Fulfill Your Dreams - Be The Proud Creator Of A High Speed Dummy Conga Line!


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Movators are back with all new improved pathfinding technology. Walking is a thing of the past with these babies. But a picture's worth a thousand words so watch and be amazed!


Landing in an (empty and conveniently set up with movators) enemy base.


All troops have movatored into position.


Use movators to put together (hopefully more effective than these ones) floating defenses.


Or have some fun and put together a clone train.

But more importantly, navigate irritating and impossible structures at lightning fast speeds (movator speed was greatly increased for gifs):


Download Again:



Need To Know Information
Unlike the previous version, these movators are actually pretty smart (or their controller is). The only rule is that they can't be closer together than directly touching and they can only connect horizontally or vertically and when they have LOS to each other.
So yes, you can span the map with two movators, it works perfectly with horizontal wrapping and hopefully vertical wrapping as well.

To place them, just place your controller and your nodes in whatever order. To remove a node, place the remover on top of it.

To use them, move an actor into the area of one of the nodes or between two nodes (henceforth referred to as the MovatorArea), they'll float and not move normally. From there you can move them in whatever direction you want. To make them hold position, open your pie menu and press UP, to make them stop being affected by the movator and fall normally, open your pie menu and press DOWN. These last two bindings are irritating and will be changed shortly.

I've learned a decent amount since my previous attempt at these, so I used smarter algorithms and wonderful lua hashtables everywhere so this shouldn't be too laggy, despite being way better. However, I haven't done much benchmarking (my computer and cc don't get along well at the best of times anyway) so I don't really know how laggy it is. I'd love to get information on how much it affects fps and deltatime when there are a lot of movators and a lot of actors in the movators if anyone wants to share.

A bit of important troubleshooting: This issue should be fixed (I've had 100% success with it so far) but just in case I've left the solution in for people to access. If you experience a problem where actors aren't in the MovatorArea when they should be (i.e. they're in the area of one of the nodes but nothing's happening) open your console with tilde (~) and paste or type in the following, where team is replaced by your team (red is 0, green is 1, etc.):

Then paste/type:



Bugs and Issues


Planned Additions and ToDo List


I think that's about it, if you want to have a bit of fun and make your movators as speedy as those in the gifs, change self.Speed on line 43 of MovatorController.lua to 32 or whatever you want.

Once more, download for anyone who missed it:



Enjoy


Old Versions

absolutely epic.
you sir have won a golden trophy the size of a small lake, filled with 5e+25e+25 ct worth of diamonds.

I can only get 5e + 25e + 25 carat to be around 21 grams

AWEEESOMEEEEE!!!!!

Finally I can make vertical bunkers where jetpack actors no longer go derp when going from floor to floor.

Well thanks for the praise and accompanying diamond discussions, I'm glad to see it wasn't a waste of my time.
I'll see if I can update this soon since I've got some time on my hands now. Probably going to try to change the node placement method to be less of a pain (see todo list for details).

Edit: Also updated with a list of long term possibilities. None of these things are concrete but I can say that a power system shouldn't be too difficult to set up. I do still have quite a few things I want to do before that so don't expect it soon. Either way, reactors, relays and batteries will happen as will mobile reactors and relays. I think it'd also be cool to set up a full economy system with different reactor types which each use different fuels and have different advantages and disadvantages but that'd definitely be a long way off.

Edit 2: Pleasant weather showed up so I found myself more busy than expected. I'm also experiencing the same weird bug I mentioned on line 46 of the Hub Node, I'd really love a fix or some info on this one. I do have the movement all done, I just have to work on the ai and get rid of that problem. So if anyone experiences their actor continuing to go left/right when it should turn downwards please let me know. I'd like to at least confirm it's not just some strange thing on my end.
Anyway, I'll be busy for the next day or two so it might take a little while longer, I'm not gonna try for a definite deadline here, sorry.

Edit 3: On the off chance anyone reads this, I've been sitting on a new version of this for ages. Haven't gotten good pathfinding yet but I do have separated nodes and nice glowly bits in between them. I'd release it but for some reason it's laggier than the previous version by a large margin and until I can sort that out I don't really want to. I figure that's gonna mean getting good pathfinding in so I can have it all managed by one particle and stuff so it's a long time coming. Getting in my way are some missions I have to finish up and the fact that I'm just not spending much time scripting at the moment. In short, I'll finish this when I finish it, motivation will obviously play a major role in how soon that is.

Well, almost two years later: Update!

This version's way better than the previous rubbish. Look in the first post for info, it's way too late/early for me to type any more stuff up.
Please share comments and criticism.

Thank you Jesus, I needed it.

Yay, a comment! Thanks, I was beginning to think something had gone wrong haha. Please let me know how they hold up and what issues you run into.

At first I was like, "omg new mod!"

Then I read that it was over 2 years. Whatever, still looks awesome. DLed.

Very cool systems, I love em! Makes navigating complex bases so much easier. Good work!

Ninja: Well it's certainly not been in the works for two years. At some point not long after my last post I stopped working on it and I only picked it back up 2 or 3 weeks ago. The previous version was pretty useless for ai controlled movement, it was really limited, whereas this one very much isn't.

clunatic: Thanks, glad to hear it gets the job done I definitely want to add more to it and to base complexity on the whole down the road.

Edit2: Update updated:
The bug's fixed and I made some other minor modifications so that actors have better goto ai when they exit a movator. I also did some fairly large scale testing (50+ movators with 10+ actors following each other) and found that it's unfortunately kind of laggy. I'll be going through the code and seeing how and where I can cut down on that within the next few days. Other than that the only things I want to add for movators are an actually usable controller, a safety system for adding movator nodes so they don't overlap, large area movator nodes for easily filling big rooms and possibly better exit direction detection so it will always drop the actor out of the best node in the best direction (this one's complex and I may just rely on the user setting waypoints intelligently).

Edit: Update posted:
Aside from everything mentioned below I fixed a couple issues where nodes with inbetween areas intersecting where breaking things pretty badly.
Note that intersecting areas will still confuse the ai movement if you don't have nodes to direct them. I may fix this but I think it may be a good idea to reward people for not trying to break the movator system by making the ai less confused for them.
Unfortunately one minor bug was introduced and I don't have the time to fix it now. I'll get it quickly fixed today or tomorrow.


I'm happy to say tomorrow's update time. It would be tonight but it's late and I have one more thing I have to test properly before I'll release an update.

However, in the meantime, here are some teaser pics. They're probably not the easiest to understand since they're all a bunch of screenshots stuck together (I'm tired and getting decent gifs is hard) but I hope they get the point across.

These new movators are even smarter than the previous version's, they can:
Give good instructions for silly paths with loop-de-loops and intersections and all sorts of junk. Actors are only allowed to change directions at nodes, so they ignore other intersections when finding the shortest path. That said, sometimes the actors will cheat and take shortcuts. It's accidental but it's still pretty neat to see. Actors following other actors do occasionally get a bit lost or left behind, but they pretty much always make it to the end point not long after their target does. Also the last pic is to show you just how convoluted the maze they're navigating is, I think it's pretty impressive


Give and read multiple waypoints for actors, you can now set your first waypoint where you want the actor to get out of the movator and then set others for the ai and it'll all work smoothly. If you set multiple waypoints inside the movator area only the first one will be saved. This'll probably be changed to the last one, either way it's set like this because micromanagement shouldn't be necessary for movators.


Remove and add connections based on obstructions, you can dig a path from one node to another, or block off the path and the movators will stop connecting.


Other things in the update will include:

Bonus pic, some early post-release testing with 100 movators


Enjoy

So I got bored and decided to do a bit of CC modding after a year and a half, if anyone's still around here's an update for Movators with a whole bunch of fancy features:

1. Support for squads - no more losing your squad when you go through movators, squad ai also works
2. Brand new sprites for everything, and a big fancy room for your movator controller
3. Pie buttons allowing you to customize things like movator speed, mass limit, whether or not to accept crafts and more!
4. A variety of effects that show connections between movators, and the ability to swap between them (or turn them off)
5. An informative UI telling you the number of Movators you have, the number of actors in them and your various settings values
6. A bunch of bug fixes and stuff


For new pics look on the workshop here.

Download link is in the first post.