A Path Beyond Aircraft crash and burn

[Chaos_Knight]

Alright, not to litter the naval topic I've decided to start this one.

Some backstory:

1 hour ago, Chaos_Knight said:

You know what I was thinking about a while back?

The idea occured to me once "crashing" aircraft were implemented. Is it possible to make a script that would turn destroyed aircraft/naval into a different vehicle rather than the "projectile"? So that people won't just "pop out" and fall to their doom long before even their vehicle does. And once "wreck's" velocity drops below certain point (aka when it landed on something) it quickly loses all HP and explodes dealing some damage to the driver and nearby objects susceptible to AOE. You can exit manually of course.

<...>

Aircraft in meanwhile will benefit from this in a way since it would allow for a parachute logic substitude (just sit in there while your heli goes down). If drivers of certain vehicles need to die, you can always add demo truck script to the "crashing" version. The only downside to this is making aircraft explode when they hit water surface rather than sea bottom but I guess making "wreck" take damage from "swimming" zones could solve that.

To address some points made by Pushwall so far:

1 hour ago, Pushwall said:

Something to note is it has a slight unintended nerf to AA defenses in that AIs continue to treat a crashlanding unit as a valid target - and in fact a preferred target since it has 1 HP

So def logic relies on HP rather than target armor type? Since I could've sworn flame towers preferred my full HP cap to red health ranger nearby. Hm, that might be a problem indeed. Unless wreck is made with slightly more HP than the base unit to make defences switch. After all, I think kill script for it should be able to deduct any amount of HP per second, right?

1 hour ago, Pushwall said:

and also a nerf to Volkov since everyone else can also survive a helicopter crash

This one can be avoided by making people lose some armor in explosion while Kov would only lose health which he would be able to quickly regenerate with no consequences. And/or just make him more resistant to crash explosion in general. I can imagine that helicopter fuel can't really melt that steel guy  

1 hour ago, Pushwall said:

a nerf to Chinooks in that even if you manage to reach the enemy base, you'd better be able to get everyone away from the Chinook before it blows and heavily damages/kills everyone...

Well, to be completely fair, in RA1 nook just murdered everyone inside when it detonated even on land but that obviously won't do here. Then again, it would make sense for aircraft transport to be more volatile when going down compared to diesel-powered APC/ST for example + it's more mobile already and has decent HP last time I checked.
It's also sort of a buff to nook also because you'll be able to just drop into the enemy base from high altitude (no need to spend time landing) deep-strike style. And maybe even kill someone on the ground in the process  

[Pushwall]

35 minutes ago, Chaos_Knight said:

So def logic relies on HP rather than target armor type? Since I could've sworn flame towers preferred my full HP cap to red health ranger nearby. Hm, that might be a problem indeed. Unless wreck is made with slightly more HP than the base unit to make defences switch. After all, I think kill script for it should be able to deduct any amount of HP per second, right?

It cares about target type (infantry, light vehicle, heavy vehicle, aircraft, or building - different AI objects prioritise these differently), as well as HP (more HP lost = higher priority), distance to target (closer = higher priority) and unit cost (more expensive = higher priority). Since there's only two different units that AA defenses can even attempt to target in the first place, which are both aircraft that have the same price, the deciding factors in what they target in this case just boil down to HP and distance

[Pushwall]

The other thing is that not only will defenses keep shooting at falling helis - but from my experience defenses tend to not switch target unless there's a drastic difference in priority between the current target and other targets in range. Which is probably a thing danpaul intentionally did so you can't fake out a defense and make it rotate in circles forever trying to go between two targets that have slightly different priorities.. Low HP doesn't change priority nearly as much as, for example, being an infantry instead of a light vehicle in the eyes of a flame tower. So even if I were to figure out a way to detect when heli is crashlanding and refill its HP, it would still likely be preferred over other nearby helis.

[Chaos_Knight]

18 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

The other thing is that not only will defenses keep shooting at falling helis - but from my experience defenses tend to not switch target unless there's a drastic difference in priority between the current target and other targets in range. Which is probably a thing danpaul intentionally did so you can't fake out a defense and make it rotate in circles forever trying to go between two targets that have slightly different priorities.. Low HP doesn't change priority nearly as much as, for example, being an infantry instead of a light vehicle in the eyes of a flame tower. So even if I were to figure out a way to detect when heli is crashlanding and refill its HP, it would still likely be preferred over other nearby helis.

And what about making it "cost" 0?

[Pushwall]

13 minutes ago, Chaos_Knight said:

And what about making it "cost" 0?

1 hour ago, Pushwall said:

And anyone who was around to test the "old" Chronotank script back at BHP might have an idea about how irritating the workarounds are for taking a vehicle that is currently occupied and replacing it with a separate vehicle preset for different physics different price, while still retaining the occupants.

And naturally a falling aircraft is going to get closer to the AA as it falls (unless it's also on the retreat as it gets shot down), so a falling aircraft's priority is still going to increase as a result...

Basically this is another thing for @moonsense715 to do with regards to crashland logic - just make AI ignore crashlanding objects. If that's possible then that saves us against all these convoluted workarounds.

Also wtf happened to consecutive posts being automatically merged?

[Chaos_Knight]

10 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

Basically this is another thing for @moonsense715 to do with regards to crashland logic - just make AI ignore crashlanding objects.

Yeah, that really seems to be the only solution indeed.

13 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

Also wtf happened to consecutive posts being automatically merged?

Forum engine upgrade happened AFAIK. It doesn't seem to either be configured to automerge yet or doesn't support it anymore.

[Pushwall]

1 hour ago, Chaos_Knight said:

This one can be avoided by making people lose some armor in explosion while Kov would only lose health which he would be able to quickly regenerate with no consequences. And/or just make him more resistant to crash explosion in general. I can imagine that helicopter fuel can't really melt that steel guy

Something I was considering for Volkov was him having an armour bar that cannot be depleted, or just removing his armour and baking the armour resistance percentages into his "skin" - both would have the exact same effect (though both could be confusing in their own different ways - either "why is this guy's health going down so slowly compared to other people with no armour" or "why does this guy even have an armour bar if it can't be depleted") and would play nicely with the idea of having heli crashes primarily affect armour and doing so in a way Volkov doesn't care much about. Though the Volkov thing would certainly need some other balancing factor since it means he can't be whittled down to a more vulnerable state like everyone else can.

[Pushwall]

Another thing that's forbidding us from using crashland mechanics for helicopters is that right now, kill tracking doesn't work properly against anything that uses them. You get no killstring and no kill points/kill cash for downing them. You may have seen this already with the Yak, but that's an issue constrained to one map currently (and apparently not having much impact as Yaks still don't seem to be giving Soviets much of a fighting chance anyway). Having that fixed is another thing on the scripts to-do list and once that's sorted, we can try this out.

[MPRA2]

7 hours ago, Pushwall said:

Another thing that's forbidding us from using crashland mechanics for helicopters is that right now, kill tracking doesn't work properly against anything that uses them. You get no killstring and no kill points/kill cash for downing them. You may have seen this already with the Yak, but that's an issue constrained to one map currently (and apparently not having much impact as Yaks still don't seem to be giving Soviets much of a fighting chance anyway). Having that fixed is another thing on the scripts to-do list and once that's sorted, we can try this out.

regarding the YaK, I'm not entirely sure how you can implement a buff to it in order to give the Soviets more of a fighting chance, but I do think expanding the map, or at least the flight ceiling/OoB areas (if possible), just a little bit to give pilots some more breathing room from the AA guns (if the allies repairwhore them) and rocket soldiers/M60s littering the sky with lead and AA rockets.

Dont know if you are planning that already, but the YaK definitely doesnt need any damage buffs, as it can half health a main building in 3 or 4 strafe runs if majority shells hit.

[Pushwall]

8 minutes ago, MPRA2 said:

regarding the YaK, I'm not entirely sure how you can implement a buff to it in order to give the Soviets more of a fighting chance, but I do think expanding the map, or at least the flight ceiling/OoB areas (if possible), just a little bit to give pilots some more breathing room from the AA guns (if the allies repairwhore them) and rocket soldiers/M60s littering the sky with lead and AA rockets.

Dont know if you are planning that already, but the YaK definitely doesnt need any damage buffs, as it can half health a main building in 3 or 4 strafe runs if majority shells hit.

I'm already planning a flight ceiling increase and opening up the map boundaries in areas that ground units can't really make use of (like the river and mountains).