Custom Map #170: The Crawler. By: eduran

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This topic is for discussion of map #170: The Crawler


Author: eduran
Size: 115x74

Desc:
An ancient war machine - corrupted by Creeper - has survived the ravages of time. Do you have what it takes to beat it? ! Requires game version 1.69 or later ! #CRPL: custom enemy #Digitalis #Runners #NoSpores #NoTerps

[Helper]

This is outstanding!
Still working it.
H

[Grayzzur]

"Oh, I'll just do the hard version first." Geez. What did you do to the creeper on the lake? It does NOT push back easily, even though it's really, really thin.

[eduran]

It's mostly the emitters. I was surprised by that, too. My guess is that depth 1-2 creeper makes mortars very ineffective while PCs struggle with the sheer amount of creeper that is produced by a 1/0.03 emitter.
The lake also fills with depth 1 creeper from the corners, but that only matters once the emitters are gone.

[Grayzzur]

The lake also fills with depth 1 creeper from the corners, but that only matters once the emitters are gone.

Aha. That. You might consider allowing that to be shut down, say once all 5 lake emitters are toast. I found it rather annoying and disconcerting to have a constant flow of creeper at my back with no emitters.

Nicely done units. I like the way the leeches hover around the crawler when they want to repair but the pads are full. (That wasn't much of an issue on this version, but those suckers are hard to take down on the harder map.)

[knucracker]

I enjoyed this map as well.  It took a little while to figure out Creeper was flowing in from the left... but when I did I just had to leave a few PC's behind to keep it held back.
The flight behavior of the flying units is really cool.

It made me think about various possibilities...
Things like air bases for both the enemy and yourself that have air units that take off and dog fight with each other.  When not fighting each other they might leech, or bomb Creeper/AC.  Of course enemy Beams (done in CRPL) might also have to be implemented that would shoot down the player owned air units.

In any case, I like maps that make me think about possible things I've not considered before...

[eduran]

Things like air bases

Totally off-topic, but I am currently revisiting my River Crossing map, with the intention of replacing the swimming Leeches with airborne ones. Does an airport with a landing strip sound like a good idea? Sure, that can't be too hard to do. Except... getting the Leeches to actually point in the right direction when reaching a waypoint (the start of the landing strip) is pretty complicated.
The screenshot shows my best attempt so far: The Leech is supposed to face to the right when it reaches the 'approach point' (the cell at the foot of the arrow). To do that it checks the length of four possible paths and chooses the shortest of the lot (in this case, the yellow one). Working on that really makes me appreciate the effort that must have gone into allowing Bombers/Strafers to follow a player-drawn line.

[knucracker]

I know, it's nuts isn't it?  The first time I encountered this problem I just smiled and put my head forward on the desk in front of my keyboard for a minute.  What a wonderful little algorithmic surprise that pops up out of nowhere.  When you plan for flying a unit around you just don't intuitively assume there will be this interesting little challenge that pops up.  But, that's why we do this kind of thing... just for surprising little challenges that come up :)

The 'right' way involves the turning radius and calculating where to position a circle with a radius equal to the turning radius needs to be so that the target line and the aircraft travel line are at tangents.... Or something like that.

The cheap way is to do pretty much what you are doing, but to use two point for alignment.  Your target line of flight (the runway) forms a line.  Project out from that two point on the same line.  Fly to the first one, then the second one, then the beginning of runway.  You can do more than two points (say 3 or 4).  Each can be close to the previous and each refines to direction of  travel a little but.  Doing this you asymptotically approach the right travel line.  And of course once you reach the beginning of the target line (the runway) you turn towards the end of the runway for one final alignment.

This is how most people will fly a plane when playing a game.  If they are approaching a runway in a mostly perpendicular direction they will fly to a spot out past the beginning of the runway and make a sharp turn.  They won't turn toward the start of the runway, though, since they are still coming in at an angle.  Instead they will repeat the process at a point out from the end of the runway but of course closer than they currently are.  After one or two more times doing that they are out of space to refine the flight path so they crash her into the virtual pavement.

Note that the tighter the turning radius the fewer refinement targets are required before it just doesn't matter anymore.  You can also make the pre-runway target points be closer in.

Now I'm all ears for other novel approaches to this problem, or if someone wants to work out the actual geometric problem of a single point to fly to so that you only have to make a single turn to be right on the path of the target line.

Lat thought for anyone else who read this far and wants to give up because it seems like too much trouble... Just make a ufo that looks like something from Mars Attacks!... then you don't have to worry about flight paths and can move from A to B with a zero turning radius :)

[Clean0nion]

Lat thought for anyone else who read this far and wants to give up because it seems like too much trouble... Just make a ufo that looks like something from Mars Attacks!... then you don't have to worry about flight paths and can move from A to B with a zero turning radius :)

That's why I use circular sprites!

And this whole thing is what I hate about projects... I have to finish one thing before I can start work on a fancy, new, cool thing. Very few of the things I'm currently working on have new-concept scripts in them - and the one that does is too insanely complex for me to fathom.

[Helper]

"Does an airport with a landing strip sound like a good idea?"

When all you progrummers get bored, give some thought to an aircraft carrier for some of these island campaigns. Load it up with fuel, ammo, Strafers, & Bombers and project your force across vast oceans to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy.

H

[eduran]

I've posted a follow-up on the flying units discussion over in the Coder's Corner: http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=15387.0

[planetfall]

For me (game version 1.72), it gets laggy once the leech arrives, to the point of it being unplayable. Packets move super slow, guns freeze for a second, then fire and swivel at normal speed, then freeze again...

And it was such a cool map too  :'(

[eduran]

Odd, I never ran into anything like that. Could you share your savegame or a screenshot of the situation?

[Jamz]

For me (game version 1.72), it gets laggy once the leech arrives, to the point of it being unplayable. Packets move super slow, guns freeze for a second, then fire and swivel at normal speed, then freeze again...

And it was such a cool map too  :'(

Yeah, this also happened to me too. And like you, I'm also on v1.72, Windows 7 64-Bit.
However, it seems it only lags when the beam is firing at the leech. Initially when the leech flew over towards me, there was no problem even whilst my cannons were firing. But once my beam finished construction and began to fire, then boom, laggy.
But strange thing is though, that some other things seem to continue moving at normal speed. For example the crawler doesn't seem to lag and continues moving normally. Also, the countdown timer to when the crawler drops an emitter or lets loose another leech doesn't seem to slow down. And, mission time seems to flow at normal speed as well except that clicking x2, x3 or x4 speed doesn't actually change the mission speed.

Oh and just so you know, I was playing this map but on the harder version ie Map #171 but I think the same problem is applying with both maps #170 and #171.

[Jamz]

Yup, just checked it one more time and it's happening again.
Only happens when the beam fires. Whilst the beam was firing and lagging, I destroyed the beam and after a few seconds, it started working smoothly again... until I built the beam again.

I guess if it was working fine before, then maybe it's the update to v1.72 that's caused this?  ???