The Thousand Pound Ape in The Room

Majesty, Cunning, Airplanes.

What happened to work on aircraft? I am familiar with Lua and Source and I know its possible (even the 1/64th scaling has been done I've seen that myself) and I've been following this mod since 2005 - when did aircraft development stall? Where is it at now? Does anyone have any of the work that has been done?

I think a release with new aircraft maps and aircraft themselves would juice Empires mod like anabolics - So whats going on, devs, vets, anyone?

 

Something with the physics + lack of time + random drama stalled it.

 

Well if anyone has any leads on the work I'd be fucking glad to take a crack at it honestly, I love Empires and it makes me sad to see the community dramatize themselves to death.

 

It's not really posible like you say. We tried scaling and, unless in an isolated environment (i.e. like Eternal Silence), it causes too many issues. Add to that the limitations with the source engine, the lack of coders and just the other issues that need to be dealt with, it isn't being worked on, and the honest truth is, it never will.

 

instead of force being applied on a physics object to induce movement why not use prediction, sort of like what Garry did with gmod and prop flying recently - for empires aircraft and simply have VTOL gunships and transports on larger maps?

 

Most Empires maps are already using the maximum that source will support, and that's not even close to being large enough to support aircraft.

 

the models exist, treat aircraft as ground vehicles that can move up and down, idk I wish i could be less general but I don't know the condition of the games guts honestly.

 

So in my mind all it would take for aircraft to exist are another turret for the commander and engies to place - some sort of AA sam - the factory for both factions and say a gunship and a transport, make it more akin to Air cav support as opposed to fighter jets and interceptors. Treat the gunship like a flying tank and the transport like a flying APC, only they would both be considerably more expensive. I know in the past aircraft for the mod were conceptualized as requiring extreme speeds and distances but why not simply treat them like VTOL... Helicopters really.

 

Can you code that?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJnWanw0YnA
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVFk59u_RDE
choose your aircraft

 

No they don't. There's a single model that just about got ingame, but the rest were unusable high polies made purely for renders. Lamer's 2nd video was an entity based aircraft made by a mapper.

 

here comes a dude who knows the language the mod is in, and wants to work towards adding aircraft. i want aircraft, even a blimp would make my day.

 

I thought it was written in monkey shit.

 

I'm pretty certain it's written with spaghetti.

 

Oh it's the aircraft month of the year? I guess next month is the anti-nade spam suggestion, the month after is for making changes to the entire game based on games of district, and then we get into ***** again oh lord these forums never change. Look OP, if you want aircraft go play battlefield or something, everyone knows it's impossible, all of the points you have brought up have been disproven. And don't talk about Garry Newman, he got access to the source code, and even then aircraft in gmod on multiplayer are 100% complete garbage.

 

Do not want: Aircraft, trolls
Do want: balancing, polishing, more players.

 

There are a bunch of others things with higher priorities and realizations than wasting time trying to make half-ass aircrafts work & causing huge balancing issues. There is too much of a brain drain in the Source engine to find people willing to work on the engine.

The most respectful thing to do is polish this game and cater to the existing community with minor enhancements & fixes. At best, the mod will stay alive for a long time with a small community and tiny fluctuation like every other HL2 mod on life support (Battlegrounds 2, Zombie Panic! Source, etc.). If you are patient enough, you may find a huge surge whenever, if ever, Half-Life 3 is released.

 

Not that we have the programming time for this but...

Why not make a compromise and have it be a squad power? Instead of arty strike its bombing run.

A NON-user controlled aircraft flies by and drops a few bombs. Since the aircraft has to come from out of the map it should take a bit more time for the drop to occur a thus bombing runs (aka arty strike) can not be abused to instantly hit things like people or tanks. Which while cool, is rather absurd and OP for an almost instant hit skill.

Commander skill... drop ship a vehicle. Costs standard price plus 10% shipping fee.

All air vehicles can be shot down ofc.

 

eternal silence has aircraft, it's not impossible, but your gonna have to figure it out alone with no access to the source besides the sdk. you could even try making an empires spin-off with a different engine that will support vehicles better but good luck, they always seem to fail.