Version 1.09 released.

OK, I think I have the AI sorted, at least for Dummies. I just got it to navigate out of the Tutorial Base, across the valley, one user waypoint, all AI pathing, and back again. That looks like success.

If anybody tests this build, let me know if you can replicate that result, and whether it's working with other troops. I think I may have squished that bug, though, or at least I have a clue about what's crucial and how to get it tuned so that I can turn the jetpacks down a bit again

So, that leaves dealing with prone and further tweaks to get jetpacks and the AI mutually happy, and then, back to content and balance stuff.

Version 1.10 released.

Left settings.ini in 1.09, sorry, will write an installer script when I get some sleep to keep that from happening.

Also, fixed all the AIs reverting to Sentry; I overwrote that code while I was fooling around with the AI. So we're back to normal now.

Version 1.11 released. Just testing out my new install script; looks solid over here and the mod got smaller, although not small enough to be an attachment

Anyhow, time for some sleep! Have fun, folks

Working on the Imperatus guns, here's the basic plan.

Imperatus is described as "relying on brute force".

The only official weapon that's specific to them, the Bullpup, is an effective weapon for killing just about anything short of a tank, but it fires slowly and isn't terrifically accurate.

What I've decided to do is to get some of Kettenrad's wonderful renditions of the Green Dummy weapons into the game, along with a sprite Lizardheim dropped in the Sprite Dump that I couldn't resist and Naxete's classic rotary cannon.

The rest of the weapons have to fit the Imperatus theme in some way, but be sufficiently different from one another to have a distinct job. Here's my plan, thus far:

1. The Twister: it's a very powerful SMG with a rapid rate of fire; only thing that sucks about it is the range is very short and its damage falloff is steep enough that it bounces off Dummy armor at long range. Similar in theme to the Nail Cannon, which is one of my favorite things in the mod atm, but lighter.

2. The ShardGun: shoots grenades that are smarter than the user!

Like the real-world "smart" grenade systems, this fires a shot that can direct its kinetic energy forwards or downwards. Aim over the heads of enemies or fire over terrain, and it senses them and fires; if trying to remove a sniper, fire it up from a safe position and it will automatically sense the sniper's position and fire sideways.

I haven't finished the Lua for it yet, but that's the basic plan, in a nutshell. Needless to say, it's going to be hard to balance something that actually acts like a state-of-the art, real-world weapon system, but probably I can just nerf the fragments until they're just not terrifically useful against anything heavier than Dummies.

3. PelletBlaster: it's a shotgun. Exciting, no; lethal, yes. Low rate of fire and a lot of kick.

4. Melter: I'm melting... meeeeeeelting! That's what your enemies will say, anyhow. Fires slow projectiles in a bolt of pure energy. Sort of the Imperatus's answer to the Destroyer Cannon, it's not as good at area-denial but it's very lethal to anything it touches.

5. Ion Pistol: it's the Annihilator's smaller brother. Fires a small cloud of shots that are slower and less-lethal but behave a lot like the Annihilator's shots do. Low rate of fire, long reload times, but it's good for bouncing off corners.

6. Rotary Cannon: Putting Naxete's sprite to use. Basically a man-portable version of the light cannon the Robo Drone uses, with a spinup time.

Anyhow, that's the plan. I have about half of them set up with offsets working and the basics and I'm working my way through all the guns tonight, if possible; obviously balance will suck at first, so please bear with me and offer feedback

In other news, I've nerfed the rate of fire and reload on the Annihilator; I felt it was just a wee bit too ubiquitous and it needed a change.

Quick question, how would I disable the "can't pick up dropped weapons" thing?
Really frustrating when I try to arm my guards and they can't pick up their rifles.

That's simple, but it comes with a really high price.

If you set GetsHitByMOs = 1 in the HDFirearm, you can pick it up again.

But then it will take hits from enemy fire, too.

I'm looking at Lua solutions to this problem when I'm done with the current round of content stuff

OK... good news, bad news.

Good news first: I've got a good solution for not being able to pick up weapons, and now I just need to implement it; it's a tiny bit of Lua code and it gives me the desired behaviors. So, yay, that's one of people's major gripes solved


Bad news: there doesn't seem to be any rational combination of things that definitely determines when a character is prone.

--This all got fixed, yay!

I finally found a solution for the prone problem

Turns out that what's happening is that the AHuman sim goes a bit nuts when you control RotAngle under some conditions. But it no longer really matters all that much, because the main reason why that was done in the first place was because of jumpjets behaving so awkwardly. I don't think there's any tradeoff now that they work a little better, so I can get rid of that.

Now I just have to update my scripts, and I'll get an update out. Yay, two of the biggest gripes are fixed, I think

Version 1.12 released.

Big bug-fix release. This fixes two major bugs:

1. Soldiers can duck, crawl, etc. like they could in Vanilla, without losing all of the other benefits of the movement scripts. Soldiers are also a little bit less floaty.

2. If you drop a gun, you can pick it up again (and it doesn't become a magic bullet shield). If enemies drop their guns, you can pick them up. If you have time to pick up guns, you need to play Metafight with more AIs

Other changes include putting in the Imperatus arsenal. Regard the weapon effects and everything else as purely temporary, however; I got them functional at a very basic level this evening, but they aren't even close to being polished, let alone balanced.

So, no, the Rotary Cannon won't be 50 gold in the future, the MegaColt might actually hurt things, etc., heh.

That said, I think the art looks cool, and it pretty well rounds out Imperatus as a real faction. Thanks to Kettenkrad, Lizardheim and Naxete for their work on the sprites I've used as a basis (with a fair amount of editing by me).

There are other bits and pieces, but that's it for this evening. I'm pretty happy, I was afraid I'd never find a good solution to the prone issue without losing something important, but it's all looking pretty good

[BIG FAT EDIT]Looks like I still need to keep working on the weapon-pickup code after some testing; under some conditions they aren't playing nicely and become magic bullet shields again. Ah well, that's something for tomorrow. Time to sleep![/EDIT]

Version 1.13 released.

Dropped items switch states correctly, held items aren't bullet shields. It's not 100% reliable... but it's reasonably close. I'd like a better method, but it appears that simply querying a HeldItem about whether or not it's being held isn't straightforward on this engine, and the methods I tried out all ended up being dead ends, so I'm doing a check against velocity instead.

When I'm done with RL for the day, I'll try and finish the Imperatus code / effects. Then it's back to other content stuff, like giving everybody their own unique commander unit in place of the generic Brains and some improvements to the Metafight code I've been wanting to get done, like making it get harder if the AI has enough money and reducing the lag during the orbital bombardment phase

I tried installing 1.13 with my other mods and this seems very useful, but I keep crashing when I load missions.rte. Any fix?

Got a nap, dealt with RL, fixed up a couple of bugs in the held-items code.

Sleep's useful; I found a pretty foolproof way to determine whether a HeldItem is, in fact, being held right away. I think that should resolve the last issues with items not taking hits when held, but being pick-up-able / destroyable on the ground. I also found a bug with weapons with infinite ammo and fixed it.

I'll put out a patch for that when I've had time to do a little more work on the Imperatus guns

Got the gun offsets cleaned up, there were a few things I didn't think were perfect yet. Got new heads done for the Imperatus Sniper / Engineer:



I still need to write some code and do a lot of testing before their guns are vaguely 1.0. Unfortunately, RL requires that be tomorrow, I think. I'll get a patch out with what's done in a few minutes, but please bear in mind that it's all very alpha atm

Version 1.14 released.

Fixes dropped weapons being interactive vs. held weapons not taking enemy fire. IOW, you can drop weapons and pick them back up again, or pick up enemy guns, but your guns aren't magic bullet shields.

I also fixed a bug in the auto-reload code affecting weapons with magazines of infinite size.

I think this is a pretty solid fix for those two issues.

I've also fixed some minor offset stuff on the Imperatus guns, did a few little pixel improvements here and there and have added the Sniper / Engineer custom heads.

Imperatus guns remain, for the most part, very alpha, so please don't yell at me about how awful they are, I know

I like how most of that page is your posts. Would it kill you to use the edit button more?

Also, don't get too carried away with Imperatus stuff. Remember they're getting a bunch of new weapons in the next update judging by the SVN feed, and that release can't be all that far away if Data intends to keep to his release plan.