OK, got a bunch of things sorted out:

1. If your soldier is > X pixels above the ground, then your jetpack's safeties disengage and you can fly faster. Good for cross-country trips and it makes crossing deep chasms easier. IDK whether I have it tuned quite right for the AI to use it properly yet.

2. If your soldier's falling fast enough to seriously hurt him/herself... their jetpack's automated safety systems fire the jets, slowing the rate of decent to a survivable velocity.

Note that the above's all tuneable, just like everything else, so coding a "drop commando" who can drop really fast or an "investor" whose safety-first attitude means that they barely fall at all is very easy

Version 1.05 is out.

Changelog:

As usual, I'd appreciate hearing people's thoughts on balance in Metafight and how things are feeling overall. Personally, I'm pretty happy with this build, in terms of what the troops can do and how they feel; their improved jetpack mobility, safety device code that allows for smooth glides down steep slopes, etc. is a big step in the right direction, imo. Now I need to get content squared away and keep tuning balance.

My opinion:

I feel like Coalition's pretty competitive now. The only thing they don't have is a heavy that's actually heavy. I think that may be a feature; they have such a huge variety of specialized firepower that they can defeat practically anything. I think they need minor tweaks here and there but are starting to feel pretty useful.

Dummies are ruthless and evil and the only thing that bothers me is that their Brain should be an AI, not a blob of brain in a bowl.

Browncoats are still a bit OP and probably need cost adjustments. I'm still not sure they need a turret or walker, but I'll probably give 'em one just for completeness' sake.

Ronin need... something, not quite sure what (basically, other than Gordon, I just feel like they're too flimsy and aren't really getting things done, but I love their firepower and Rambo'ing Gordon is pretty cool). Maybe they just need a nice turret, or maybe I need to look at other things.

Imperatus remains unfinished, so I need to get its basics done for them now, so that they have some guns and stuff to actually discuss.

Arrrr, so eager to try this as an HIB user. See so many good ideas here that should be incorporated into later builds.

EDIT: The HIB version is still not competible right?

See this thread.

Am I the only one who thinks this mod blows? Sorry for being so honest about it, but it's just not good. I don't know about the weapon balancing, that might be okay, but I did not test those very much. I uninstalled the mod after about ten minutes of playing, since everything else is so horrible.

The sketchy scripts for making units move faster is pure garbage. My units twitch like mad and glide over the ground when I try to make them lay down, and when they "walk" they more of just glide in a very disconnected manor. They also bounce off of walls, or anything really. It's like they have an invisible bubble around them at all times that deflects off of terrain. I have a feeling this is 'precisely the case.

The rockets and dropships suck now and are zero fun. All they do is twitch around and move up, down, left and right. They never crash, never lean to the sides, never do anything. If you take manual control over a rocket and do not press any buttons, it twitches and spazzes straight down at a slow pace and lands just fine. There is literally no point in ever using them for anything. Mind as well just get a mod that allows you to teleport units straight to the surface. I get a feeling the mod creator just sucks with the game's engine, so he "fixed" it by making all movements easier. This pertains to both the drop ships and the units. When I play Cortex Command, I ALWAYS manually land my rockets, and I can do all sorts of fancy maneuvers for tactical insertions or suicide bombings. This mod removes all of that.

Lastly, the IA is useless. I found myself constantly shooting oblivious enemies in the back of the head while standing right next to them. More so then with the normal CC AI. It feels like the enemy units just had a ton of Lua event based scripts added to them to the point where nothing works. I beat Dummy Assault with one browncoat and a heavy coalition sniper rifle without taking a single hit. When I play on vinilla CC, I usually wind up loosing my sniper and half of my browncoat's health, if not more. This mod make the game more of just a shooting gallery.

In short, I find this mod fails horribly at all the points it features. The "improved" movement sucks; it's inconsistent, inconvenient, and limited. The "improved" shuttle controls suck; they require literally zero effort to fly and have less maneuvering options then the Millennium Falcon. The "improved" IA sucks; enemies just stand around staring at the wall while you shoot them. Now I'm not saying I could do any better, I'm just saying this mod is honestly not good in any way, and I feel bad for all the people who have been trying desperately to get the correct build to install it. It's not worth the effort, don't bother.

Very underwhelming mod. 0/10.

I kinda agree, I stopped after about 2 minutes.

Well, you're welcome to your opinion, but over here, Metafight's a lot more challenging with the mod I honestly feel like you haven't actually played it at all, though; 10 minutes means you fired up Maginot or something and then wrote your rant, and the entire mod's built around Metafight.

I made this mod for people like me, who were beating 3 AIs on one team on Vanilla Metafight easily and felt that it wasn't nearly challenging enough

Anyhow, please play something else and have fun, it's just a game

I'm sorry it felt like a waste of your time; I guess some people just don't understand the objectives or why I chose to do this, but you can't please everybody

Ten minutes might have been an understatement, but I prefer to round down then up. Seems more honest that way. I played the Dummy Assault mission and a bit of Skirmish, and tested coalition, browcoat, and robot actors. I also used both the Mk1 and MK2 rockets and a couple of drop ships. I've been playing Cortex Command since I bought it in 2009, and do sometimes enjoy mods that bring more of a challenge. This is why I was disappointed in your mod. However, I am glad to see you did not take my post as offensive, though I understand it may have come off that way. I just don't like beating around the bush. I still believe I have provided enough information for my post to count as a critique, pointing out many of the mod's weak points. Both opinionated ones, and bugs.

I do have to ask you this though; why did you do this to my beautiful rockets? I mean, they are just elevators now. Do you seriously think they are better? Or that it makes the game more of a challenge? Modifying the AI so they can actually land them without crushing half of their own units would be a good idea, but stripping away all usability of the shuttles seems like something meant to make the game easier, not harder. I'll admit it took me a month or so to get decent enough with the rockets to properly move them around and land, but at least they where still fun. Also, why don't you mention anywhere that the actors can no longer use their full range of movements? Am I the only one who likes to make my soldiers lay down or crouch behind cover? I think you have good ideas, but poor execution. I just don't understand why you are so satisfied with the current state of the mod is all. Do you think you could release a version with normal unit and shuttle movements so people who like the physics engine can still use your mod?

Again... try a Metafight campaign, then come back to this.

You'll understand a lot better why all this was changed, or you won't, and either way it's not worth arguing about

Play 1 vs. 3, anything vs. anything, and then come back and explain to me why you have time to manually steer rockets, because, other than defending an uber-base where you'd win anyhow, you won't.

This is not a mod for people who like building AI-proof trap bases for Skirmish or playing canned missions, basically. You can't really get it unless you play Metafight.

It's the only real game in CC so far as I'm concerned; the rest of it's just goofing off. You guys who "judge" a mod by just messing with characters for a few minutes really are missing the point.

This is not a mod for people who think they should have time to manually fly their rockets. It's for people who think they should be too busy digging their commander in, ordering stuff in a rush, switching to a defensive sniper to stave off waves of bad guys and then going back to control your Rambo commandoes to have any time to muck about with a problematic physics engine, buggy character movement and ACrabs that are hopeless on anything but flat ground.

In short, I'm not going to tell you that you suck at CC, but I am going to say that you play it very differently and care about things that I don't. When you can tell me a strat for beating 3 Browncoats in this mod on one team vs. yourself in a Metafight campaign, you're free to complain about how newbie I've made things

OK, now that I'm done being snippy: I am taking a good look at why the AI seems to pack up if there are enough actors in a scene.

I think it has to do with coroutine handling; I'm going to encapsulate the motion script in a coroutine and see if I can get it to behave itself and share CPU time nicely

One of my worst gripes I had while playing around: People walk in the air, it looks weird and... I don't like it.

It's not a mod bug; it does that in Vanilla, too, if you hit the movement keys while in midair and you aren't either dropping to the point your legs ragdoll in ways they shouldn't IRL or are doing an equally-silly Superman nosedive.

You're just noticing it in the mod because I don't let characters do their silly faceplant stuff. Try flying a guy straight up in Vanilla and then moving slowly forwards, it does the same stuff.

There is no fix for that, other than having a new Actor state for moving right/left in midair that prevents the leg IK from acting that way. Like a lot of things in the mod I have to work around stuff that is hardcoded into the engine.

[EDIT]Got coroutine'd movement regulators working. I'll have to see if that fixes the AI issues or not...[/EDIT]

By that I meant that the MOVE while going left and right, pressing left-right-left moves them a good distance right away.

I've tracked down why the AI packs up sometimes. Basically, it appears that scripts outside Base.rte calling "require" are getting hosed by the file system, if they need more than one level of recursion. I.E., if A requires B and C requires A, you're not going to get the desired result if you load C. D'oh!

Should have a patch that completely resolves that and helps it run even faster sometime over the next 24 hours.

Still trying to see if I can make the resulting script shorter on the mod end, with a master script that everything else just plugs into; that would sure solve a lot of my maintenance hassles

Version 1.06 released.

Changelog:

Back to work on Imperatus