[Rel] Proper t1 Multirole Gunship

Apologies for interrupting your beautiful relationship going on here () but this sounds kind of awesome. To clarify, it's a T1 gunship that fires missiles at both air and ground targets?

Yep!

Moves about as fast as a tank though. Faster than a tank, slower than a bot. Does fire missiles at about 85% of ground AA's range, can soak a few shots from AA, can fire on air and land, fires about 40% as fast as a hummingbird.

Yes.

Squishy, I could post it in the OP, and rename it [Rel], if you want. Your name is in the modinfo, and I can add it to the OP.

Sure thing! It'll be fun to mess around with it when I have internet. *hype intensifies*

Like UBER, I will delay it because of a small oversight. It is easy to notice a unit does too much damage because you forgot something, like "it has two weapons" in this case.

However, it adds an opportunity for AWESOME, as I will edit it to fire alternatingly, so it will be able to pick off more small ground forces and still be very lightly chippy against structures and tanks.

Oh yeah, I gave it half the fire rate of a fighter. (I think?) but forgot about the duel weapons... So just simply nerf fire rate or lower it's damage, or the alternating fire! Which is pretty cool I might say.

Just for prosperity's sake, you can look at the "dual laser turret"s tool "aim bones" in the unit.json for it, and look at the kestrels same aim bone. You notice one has two seperate bones listed back to back but in seperate quotes, the kestrel does, where it is something like "kestrel weapon tool" "left muzzle" "kestrel weapon tool" "right muzzle". The other has both listed together, the laser tower, something like "laser weapon tool" "left muzzle; right muzzle".

You can copy the laser tower's syntax, paste it in the gunships after ""tool":", and paste the proper "tool" location for the gunship into the laser turret's place.

That was something Nanolathe and Madsci informed me on. However, they also noticed something that I noticed as well. The muzzle flash still shows both firing at once, even though one side fires. I thought it was me, but they informed me all units do this including uber's. I wonder if Uber plans on making a way to seperate the tools and make muzzle flash dependendent on it's individual tool's firing, rather than the muzzle flash and such occur only on "unit fire"?

Hm.. If you wanted to really complicate things you could make two separate one barrel weapons. (Though how would you then dictate which fires before which?), but yes, make two separate weapons, each attached to one of the muzzles.

I checked how naval did that. It still retains same muzzle flash. Although I considered giving the gunship seperate AA and land guns.

I don't know, I actually like the idea of it firing solely missiles, it's something different. You could either scrap the idea of alternating fire and just balance you unit to compensate, or keep it and ignore the muzzle flash issues until there's a way to make them separate. That is unless of course you want to do the separate aa and land weapons.

Edit: I'll gladly work on a model for it btw, once I get my 3Ds max.

Sorry for double post, but:

Yes! We should, I'd love to add you to the team of that balance mod we're working on.

As I test this, you are right in 3 ways.

1) if it had machine guns, it would stand to make sense of that muzzle flash

2) it is hard to balance atm, i have it good atm but it makes it's ground damage or air damage wierd for it's health. To fix this, it is much easier to just have a steady low damage weapon with a very occasional high alpha shot. We are talking something capable of doing majority damage to fighters but not being available again for 3-4 seconds, and also being used on mexes and tanks, but not being enough to kill any of those things outright, just injure them enough for the machine gun to finish them off. Then, the machine gun could be sufficient against bots and fabbers and anything it can hover safely on.

3) It is also hard to justify it's higher health. I plan to make it able to linger, shoot some stuff up, if AA is present then get a few kills but not do any significant damage, and then leave possibly for repair. It has 180 health right now, I want it to have 300 but ground AA takes forever to kill it and air AA still makes quicker work of it. If I made it stronger against air AA and weaker against ground, with seperate weapons, I can justify it.

Having trouble mounting weapons to kestrel and getting it to show up ingame. Can mount two of same weapon, can mount each weapon individually, can't mount both at same time either to both or seperate sides.

Fixed it. Now I have it working, but I am considering making the gun closer range and the missile longer range, since the missile is just occasional fire.

Sorry it is taking so long, it is hard to test on my end since build graphics is bugged. Was sort of waiting patiently for you to get on and test.

Alright, may I ask how you got it working? I wanted to do something similar on another unit, but couldn't figure out how.

Edit: Also will you try to keep both weapons using both muzzles, just for OCD sake?

Edi2: I'm also really sorry, but I can't as broken internet during the day... Just about an hour and a half and I'll gladly test it with you, we could even start another project if you'd like. I completely understand it taking a while as it's quite a bit you've been working on.

NP, sure, and I got it working actually straight up. it was syntax, I admit. make SURE to count the square brackets. There is one at the end of the weapon attribute, but you can't have one after the quote and pointy bracket.

[{"spec_id":"/pa/units/air/gunship/gunship_tool_weapon.json","aim_bone":"bone_rightRecoil","muzzle_bone":"socket_rightMuzzle"},{"spec_id":"/pa/units/air/gunship/gunship_tool_weapon.json","aim_bone":"bone_leftRecoil","muzzle_bone":"socket_leftMuzzle"}],"fx_offsets":

The above was where i was working on.

[{"spec_id":"/pa/units/air/gunship/gunship_tool_weapon.json","aim_bone":"bone_rightRecoil","muzzle_bone":"socket_rightMuzzle"},[{"spec_id":"/pa/units/air/gunship/gunship_tool_weapon.json","aim_bone":"bone_leftRecoil","muzzle_bone":"socket_leftMuzzle"}],"fx_offsets":

Due to copy and paste, I did the above. Guess the syntax error?

Basically, don't copy and paste the end bracket, stop one bracket short. Same with the starting bracket.


Okay, so the current gunship, fires 80 range missiles for 50 damage at a rate of about an ant shell, so basically just weaker than an ant shell. The 50 range machinegun does 15 damage with a rate of 3, so little over doubles it but you have to dedicate it to going overhead which puts it more in harms way.

The minigun is more for brawling army vs army, the missiles are for longer antiair and harassment, the minigun is also used as a get-off-me tool against fighters. Because of this actually, it usually does more than it's cost in damage to other units as long as AA is thin, and if it is heavier it usually either hit and runs without serious damage or it wastes its value.

The unit also has 240 health, which lets it take as many shots from AA as the ant can take from other units. If you use them for harassment, you can try to maintain them with combat fabbers. If you sacrifice them, they are little more than an ant in cost which balances them. You could even use them to get bombers in without fully sacrificing a unit. They will die to fighters, but they will still trade with fighters in the process, but the unit cost twice as much as fighters. Fighters can also swoop in to kill them, as they are slow.

I also adjusted it's acceleration, even though it is slow the acceleration rate affects it's hover-dodging. Basically, I made it feasable to harass or approach a commander using micro left-right banking. Actually, if it is overhead it can't be attacked, it does free damage, but it does not do significant damage, I am not sure the missile can even work directly overhead.

BTW, this inspires me to make the t2 gunship into a "air vanguard". Cost the signature higher price, works like the "realm mod vanguard", moves real slow and soaks up tons of damage but sieges and harasses units with steady dps. (the realm mod vanguard has a rapidfire dox machinegun instead of flamethrower)

Good idea, we could add both of these to the balancing mod if you'd like, seems fair enough. My idea for the Vanguard though would be more of an AOE flamethrower with steady light damage DPS but over the course of more enemies, obviously I'd need to scale the fire effect to fit with it.

Btw: Only about 35 minutes before I can get on and have a round with you with the new T1 gunships. Can't wait to try them out!

Sorry for double post... but- my internet mysteriously went to it's unlimited broadband mod 30 minutes before it normally does... Which means we can have a go at the mod! Go to the conversation I made and join the TS if you'd like to talk whilst we play.