Drilling vehicles and shield generators

[Clavin12]

I was playing FE the other day in chaos mode where the beam things come down and hurt your buildings and i thought: what if there where buildings to generate shields which would project for a certain size and protect any buildings inside. perhaps to make it more fair whenever the shield got hit the shield generator would get hurt. maybe the enemy could get inside and hurt the buildings from the inside but only when their inside.

-another thought. Would it be possible to make a vehicle that could drill into the ground?

[Nielk1]

It depends on how you want the drilling to work, Cloaking a unit and somehow shifting it underground may work.

As for the shield, SRV has anti artillery shields and a damage field that is just strong enough to kill the super sensitive vehicle based missiles.

[Clavin12]

I was thinking more like one of the scions shields except larger.

[Clavin12]

what about a land modifying vehicle like to a constructor

[bigbadbogie]

It can be dangerous to modify terrain during games. It can cause all kinds of problems.

[Nielk1]

You can edit posts instead of double posting.

Terraforming rigs may be possible, its been an idea for a while and building the appropriately configured building should work.

Larger Scions shields are impossible, its been talked about, never going to happen. Other things can come close and look good doing it though.

I have an old image around here somewhere...
Not mine, just... old...


AMENDMEN:
BBB posted while I was posting. It is not dangerous to perform minor alterations. MP Editing worked in 1.2 didn't it?

[Clavin12]

How about a ship hangar where your ships could go to stay safe from stray shots or enemies rather than a shield?

[Red Spot]

I had some work done for a new race, loosly based on the isdf however their buildings are (partialy) underground. The recy/factory/Sbay all have an entrance with a ramp but the rest is underground. Havent actually tested if the AI likes to use the Sbay but the recy and factory work well. Doesnt really allow you to hide, but does make it a lot harder for strayshots to do damage ...

The biggest difference is AI-pathfinding and how often units get stuck in buildings.


On the subjects of shields. A large m-curtain on a building would more or less create the effect, it however will only stop projectile based weapons so is pointless vs the energy based weapons (eg: stops sp-stab, doesnt stop blast)
There are some effects that can be played with to create an effect of a shield(generator), but I would sooner advice to remove the (annoying)beam from FEs chaos setting ...
(btw, do you play Rev-D, Rev-C ?? Try the different patches, iirc the later versions remove some bugs but also add some annoying factors, like a lot of area-effect damage to some weapons. I do recal that the later versions, for me, sucked the fun out of the MPI-maps which in plain FE where awesome to play with a couple of good players)

[Clavin12]

there should be a shield which reflects energy but projectiles can go through. personally i think energy style weapons are more effective.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Could a drill type weapon be designed to drill/costruct a horizontal tunnel through a hill? Or would that require a DLL to make the actual tunnel construction. And if the tunnel were destroyed would the terrain revert back to it's former solidity minus the tunnel? Ew, my brain hurts just thinkin about it all....

[Nielk1]

The best way to do tunnels and bridges is to have something deploy on a potential spot (DLL prevents scavs from using this sneakily disguised scrap pool) and have the DLL take the object, and use its potion information to place a sright piece until such time that it reaches the end where it would stop and place an exit on the opposing potential spot.

Not really work doing IMO. Any time you would need something in a mission it could be scripted much better as the tunnel would already be there, you would just have to trigger it to 'open'.

[Tempest Storm]

The Terra-forming Rig in the screenshot above I think was from Special Ops MOD, IIRC it used terrain generated through BZ2's exporter to create buildable terrain deformations. Then had a special DLL that would perform ai.calcliffs after it was terraformed. It worked quite well but I think the problem with it was that ai.calcliffs didn't work in Multiworld making it a SP only feature.

[Nielk1]

Odd, whenever I edit terrain the paths view automatically shows the new cliffs, or is this not true for MP?

[AHadley]

Jamsh has his bridge-builder unit.

[Nielk1]

Jamsh has his bridge-builder unit.

And who do you think is involved in that?