General Category > AI War II - Modding

Ship weapon GFX & multiple ship weapons

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swizzlewizzle:
Just wanted to post this here since I didn't see it covered in any of the design documents.

I know that in AIW 1 most ships had a single weapon that fired from the center of the ship's sprite, though there were some modular ships, champions, etc... that had multiple "weapons", as well as things like the artillery golem that had 50x+ projectiles firing out (which I suppose is a kind of "multi" weapon?).

My question is - in AI war 2, will we be able to define origin points for weapon GFX on models imported into the game? I mean, instead of all weapon GFX popping out of the middle of the ship, being able to set points on the ship (likely at spinal gun mounts, turrets, etc..) for the GFX to come out of?

Doesn't have to have an effect on the simulation, but just being able to define where shot GFX come out of a ship model, as well as the % chance (or if % chance is too cpu heavy, maybe just be able to set a series array of some sort?) for different shot GFX to pop out of a certain shot-origin anchor.

Most ships out there that could be imported into the game in the form of a mod usually have some sort of turrets, spinal mounts, or "gun points", and it would look quite strange to see these ignored, instead having a stream of shot GFX coming out of the center of the ship.

Is it possible to get visual-only "gun mounting points" like this added before v1.0?

PS: Seems that some of the starships seem to have multiple gun points added to them, so perhaps this is something already in, or being planned? Again, I didn't see anything in the design documents so I hope i'm adding something useful here. ;)

x4000:
It is definitely something I'm considering!  I know Keith really would like that, and it shouldn't be too hard to do IF we can get some of the matrix math fast enough.  We already have it set up to where you can set offsets for shots to emit from, though, and so that bit at least shouldn't be a problem.  The main thing would be having multiple visible guns or similar in our own models.  But having multiple emission points is becoming easy with the changes that I'm currently having to make in order to support flatter unity hierarchies.

swizzlewizzle:
Superb. ;)

swizzlewizzle:
Hey Chris.

So I got some updated answers to this from the Discord.

One thing that isn't clear still is how to set multiple fire points on a ship (gimbals? Turret locations?) so that it spreads it's "fire GFX" across the ship's surface instead of a single origin point (like the ship's transform you used in your single mesh import vid).

Along with this, it seems that per-weapon targeting is... technically in? It looks like there is a bit more code work required though to get different banks of weapons on a large ship firing on different things?

Basically, I want to avoid a massive ship firing all of it's weapons on a single tiny fighter squadron, when there might be lots of other targets.... in that case, want to have it look more "epic" by spreading the fire around, ala what you would see from a typical star trek/star wars battle. :)

keith.lamothe:

--- Quote from: swizzlewizzle on January 20, 2018, 08:26:22 pm ---Basically, I want to avoid a massive ship firing all of it's weapons on a single tiny fighter squadron, when there might be lots of other targets....
--- End quote ---
Each weapon system does its own targeting. First it filters down to possible targets, and then sorts those to find the most desirable target(s), and in both cases the result can vary radically based on the weapon system type.

That said, if you've given orders to kill a specific thing, or orders to kill "threats to my shields" (the Defense targeting-policy), it's likely to focus-fire for the purpose of efficiency.

You could add a "Cinematic" targeting-policy to get stuff to spread out its fire gratuitously ;)

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