New CW3 gamemode suggestion(s)

[ghostwalker13]

I was looking at some of the game modes there are available right now, and I started thinking.
Maybe add a new one!

I thought about the player controlling a mech/suit (or what you call it) like in Stewbasic's Platformer.
And there would also be an A.I controlled one and you both had to lay down units ( 2D of course ) to defend or attack each other.
Your suits would have guns like in the credits mini-game at the end of CW3.

Recap:

• Suits would have guns
• You would fight eachother with guns and units
• The maps that you would fight on would have to be 2D

If you think my idea is a good one, please comment about it below.
Also, if you have anything to add to this/that post below, all excepted.
--------------
For Expert Coders:

Here's a challenge.
If this idea gets over, say... 100 good posts about it, then I want you to try code a template for this to take place.
If completed, please either p.m them to me or email them to me at: [redacted email]
[ PLEASE! NO VIRUSES! I don't want to continuously rid my PC of malware every minute. ]
The best ones will be used in the first map that I will make.
Oh, feel free to use your completed templates for your own maps if you want to, I don't mind!  :P

Units:
If you want to make a model/image of the in-game units, feel free to create some.
But keep in mind, that sometimes you need to rotate them either way, so also add a turn other direction script to your template.

That's all from me, Good Luck!
[ I can't stress enough... If emailing, I DON'T WANT ANY MALWARE!  >:( ] 

I removed your email address. We don't permit activities that expose the privacy of our community to scrapers, bots and other mechanisms that harvest email addresses for spam and malware distribution. People can contact you through the PM (Private Message) system here or you can enable direct email contact in your profile.

[warren]

Real people don't infect other people with malware these days. Malware is institutionalized.

I once considered creating a super tank with some weapons you could click on to take control of then drive into the creeper with. Just one problem. I don't like tanks.

[ghostwalker13]

To warren,

What about super-viruses that leave no trace of activity and track your logs for internet usage?
Malware would actually classify that in it's categories.

Anyways, I like the idea of a tank, but we'll see what idea is rated better by the community.
( no hard feelings...  :-[ )

Thanks for the tank idea though, it's quite a good idea.

[Grayzzur]

It's impossible to leave NO trace and still communicate data off to some other server, but most people wouldn't know it's happening.

[planetfall]

I had the idea of tanks as well, which would have multiple ports for weapons. When building the tank you could mix and match different weapons or utility items (shields, speed upgrades, etc) and each would require a different amount of resources. I eventually abandoned the idea because a GUI that clearly indicates what is being built would be tricky. But not impossible...

[ghostwalker13]

Yeah. Could do that, but how would you implement movement without having all the different components stay behind.
What I'm basically saying is:

   "How would you move the tank without the other components staying behind."

Because you know, you move one thing and you can't attach another thing to the moving one.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's impossible.

[Grayzzur]

As long as you have the UnitID of the units in question...

Code Select Expand


<<UnitID>> CONST_COORDX <<NewXCoord>> SetUnitAttribute
<<UnitID>> CONST_COORDY <<NewYCoord>> SetUnitAttribute


Or the PIXELCOORD versions for more fine-grained movements.

[planetfall]

Back in my day we had this script called UnitRider...

(example: http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=15528)

Of course, that's just the original, highly limited version, and over time I updated it to be multipurpose. For example, in a couple newer maps (won't plug TOO much here :P) there are some enemies that are stationary but can rotate, and have smaller components (which are actually fully-fledged units in their own right, except they can't move of their own volition) that rotate along with them. Then again, that was nearly a year ago. Maybe I should return... but I managed to somehow turn the mapmaking process into a chore, so perhaps not.

So, yes. The recent version of UnitRider would be perfect for keeping weapons on the same spot relative to a vehicle constantly changing location and rotation.

[warren]

You know the secret to not making it a chore? Don't update on a schedule. At least it works for me.

[planetfall]

That's not what I mean. I had made the workflow needlessly tangled.

First of all, there's no word wrap in CRPL, so I have to place all the line breaks in all that dialogue by hand. Why did I decide to go for a custom dialogue window? Because I ran out of character image slots for my needlessly large cast. (Also, it was useful being able to display unit images, for help menus.) And, if I go back and change an old unit, I have to also change its help text, which is a few more panels of manual line-breaking.

Secondly, the games were getting incredibly complex. This was OK gameplay-wise, because I had taken a number of measures to optimize the scripts over previous versions, and there was ample help text and everything had a descriptive name and everything was functionally very distinctive. The problem here was that now I had upwards of 50 scripts, and a lot of them had rather similar names, or were "meta" scripts that defined behaviors (and worse, bookkeeping) rather than objects. And since scripts were always sorted alphabetically, sometimes functionally related scripts were far from one another. For example, if I had a modification to the behavior of all missiles, BHMissile.crpl is near the top of the list and TerraMissile.crpl is near the bottom. So I grabbed an old python program originally intended to solve a very simple file organization problem through the most ghastly, overcomplicated way imaginable, and I repurposed it for searching scripts. Then I decided to import skynet. I wanted to make it even more complicated, because I wanted to have other utilities to manipulate the scripts automatically, for example to change the UID of the core they use for global variables. And, because the program was only looking at the scripts in a single map's script folder, this introduced another problem: if the utilities are run via the editor assistant, then they either need to be hardcoded in (ugh!) or stored in the folder with the game scripts. And if the utility scripts are stored with the game scripts, CW3 won't know what to do with them and won't compile. So then I have to store the scripts in another folder, and overwrite them in the folder the game is looking at, and... ugh. Not pretty. Every time I have to fix a typo, I have to run another program to sync the scripts up, just to fit my desire for a single, definitive master set of scripts (which I decided upon after Turkos Prime being stupidly delayed by having 3 different sets of scripts, none of them completely updated and with different modifications being made to each.)

...I could probably do it better with symlinks, couldn't I? I wonder how CW3 would respond to that. Back in a mo!

[warren]

Wow. That is quite the workflow.

I only know strategies to fix two of those. I would run external scripts from a (on windows) .bat file put on the path (windows directory). I would use name mangling <prefix>.<scriptname>.crpl for grouping purposes.

But currently I only have eight or so scripts that I reuse. I just remember the most recent project and that is the current master copy.

[ghostwalker13]

 :o
:o
:o

I have no idea what to do then.
It's official!

Anyways though, could you use the "<<UnitID>> CONST_COORD[input x or y here ]) <<NewXCoord>> SetUnitAttribute" script with the tank and move it? Well by some evidence it works. But what I'm going to ask is this.
   

Does this work like the "wielder" in Garry's Mod?

Where, if you move the object another object is wielded to (stuck to), both objects move.
Obviously, the rules of physics sort-of apply in CW3 and we play in a 2D world up to down. So, don't expect that a unit will be flying across the map on hover-balls.  :P
( Even though it is possible. Hint at Stewbasics next 2D left to right map. )

All from me for now, cya.

[warren]

The correct way to move a tank made out of multiple cores is simply:
Move all the cores. From the same script.

In the world of programming, nothing works, until you do it yourself. Or buy someone else's code, of course.

If that is what you are asking.

[Grayzzur]

Or you could make it be a single core with multiple custom images, and have one core handle all the logic (as long as you don't hit the maximum number of instructions per core per game tick limit).