Unvanquished Forum

Have a look at our turret:

We'd like to add another human defense structure to the game that uses the same or a very similiar¹ stand as the turret and is close to it in size and style. The head/body of the buildable shall be a rocket pod that hosts a good number of small missiles (ca. 30). The missiles should not be visibly sticking outside of the structure as it will really have unlimited ammunition (just like the turret). Have a look at the missile launchers at the side torso of this mech for an example of such a system.

The gameplay design of the rocket pod is still a bit rough, but since the human team only has two defense structures so far (one of them being unlocked in late game) it will certainly fill a niche.

Here's the current gameplay draft:

The rocket pod is a structure similiar in size and price to the turret. It fires small unguided (or just slightly guided) missiles that kill a dretch on hit. The damage per second is significantly below that of the turret but its reach is a lot higher. Mssiles can be dodged when fired from some distance but at a low distance, dodging gets increasingly harder, even for small aliens. The delay between a line of sight and firing a shot is directly linked to the turning time of the turrets head and thus low (there is no or just a neglible additional spinup time). Thanks to Norfenstein for the idea.

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¹ If your concept copies the foot and/or the pneumatic stand of the turret we can later have the modeler reuse the turret's source.

I'm on it!

Here's an idea for that.
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That looks very good! Be aware that the rockets will most likely be unguided, so the head won't face upwards but forwards or even slightly downwards (dretches) most of the time (it will look like in your sketch when shooting down flying aliens though). Due to the usual bounding box badness, the head should be slightly more compact, maybe a single row less and/or putting the guidance system a bit closer to the missile racks. I don't think it's necessary to put that in the sketch, we can just tell the modeler to mind the proportions.

There's not much more to say, you picked up the requirements perfectly! Maybe chris (hwo modeled the turret) would like to have a last word, for my part I'd put it in the modeling queue.

chris, maybe you'd also like to share your thoughts on using your turret's stand for this model? Are you fine with that? Is it technically possible? What are the differences? Can animations be reused? Would you prefer to do the model yourself or have someone else do it? Can you release and link the turret's source files accordingly?

Thanks for the feedback Viech. I'm glad you like it. the modification are tricky but it's my job to rise to the challenge so I shall fix it if it's necessary.

After the rocket pod, would you like to take a look at the tesla generator, or do another weapon?

Incredible job you've been doing, by the way. I'm honestly stunned by the quality and rapid pace of your work.

Do we really want the tesla generator? I'd rather focus on weapons and mandatory buildables for now. Depending on how easy it is to recycle parts of the turret, it might make more sense to design a third defense structure in a smiliar way.

Alex, this is something a modeler can fix in seconds, so don't worry about it. (It's also not in any way related to the quality of your concept but just to the design of our engine.)

So you won't need any fixing on the Rocket Pod? It's a bit dumb but fixing the angle would require quite a bit of work because the whole perspective is in that angle. And, as you mention, the modeller can fix this in a minute.

I don't mind doing weapon, they're a lot of fun and a new challenge.
The Tesla generator was also interesting so if you need it feel free to throw it my way.

Oh, the angle isn't really relevant, I just wanted to let you know that the missiles are unguided and thus this won't be the most common angle.

Just to clarify: When I said the following,

Viech wrote:

Alex, this is something a modeler can fix in seconds, so don't worry about it. (It's also not in any way related to the quality of your concept but just to the design of our engine.)

I was talking about the height of the launcher, not the angle. The reason is what I mentioned earlier:

Viech wrote:

Due to the usual bounding box badness, the head should be slightly more compact, maybe a single row less and/or putting the guidance system a bit closer to the missile racks. I don't think it's necessary to put that in the sketch, we can just tell the modeler to mind the proportions.

Anyway, your sketch is good. We can just tell the modeler to work with any angle that is most comfortable to work with and to either 1) move the head a bit closer to the stand or 2) make the head itself a bit lower. That way the rocket pod will have roughly the (bounding box) size of the turret, which is desireable for gameplay reasons.

Regarding the tesla, I'd postpone it for now. Feel free to grab any gun you want! Maybe you'd be interesting in providing a concept for the chaingun (read portable heavy machine gun)?

kharnov wrote:

Chaingun

The rapid-fire weapon of the human team, a shell-based machine gun. It fires very fast and does decent damage, but the shots are spread over a wide circle due to the recoil of the weapon, rendering it inaccurate at long range. Our concept model has a rotating barrel design, but we are also interested in a single-barrel design, something like a modern portable machine gun, except more futuristic. Since the weapon doesn't reload, it does not need a reload animation. Instead, it would only need a firing animation and an idle animation.

I can start on that Chaingun while we finalise the Painsaw.