Hover tank collection

[Wormbo]

I guess this deserves a thread of its own.

The Firebug
[video][/video]
Dual flame throwers mounted on a smaller tank chassis are pure terror for infantry. As if the flames and agility weren't enough, the Firebug can even perform a flame jump by redirecting some if the flamer fuel through its thruster system. This allows for quick evasive maneuvers against many attacks. The flame throwers also proved useful for AVRiL defense, bots are annoyingly efficient doing that. Last but not least, if you manage to kill it anyway, you don't want to stand nearby, because the remaining flamer fuel is purposefully not contained in accident-proof tanks and causes the tank to go out with a huge fire ball and massive damage.
Needless to say that flame throwers are only short range weapons. The Firebug doesn't have any means to fight off enemies that are either further away or high above.

The Poltergeist
[video][/video]
The only vehicle of the collection that was used in a map already. Primary fire is a heat ray like that of the UT3 Darkwalker, secondary fire is an energy shock wave that pretty much penetrates anything in its path, though with varying efficiency. Currently without a gunner seat this is a vehicle that can defend itself against many kinds of ground attacks, but has a hard time if air units show up. The shock wave is a good way to get rid of incoming AVRiLs, but can be hard to time for that purpose.
While currently a one-seater, I planned to add a rocket pack for air defense. You have to admit that a Goliath's gunner seat is quite boring at times. Your weapon is too weak to quickly take out enemy vehicles, and if you attack ground targets, the driver might "steal" your kills. Now the Poltergeist gunner seat would be different. You'd have anti-air and long-range surface-to-surface rockets at your disposal to effectively take care of targets the driver currently can't take care of.
(I guess I could provide both versions because it's quite a balancing change.)

The Odin
[video][/video]
Consider it a hovering deployed Leviathan with fewer health and without splash damage. Its main turret fires a high-energy beam not unlike the Railgun Tank, but stronger and thicker. Like the Poltergeist's weapons, it can only be aimed up and down, not left or right. That and the Odin's size and lack of agility make it a bit difficult to aim. Even more so if you have idiots on your team that "help" by pushing from behind. (Stupid bots!) But if you manage to aim on target and cope with the charge-up time, you have a weapon that does considerable amounts of damage to anything in its path. Infantry won't survive a hit and neither will smaller vehicles, like Mantas, Raptors or Scorpions. But the Odin with only a driver is vulnerable to pretty much any more agile vehicle. A Manta, Raptor or Firebug that stays out of the main turret's way should easily be able to destroy an Odin without gunners.
For defense and additional fire power (as if it didn't have enough already) the Odin has not one, but two twin-beam link turrets, on on the left and the other on the right side of the main turret. The gunners have blind spots due to the large ion turret, but anything they can reach will be in trouble. Primary fire is a dual plasma projectile mode. The shots will bounce twice from walls, so a skilled gunner might be able to attack a target that isn't even in sight. Secondary mode is an energy-transferring "sticky" twin beam that locks on to all vehicles and friendly nodes. Friendly stuff is healed, enemy stuff damaged (of course), but enemy nodes, cores and vehicles will also be used to draw energy for the Odin's self-repair system. While a turret eats away on the target's health, the Odin is slowly healed. The beam mode isn't infinitely thin, as e.g. the Linkgun beam, so it should be a bit easier to destroy enemy projectiles (AVRiLs, Redeemers, Spiders) with it.

The Nekomata
[video][/video]
Your standard tank, but with hover thrusters instead of treads. The main turret is fixed forward, like for most other hover tanks. It is a bit more agile than the Goliath and can obviously also cross deeper water, as you'd expect. Not much to say here, except that the model was created by Crusha K. Rool and Hellfire, who created the skin and exported it to a format I could work with.

The Nephthys
[video][/video]
This hover tank is based on the Nekomata chassis, but equipped with a powerful point singularity generator. Primary fire shoots smaller point singularities that release electric discharges at nearby targets and implode on impact. Secondary fire charges a full-blown gravity vortex that, after a short warm-up period, will suck in any nearby objects, causing massive damage to anyone or anything that didn't manage to escape in time. The sucking itself doesn't actually cause any damage (unless you are ran over by a sucked-in vehicle - tough luck ), but merely moves victims into position for electric discharges. Also, if objects are sucked in close enough to touch the core of the gravity vortex, it briefly inverts its gravitational pull and causes a shockwave that damages anything nearby. Another, slightly larger shockwave is created when the vortex eventually collapses.
The Nephthys also has a gunner seat that controls a lightning turret very similar to the Lightning Gun, but with a slightly higher rate of fire and a bit more damage.

The Hover Goliath
(suggestions for a better name are welcome; no video yet - you know how the Goliath looks like)
Just the Goliath, except that treads have been replaced by a hover engine for greater maneuverability. It is not quite as agile as the Nekomata, but since its main cannon is not fixed forward, the Hover Goliath has a much better aim when moving.


Download
ONS-IslandHop-HoverMeUp-RC1.7z

[Wormbo]

Added videos for all hover tanks (except the Hover Goliath), as that's the best way (next to hands-on testing) to get an idea how they work.

[Wormbo]

Added a download link for beta 1.

[laboRHEinz]

Hey Wormbo,

thanks a lot for posting your new vehicle collection here! Must have been an awful lot of work, so kudos to you!

I'm afraid I didn't find the time yet to provide decent feedback and I hardly won't for every single vehicle in the near future either. However, at least, I do have several ideas of general aspects when developing and introducing new vehicles, mainly in regards of power balance. I hope I'll be able to phrase them by the next weekend.

Cya then.

[Pegasus]

To my mind, the most pertinent question still pending here before getting into any of that is, whether this content is showcased because Wormbo simply wished to share with everyone custom content he made for his own fun, curiosity and/or personal dev skills improvement, or if it's being presented with the intention of seeing these vehicles featured in live play on public servers such as this one. If the former is the case, then all anyone could reasonably comment on that IMO is something to the tune of "good job, sir; you're an experienced Uscript coder and this pack only further serves to illustrate your improving abilities to turn out [semi-]complete content all on your own, which is pretty damn cool these days!" without any need to go into any further analysis. On the other hand, if these vecs are expected/hoped to be seen participating in online play, you can bet the line of stakeholders wanting to raise gameplay and balancing concerns is gonna start forming pretty quick and, depending on the server, they should be expected to offer diverging improvement suggestions as well and according to their own community's particular preferences. So yeah, let's just wait to hear what exactly the goal of being given a taste of all this is first before offering any more solid a design critique.

For what it's worth though, I'm already seriously digging this new flamethrower mechanic (way better than anything else we've seen so far in that regard; dual action too!) and would love to see it in online action - just not necessarily pouring out from a hemispherical turret or coming from a "floating mattress" type vehicle drivetrain .

At any rate, thanks for choosing to share with us your latest creations, mr. Worms. Always interesting to see what you've been tinkering with in your UT shed .

[Wormbo]

I do hope people like the vehicles enough to be used online. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are very welcome, and if there are requests for recombining the weapons with other vehicles, I'd happily do that as well. However, since I can't create new models, I am stuck with what it in the game unless someone with adequate skills can help out.

[Pegasus]

Let me be clear here, I'm absolutely not making any accusations of bad taste or poor effort here or anything like that; the comment was merely a casual, offhanded observation about how the goliath chassis can look kinda blocky and/or silly when its tracks aren't there and it's floating in mid-air. When you're surrounded by several such vecs at the core area like in that beta map, you're kinda bound to notice it. Also, the plain edgy/polygonal look of this Nekomata thing brings back ancient Battlezone memories, while I'm at it .
But your choice is absolutely understandable and I'd rather have things this way where our community still has some decent Uscript devs hanging around and they're able to quickly prototype any novel idea or mechanic they might come up with through repurposing existing UT assets - even in hacky or kludgy fashion sometimes (hey, the world's filled with hacks after all, if anyone bothers to look under proverbial engineering carpets) - to put something new together for all to test out than go with the alternative, i.e. have skilled texture artists or modellers around that could make anything look cool and mean as hell but still be stagnating because there's no coder to actually get anything off the ground. Cool visual (re)design suggestions for any new vec that proves itself useful ingame will surely follow and eventually someone's bound to roll in, fire up their ZBrush/zModeler and realize one for us . Until then, we'll get by by playing mr. Potato Head with the various UT Lego pieces we got or, at most, try to be inventive by stretching and manipulating static meshes and attaching those to new vecs' turrets (although it would cost a bit of server net resources, I imagine) angling for a better visual result, but eh, you do what you can.
Point is, flame tanks speak very much to the lil pyromaniac still inside me, so I can easily hold out hope for a more proper version of one finally gracing ONS and looking something more ferocious than a standard goliath with a red coat of paint compared to the existing visual gameography out there (mostly specimens from the Command & Conquer RTS franchise, generally a very fertile ground to borrow and port over interesting vec concepts from IMO). Same goes for sexier hover tank concepts (especially this one I've held on to to show you guys for awhile ), assuming ONS gameplay stands to benefit from having 'em there. Anyways, 'nuff daydreamin' for now.

[Wormbo]

I absolutely agree about the visuals, but as long as only a coder is involved, you'll have to deal with programmer art. I can only try to make it look as good as possible with the means I have. For example, the Firebug's turret is actually placed on the AS-Mothership turret's base to get a cleaner look. I even went as far as exporting the Ion Turret base mesh to T3D and cut away the huge disc. Luckily it was easily distinguishable because it used another material; I'd have removed the entry platform as well, if I could.

Personally I'd like to see the Tiberian Dawn flame tank be modeled. I'd even try creating more convincing tank physics for that, using actual SVehicleWheels instead of KRepulsors. And if the model is done right, it can look as cleanly as the UT3 Goliath does. For a hover tank I thought of the one from Tiberian Sun first. Floating tank-ish chassis with a rocket battery on it. The only one available in UT2004 is the Leviathan's and you already know how that one will look when attached to the Goliath chassis.

[Pegasus]

Heh, I remember you invoking your arcane "programmer art" powers during the Railtank's maiden days and I was pretty much cool with it from the get go. Didn't know that sticking the ion cannon turret on a goliath hull would require model editing to pull off respectably (figured the base disc would just be immersed into the chassis without sticking out and thus stay unnoticed), but props for going the extra mile with it - even if the ladder is still there .
Also, yeah, the Firebug's turret was definitely from AS-Mothership and, I suppose, even if ppl weren't very familiar with it, considering how we'd pretty much already gone through everything else in UT's weapon-looking resources shed, that one was bound to get used at some point; I think Kamek was the only one that had brought this specific turret to ONS before this as a controlled stationary turret in one of his wackier Minus edits. In a way, the convex ending of those barrels helps bring out the fire spewing concept (although IMO the idle-state flames could stand to be coming out a bit more like they do with typical flamethrowers), but the overall harmless, R2D2-esque appearance of the turret itself (:p) was what prompted my initial comment on it. Anyways, just nitpicking here.
Another notion I sorta want to preempt, both because it's been alluded to by both of us already here, but also because there's already been some C&C content ported over to UT2004 already in the form of AS maps (AS-C&C-TiberianDawn, AS-C&C-TiberianSun-v3, etc.) and elsewhere - faithfully or less so - is the concept that in the face of apparent gametype stagnation, bringing over vecs from other games by the bunches would be a good way to treat the problem. Thing is though, even with C&C - a very renowned franchise, up until the early 00's anyway, whose staunch and vocal supporters here I'd certainly include myself amongst - not every unit from that game was a success and, further still, even among those it doesn't necessarily follow that porting 'em over to ONS would automatically be a good idea. Combine that with the fact that most ONS maps do not typically feature the wet element for purposes beyond aesthetics (I got over 15gigs of ONS-related cached content n' 8yrs of playing experience and I can only come up with few maps where there's enough water to create gameplay-significant impassable regions) and, due to that fact hover vehicles still haven't proven their case regarding being beneficial to gameplay and you'll reach the logical conclusion that vecs like the Hover-MLRS (or anything else of that nature, like, say, a hover Arbalest), while neat to see realized in ONS, aren't necessarily a good use of a Uscript dev's time. Don't get me wrong though, there are some pretty cool C&C vecs (mainly from TD to RA2) that I'd be pretty keen to see brought over to ONS that could give gameplay some news spins (orca vec carrier, TS mobile stealth gen, TD flame tank and IFVs \o/). Basically, remaining analytical and focused on game design priorities helps ensure ppl will get the biggest bang for their buck when considering new vecs IMO.
Lastly, I dunno whether SVecWheels would improve experience over KRepulsors in a vec - mostly because I lack experience in the field; btw, were SVecWheels part of the failed Bulldog experiment or am I remembering that wrong? - and if they'd require more server CPU/net resources to use so I can't really comment on that, but that one should be easy enough to test even with existing UT resources, so why not whip something up and show us?

Btw, as a quick, last disclaimer, I haven't done any ingame testing of these vecs personally, even with bots, so the comments above are still abstract and only touch upon theoretical design notions rather than reflect any actual gameplay/balancing concerns. We'll find out more when someone starts testing on that front, I suppose.

[Wormbo]

Technical stuff first: SVehicleWheels are what all wheeled vehicles in Onslaught use, be it the Scorpion, the Paladin or the Leviathan. Their advantage over repulsors is that they not only keep the vehicle's collision body afloat, but also are responsible for applying acceleration. A repulsor only applies a configurable amount of upward force, but a wheel includes all the suspension mechanics. Also the wheel's applied acceleration is calculated from its torque - and only if it has ground contact.
Obviously the "wheeled tank" would work differently from a wheeled vehicle or the "hover"/hover tank. It might indeed mean a slight performance hit, as all the update logic would have to reside in UnrealScript, but the actual physics stay in native code. In fact, the hover tanks already have a large amount of repulsors to keep them from scraping over smaller objects; and they even turn with the tank chassis, unlike the Manta's or Goliath's repulsors.

Interestingly I also thought about an Orca Carry-All remake, but couldn't imagine a good use for it, or how to implement it in the first place. I wouldn't want it to lift the Leviathan (or worse: the Kraken), and people might get bored if they are stuck in a carried vehicle without being able to fire (and firing e.g. a tank cannon would really not be a good idea), even when attacked.
I don't find it that hard to imagine a map where hover vehicles could play a significant role, though. Just think of Dria during warmer times or Torlan with lots of water in the river. Also Island Hop isn't the only island-based map out there, and they all could play a lot differently if the Manta and its derivatives weren't the only vehicles capable of crossing deeper water.
Which brings me to another idea, and it's again from the C&C universe. Amphibious wheeled vehicles could drive on solid ground as usual, but work like a boat in water. The hover tanks already are quite water-proof and unsinkable, so that part works already.