MechCommander GZ

[LilWhiteMouse]

I've implemented Gunnery skills. Hopefully this will help balance things out. Now I just need to figure out how I want to apply it to missiles.

[Project Shadowcat]

I've implemented Gunnery skills. Hopefully this will help balance things out. Now I just need to figure out how I want to apply it to missiles.

LRMs always seemed to be a bit of a random thing without the Artemis IV FCS in the tabletop game. You could nail your to-hit roll and have an absolutely shitty missile hit roll (such as a "2" result, good for only 6 missiles with an LRM20), or just barely make your to-hit roll and nail your missile hits roll.
So you could make LRMs scatter rather randomly regardless of Gunnery skill.


Stealthedit: I am totally not stalking this topic. Totally not. Nope.

[LilWhiteMouse]

http://www.prdarkfox.com/lwm/mcgz.7z

To keep things simple, the gunnery skill starts at 0 for perfect aim, and goes up. The calculation is random(0, skill) with a roll of 0 being a hit. A miss will just randomize the weapon's aim, it may still hit with some luck. Ally mechs are preset to 4, and enemies to 10. With this addition I've removed the health bonus to ally mechs. I have however added a 50% damage bonus against enemies.

I tweaked the mechs to avoid getting too close. Or at least discourage them. Still suffers the wrath of Doom's AI.
Alacorns no longer appear from vehicle depots. I hate the god damn things.

[EDIT] Next version:
Not that anyone cares, but roadway generation is now completely automated on the script side. I can place as many nodes and branches in a map editor as I want without having to ever touch the script.
For aesthetics, the main road starts and ends at a tunnel. Removes some of the isolation feeling.

[LilWhiteMouse]

PDF's paper doll display in:

Blue (Undamaged) - Green - Yellow - Red - Black (Destroyed)

[LilWhiteMouse]

http://www.prdarkfox.com/lwm/mcgz.7z

I'm unfortunately putting this project on the back burner for now, as yet again some of my projectiles are not doing damage even with my A_Explode() hack. I'm uploading what I've done so far, which isn't much. If my projectile issues are ever resolved, I'll pick this back up.

Not sure how much of this was in the last version:
Enemy VTOLs are in. Just the Yellow Jacket ATM. It's a recycled model, and I'm not happy with it anymore.
Retextured many of the buildings, and tweaked the base building to be a bit less bland.
Repairs are now done by calling out a repair truck, which will be transported from your dropship by a VTOL. Just select a suitable spot and 'USE' the Fix Me option. Any nearby mechs that have damage will be repaired if you have the repair points. The amount of damage and available repair points are shown when the allied mech is selected. Salvage in the field now goes towards your repair points (+25).
Added a simple objective to the first map just for something to do.
Started work on a new map (Map03) before I noticed these new problems. It is playable, but rather barren and bases are rare (the code hasn't been adapted yet).
If an ally mech has a specific target, you'll get a color coded damage indicator for the target when the mech is selected.
Didn't want to, but added a Union dropship. Needed a larger dropship, but it's still scaled down so as not to be too big on the map.
Cars/Trucks/Cargo containers are no longer target-able objects. They can be destroyed, or stepped on though.
Replaced the LRM sprite trails with 4 poly models, seems to cut down on the lag. Also gave LRMs a kill switch so they don't just keep flying across the map.
Vehicle and VTOL depots now have a 30 second delay before and after spawning a new unit.
To compensate for explosion damage tending to hit all mech parts, effectively doing 3x damage, I've nerfed vehicle HPs to balance things out. Ditto for the Yellow Jacket.

[Project Shadowcat]

It's definitely feeling a lot better now. Combat feels nice and fluid, and quite chaotic. Just wish the projectile thing would stop being such a problem.

[MG_Man]

Are there any plans to bake in some lighting into the models? That would make it look a hell of a lot less jarring, I think. It should be fairly easy to do, just a top-down light would do the trick.

[LilWhiteMouse]

There are no plans to do anything until the project works. Besides, I'm quite certain that baking would require every mech to be retextured, would require a texture for each mech, and probably bloat the filesize to retain the resolution. If the answer was yes to any of those, my answer would be no.

[Master of Disasters]

Not sure if this is still a thing but...
I fixed the problem, the issue was that all the projectiles would collide with the CommandTarget actor, that is why they could not shoot, and even when the bullets did go, they did no damage. This is also why the enemy could fire without a problem UNTIL the player directly told the ally to attack the enemy.
I gave the projectiles the THRUGHOST flag, and the CommandTarget the GHOST flag. Both mechs now shoot properly without the noclip hack, allies shoot through allies, and they will take damage. But I noticed that the arms, while shootable, often come out unscathed (destroying them does nothing, they keep firing).
BushTorso still needs to have a species, and so do the projectiles along with their MTHRUSPECIES flag, but the main Bushwacker actor does not need a defined species.

[CrazyEyes]

Thanks to Master's reply, I just now got my hands on this. Goddamned incredible. If you had a full campaign for this, you could have released it in 1997 and nobody would have known the difference; it'd look like state-of-the-art. In 98 it would be a slightly lackluster looking game.