While modding some of the units in game I started wondering, what if someone made the transporter really large, or put it in space. Any thoughts on trying to recreate the Stargate SuperGate. Maybe large enough to fly a moon through? LOL!
As cool as it looks, those things were meant to transport you from galaxy to galaxy if I remember correctly. What would you do with it though? Use it as a giant butterfly net to grab a swat of enemy avengers and make them disappear to a galaxy far far away? Or insta-Haley in the case of your moon-example?
You can use ColaColin's rescale tool on the teleporter and then add a new teleporter to the game that is set as an orbital structure. It wouldn't be super useful because orbital units can already travel between planets, but I guess it would make the trip faster if you could get a gate on both ends.
Pretty much. This early into the idea tossing contest I didn't really care how useful it is more then something fun to do. I'm a huge fan of Stargate and thought it'd look neat, lol. Ground troops can already use the standard teleporter, but flying a Haley moon through it would look cool as hell, and might make the trip faster; although, it'd be a hell of a lot easier just to make Heley's faster. Was pretty much thinking what cptconundrum said, make it orbital, then make it big, and fly something big through it. Expanding off the idea, why is there only one solar system per skirmish? Maybe mod the game so you can have multiple solar systems with multiple planets. The SuperGate could be used to get you from one system to the other after some unit's made a REALLY long journey, lol. Again, I'm just dreaming, but if you're gonna dream, dream big!~
Actually imho this kind of concept is the most promising solution to a planet invasion device we need. Have a mobile orbital teleporter that drops units from the sky. Actually what happens if one mods in an orbital teleporter, connects it with a ground teleporter and walks a dox through? How will it fail? xD
I like the way you think!~ About 33% done with my current work (been at it about 5 hours), but I'll definitely be playing with this idea later, lol.
This actually sounds more fun and a good time for a break from my other mod. I've copied the Teleporter JSON and modded it for the Orbital layer using an Orbital Base Structure. It'll link to other teleporters; however, when I walk through the ground unit, I just walk out the other side and don't teleport. I also noticed my orbital teleporter slowly descends back to the ground.
Added some gravwell_velocity and gravity_scalar physics and the orbital teleporter no longer falls back to the planet. I believe an earlier edit I'd made in attempt to call it a supergate in game is what caused my commander not to teleport to it, as I'm now able to teleport to it from the planet surface after having undone that change. I haven't yet looked at commander physics, but the instant my commander steps off the platform he instantly drops to the surface, which isn't bad, but I'd like it to be a bit slower descent. Strange part is the commander is able to build it from the planet surface. As far as proof of concept goes though, I'd call this a win. You can, indeed, teleport ground troops through a surface based teleporter to an orbital teleporter over another planet. Code: "gravwell_velocity_multiplier": 6.0, "guard_layer": "WL_Orbital", "physics": { "collision_layers": "WL_Orbital", "gravity_scalar": 0.001, "push_class": 50, "radius": 15 }, "recon": { "observer": { "items": [ { "channel": "sight", "layer": "orbital", "radius": 100, "shape": "sphere" } ] } }, "spawn_layers": "WL_Orbital",
lol nice. Though I think for this to be viable gameplay-wise Uber (or the mod) would need to make units drop slowly in drop-pods that can be attacked by anti air. Without that people could drop units on the head of enemy commanders. Also can you make teleporters mobile?
You may be right; however, if I slowed their descent speed (for lack of drop ships) they could still be attacked by their standard counter-parts. That could potentially work as I believe units that attack ground units would still be able to attack while them while they're falling back to the surface. They're also machines, so they're not as vulnerable to drop damage as meatbags. I don't know if it could be done, but we could try adding a temporary flag making them appear as air based units only while falling to the surface. Air units can use a teleporter right? If not, could we reverse it? Maybe just allow units with flight through it? In any case, I digress. I generally make cheats and as far as cheats go, this is a pretty powerful tool. I've already added the orbital teleporter to my orbital constructor so I can simply make one, send it to the planet, and make a space based teleporter right over top of the enemy commander, which is pretty freakin cool. Now, to make this thing big enough to fly a moon through!~ lol EDIT: Can this be done with all ground units? Orbital Long Range Artillery?
So I got the JAR up and running. Rescaled my Orbital Teleporter to 5x, 10x, and 30x normal size. Teleporter continued to work until I'd made it 30x size. Saw you had that issues when making it smaller as well so it might just be something related. Also noticed that at larger sizes, my units no longer fall off of it from space; but due to them being ground units I also cannot move them. Heck, even after deleting the teleporter, my commander was just stuck floating in space, LoL!! At larger scales, I also noticed the skirt_decal made a huge visual impact on the planet surface below, which caused me to not even be able to build on the planet surface; however, by leaving the original skirt_decal, that resolved both issues. Also encountered the trouble you mentioned with the teleporters event horizon as that effect never changed scale. I see there's a lot of size information in the related teleporter .pfx files. I took a deeper look at the teleporter event horizon.pfx using shadowmints json reformat tool, but without being able to successfully use a larger teleporter in orbit, I'm not really worried about the visual effects.
Leaving for the weekend to go camping. I can start checking into actual texture/mesh modding when I get back; although, I normally hate making those kinds of mods. Any friendly modder want to remove the bottom of a standard teleporter so it only has the rings (I can wish can't I)? lol
Uploading what I have so far as I've run into issue after issue. If you rescale it too big, units will not fall off of it and the particle effects do not currently rescale either. I also downloaded Blender and the Import/Export tool; however, it cannot convert textures with animations. I only spent about 2 hours messing with Blender, but I hate texture modeling and gave up creating my own. EDIT: Just noting that "unit_types" in JSON files not only control what units can build it, but also which units can use it. Hence, you can build the orbital supergate with ground units, because if you edit that, they can no longer teleport through it. Finally, with all of that said, I never bothered to make build icons.
I think the mod is still worth it just to make it possible to build regular sized orbital teleporters for units to drop down through. Does that part work? If so, please put it on PAMM
You kids and your mod managers, lol. I just uploaded it to PAMM. I haven't tested it with a ton of units, but it should work for most (if not all ground troops). They still fall back to the planet extremely fast, but that wasn't a huge worry for me.