Lander: Ground Cannons are in!
Community Forums/Showcase/Lander: Ground Cannons are in!
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 They do proximity attacks of bad guys, shoot at any bad guy that shoots them (or what they're protecting), spin round, point up, point down! All good stuff! |
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| this would be fun if it was multiplayer :) |
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| Oh, this is beginning to look like a cool game all right. |
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| Fighers now proximity attack other objects not on their side, this includes buildings and cannons. This looks really cool because you can send a fleet in attacking one building and once that's destoryed they'll turn their attention to anything else in the area and flatten the whole lot! Also, if you fly your lander near a figher he'll have a go at you too! But what's cool is that if you fly near a figher, get his attention then run off, he'll chase you, and you run off to where there are a bunch of friendly cannons, they won't attack you ('cos they're friendy and so are you) but they'll take out the figher chasing you. Quite good fun really! |
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| Sounds like it |
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| Cool, but does the fighter have enough sense to retreat if facing overwhelming firepower, or is badly damaged? Well does it then? Does it ay? Ay? ;-) |
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| I'm working on the AI now, if you get 2 ships (from opposing sides) attack one another they tend to dance round each other rather than kick the crap out of each other. So I'm programming in set pieces for fleeing, getting distance from the opposing force to be able to double back and get clear shots, they already 'evade' (evade is a flight mode within the AI engine) when they are very damaged as well as have smoke plooming from them. The other problem I've got is where do they retreat to? I'm thinking I need to have a bad guy base for them to retreat to otherwise they will just run away with no specific aim of where they're going. Indeed if they do have their own base they could do exactly what I describe above in luring good guys to the bad guy turrets. So the quick answer Jack is no... but they will! Working on it today. I really want to get this right as although dogfights are not going to be the primary aim of this game, it's going to be important. |
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| Hello there, could I please ask that you, and everyone else stop work on your games immediately? It makes me look bad when I get nothing done and you finish a game a week. Thank you! |
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| Hear hear! ;o) |
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| Dr Av Heh, these are pretty much the exact same issues I've had to deal with in sorting the AI for Tank Universal. In terms of retreating, my tanks have a base courage level which can be boosted by things like proximity of allies, proximity of base, shield level, but if the threat's too high then I calc an average position for nearby allies and the unit retreats to there (also, there's a pause time that must elapse between retreats so that a unit cannot retreat indefinitely). In terms of 'dogfights', when engaged, a tank will calculate the corners and mid points to a 'bounding box' surrounding all the enemies in range, and then give each point a score based on attributes like proximity to enemy/allies, whether the enemy can be seen, how far above/below (i.e high ground) enemy is , what was chosen before. Tank then moves to point with best score (and if enemy comes too close, box is recalc'ed and new goal chosen). It's pretty simple, but it works pretty well. Don;t know if that'd be of any use to you, but maybe you could adapt it to an aerial situation. |
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| Food for thought MadJack... The fighters in this work on very very simple rules and modes. roam mode: Generates a random waypoint and fly towards it. In roam mode it can get distracted by near by enemies. attack mode: engage and destory, however, if the target shoots it, or if it get too close to the target it goes into evade mode. Also if it's been in attack mode for too long it will evade, this stops the ships dancing round in circles with each other achieving nothing. evade mode: calculates a waypoint behind the target fighter, flys towards it then re-engages attack. protect: sets a waypoint within a set radius of an object (be it moving or otherwise) and if anything attacks it the fighter engages attack mode. This is kinda cool as you can have a bunch of ships protected your lander. All the fighters have primary objectives, if they are distracted (ie get attacked) whilst they are trying to achieve the primary they will create a secondary objective to destroy what's attacked them before going back to the primary. The gun turrets are similar but even more simplistic, as all they do is attack or wait. Still working on making them do more imaginitive stuff like dive down low and hug the ground and stuff, at the moment they do tend to just keep circling round and round which doesn't look that good. The biggest challenge was making them move around convincingly, they check all around them to see what the terrain is doing and find good paths to get to waypoints, this was pretty important as now all I do is set a waypoint and they fly off there in a non-linear way. |
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