Battlezone Forums

Are target locking machineguns possible? as in, you point your cursor/aimer/shooter/thingy at bad guy, and if it's on target, it'll shoot until your cursor/aimer/shooter/thingy is too far off target... Ok, of course it isn't. But how would I do something like that? extensive odfs? dll? hocus pocus? Some help please....

Josiah wrote:Are target locking machineguns possible? as in, you point your cursor/aimer/shooter/thingy at bad guy, and if it's on target, it'll shoot until your cursor/aimer/shooter/thingy is too far off target... Ok, of course it isn't. But how would I do something like that? extensive odfs? dll? hocus pocus? Some help please....

A well modified tag should work well. Give the leader round a pretty large albeit invisible geometry or give it shot variance and shot speed up the wazoo. Have the fire rate very fast, nearly no delay between the leader and the shot, and the shot be a missile (or cannon round? Not familiar with bz2's tag) with pretty much no direction changing ability. Make it simulate gunfire.

I did something similar in bz1 to make a laser-guided missile, where the leader was a long insta-fire stick that would do the same thing any tag leader would do.

that's interesting, never thought of using tag... would it be possible to have it auto shoot the tag leader? or is that unrealistic?

Josiah wrote:that's interesting, never thought of using tag... would it be possible to have it auto shoot the tag leader? or is that unrealistic?

You can set shot delays so infinitesimally small that it would be hard to notice any difference.

Forget about TAG the weapon and concentrate on TAG the code/class.

I think a mini-unit attached to another unit by dll (invisible and unhittable, having its position and velocity set to match the parent unit every tick) would work for non-turreted craft. The gun would fire whenever it was pointing at something it could hit. There are many issues with that idea, one being most likely I would have to code it, let alone it might not work. I still need to come up with ammo sharing, attached item toggling, weapon sharing, and tons of other things before I can consider anything workable here.

Stick with TAG for now. Granted you would still have to hold the fire button. A super high speed tag round that fired a small salvo of machine gun shells would probably work pretty well in your case.

could use laser rockets, although you still have to manually fire them, and they will change to another target if you move your reticle over something else thats targettable.

that's a good idea...

I did make a smart chain, from the tag gun, use an invisible beam leader round fired quite rapidly, make little missiles that look like chain rounds and fire salvos of 20 or so... Damn dangerous chain gun! that can be fired round corners or over hills and makes you very scared of turrets, even AI scouts became a bit fearsome!

Its fun to make things missiles after killing the acceleration ramp on them. It is just so weird when you see machine gun bullets curving to hit a target.