mase wrote:The animation for the stronghold ... Other than that looks good
Thanks for looking it over so quickly. I’ve tried to explain my reasoning to your points below. Hope this helps.
* Stronghold - it's a big sci-fi exhaust stack pumping out fiery plasma smoke from producing weapons of war – kill, kill, kill muwahahhaha. Plus all the scion buildings are generally bigger than the ISDF ones, so it's supposed to be big.
BTW, the collision__hc is still the same size as the original stronghold.
* Gun Spire modified arc stream - Uh, good, that was the point, to keep a player from driving up under it and single handedly taking out a gun spire or its lung. You can still take out the lung with a group of tanks. Besides, gspires are expensive, they should be hard to kill.
* Kiln - How much time is a player spending standing inside a kiln/forge? This seems like a one in a hundred games nitpicking. Plus, even in the orig version, one could drive their whole tank inside it.
* Solar flare – It’s supposed to be big. It has a much larger effect radius and damage rate (against N and L armor) – so that it can actually be useful to use. For balance it also has a much higher ammo consumption rate from the player’s vehicle. And while I’m not totally enamored with the visual effect, I want it to be big. If a player drives right through it, they should get heavily damaged – hopefully destroyed. Thus, reminding us all to avoid huge balls of fire while driving down the road.
* ISDF Plasma – Actually the original plasmas were green (gtower and plasma). Literally from this game’s original release, I thought this was incredibly inconsistent with other ISDF weaponry appearance and looked more like a Scion weapon (green ion, and blue arcs). Plus I’ve also always associated green weapons fire with aliens or bad guys (thanks, Star Wars Imperial weapons fire.) So I went and made it yellow and red like regular fire. Those shots also have a shell model at their tip now. I consider them to be “plasma-propelled-projectiles” rather than energy weapons –though I did not adjust any of their properties in the odfs. Also, I modified the blast cannon to be yellow like its original BZ(1998) counterpart. So, now the ISDF only has the blast and laser appearing as straight up energy weapons, while everything else is solid projectile based. Thus also trying to contrast them with the Scion weapons which are more energy based in appearance.
* The cons/build - anim only appears to run faster. It’s the same number of frames as the original. This illusion? Is likely because the units actually move faster (modified odf), and I wanted to avoid the taking one step animation, but moving twice the distance “sliding” appearance that the original walking animations had for a number of units. On the Mauler, that one gave me fits. I tried reworking the running animation a number of times, but for some reason the game doesn’t want to use it properly. But since the maulers move so fast, I didn’t want to slow it down too much, as I wanted to avoid the above mentioned sliding look that some things had/have.
* Matriarch – That’s an exhaust effect, like how the new lung shell opens up. It’s supposed to pulse – lots of raw energy being generated by the structure. Plus I wanted some animation for the structure and not have it be so static – and it’s better than the flapping chicken wings my first version had.
* Blast range was deliberately shortened. The walker is NOT supposed to be a long range attack. That’s what the Bulldog is for. The walker is a medium range attack – its engage range, even in the patches, is still only 150m. But when ivwalk got changed to attack at weapon’s range, that’s when it became a long-range attacker because of the blast cannon’s original long range. I believe this was either missed in the changes, or a not so great idea. Either way, I shortened the range of the blast cannon to match up with internal engage range of the ivwalk odf. No more sitting back, if you’re gonna go with Attilas, get’em in the fight like they’re supposed to be, and let the Bulldogs do the long-range work (as the original game intended).
* FAF missile – nope, no change to its odf, in terms of performance. What is different, only on the Thunderbolt, is that the model and odf now uses two rocket hp’s. AND with the unaltered missile odf set up to alternate fire (again not my doing), it will alternate fire. This does seems to cause it to fire a bit faster (noted I thought, in the mod readme file), but the vehicle still has the same ammo amount. If a player goes wild with FAF, they’re going to run out of ammo real fast, and with not every shot guaranteed to hit, this seems like a fair inherent balance.
So thar ya go, thems my reseasoning of why I did some of them thar things I did.
