tanks might defend an island, but infantry and vehicles can't reach the others. Bring in the airships.

    Second is "himalayas".... Tall mountainous terrain. Again not passable by normal vehicles though some tunneling for infantry might be good.

    In both map cases, I see one of the current vehicles being temporarily replaced in the research tree with airship. Probably easier coding for a temp replacement instead of a whole new branch on the tree.

    Any thoughts?
     
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  2. Xyaminou

    Xyaminou Member

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    It's hard to tell what kind of map would better fit aircraft. I think some of the larger maps like emp_chain or emp_king might work, with a few tweaks of course.

    I don't think we can get the right answer until we've actually piloted these aircrafts and got a feel for them.

    Island maps on Empires are complicated, because the max sized maps on hammer aren't that big in Empires scale. If you were to make max sized map with 50% water and 50% land you'd already be looking at a pretty small piece of land.
    Another problem with designing a map to require transport by air is that you will probably want air transport to be a mid-to-late game technology, which in both of your maps would mean you're stuck on your side of the map for the first 15 to 20 minutes. However maps with chokepoint would probably benefit from aircrafts a great deal, but that remains to be seen.
     
  3. VulcanStorm

    VulcanStorm Developer Staff Member Moderator

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    Any map with big blocking cliffs and vehicle clips and such would require tweaking and may be unsuitable for aircraft.

    emp_palmbay, emp_isle, emp_duststorm and emp_cyclopean would probably work though.

    As for other maps, iirc emp_2islands could be an interesting one.
     
  4. Misfire

    Misfire Always Lost

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    Good thoughts... I wonder if the original ship sizes should be scaled down from piloted to "large remote drone" instead, this may help with some of the map scale issues. More work getting done on the animations, but slow going. First step is get a model that's animated an moves correctly and that's pretty frick'n hard so far.
     
  5. LordDz_2

    LordDz_2 Strange things happens here

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    I did a dropship variant for duststorm, it was just a bit crashy when it came to respawning the dropships.

    They could carry players inside them and not using the "teleport" trick.
    It was done by parenting the players to the dropship and then clearing the parent when the players leave the dropship (or when it dies).

    Might be useful for ya:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/zjariaat54boxxe/emp_duststorm_dropships.7z?dl=0
     
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  6. Misfire

    Misfire Always Lost

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    Thanks LDz, I'll check it out this weekend.
     
  7. Acolyte

    Acolyte Member

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    I wanna fly :whistle:
     
  8. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    I missed this. It takes like 5 minutes at most to add a research node in the tree for anything. All things in it reference things in scripts after all.

    To add a vehicle copy paste a research node and change the relevant info, have an example.
    Code:
          "Airship"
           {
             "Name"       "Airship"     //name given to research item
             "Parent"     "Upgraded Chassis"   //name of parent that this branches from
             "Description"     "(Technology: Vehicle Chassis) Gain access to airships."   //description given when hovering over research item
             "Icon"       "comm/hex_tank"       //icon drawn on research tree
             "Unresearched Icon"   "comm/hex_tank_empty"     //icon drawn in the GUI
             "Type"       "0"     //nothing
             "Cost"       "0"     //cost of this research item
             "Time"       "90"     //time to research this item in seconds
             "Team"       ""     //which team can research this
             "XPos"       "237"
             "YPos"       "72"
           }
    
    Just note that those x and y pos do nothing as far as i know, I think it's older gui code. What order you put it in does matter though, it just reads them in order putting them in clockwise.

    After that in the vehicle script change the research line to the same name as the research node you just made, like this.
    Code:
    "Research"        "Airship"        //research item name that must be researched before this chassis can be built
    
    That's it. Some copy paste and you too could reinvent empires at your whim. A whole branch/tree takes about the same effort, only thing to really note is the research tree maxes out at 128 nodes I think. Its at like 80 right now so no real worries here.
     
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