Well, I'd used the bullet pattern control thing on the Warden, but it really was the only case where it fit much. That one's as close to a predictable and controlled movement as I could get, but it only works because of the specific nature of that one pattern (the last one it does). For basically all others, it doesnt work and would still create undodgeable situations.
Is that a death spiral pattern or something else?
What would it need to allow for precise movement?
I'm not sure what a death spiral is. For the Warden I used it for it's minefield pattern, since that's the one pattern so far that the current method of control really works with.
The sort of movement I"m thinking of, I'm not entirely sure how to describe what'd make it work. It's a bit like this here, skip to 5:18 for this boss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duF7TfiDiQQThat boss overall uses a ton of movement, but every bit of it is scripted, AND the timing on the firing of every part of the pattern is completely synced up with the movement. With patterns like that, if the movement wasnt precise or if the patterns werent synced with it, they'd have a really high chance of getting jumbled into an impossible mess. The pattern works because the positions are always *exactly* where they should be at exactly the right time in order to facilitate it.
There just isnt any way to do that in this game right now, and I suspect it'd take a bit too much to add it in. There would need to be a type of code that controls just the entity itself, and allows for it to do things like move to extremely specific coordinates on the screen (among various other things it'd need to do), but it'd also need to be able to tell very specific systems when to fire at what point during what movements.
While this would all make for the possibility of much more dynamic bosses though like the one in the video, the side effect would be that they'd probably take quite a bit longer for me to make... it's hard to say.
Right now, all I can do is keep the bosses mostly immobile, and use special bullets to create seperate firing points in various positions around the screen, though that can be kinda wonky at times.
