[Super Vehicle] "Perses" Mobile Assault Station

[Karma_geddon]

I like this toy

I'd see it well in some big map with hills, like Alien2. There would be a lot of chances to employ all of his weapons.

[Pegasus]

Although I'm still pretty cold to this vec, conceptually/design-wise speaking, I gotta admit the parabolic trajectory visualization and the plane/normal adjusted targeting st.mesh for the SPMA turrets do seem pretty nifty and useful. Only other time I think I've ever come across the former of these 2 features was with the UT3-styled SPMA in Hustle, but not sure about the latter. Are they new to this version?

Someone seems to like Bad Piggies' tunes, btw. Guess we know what Wormbo's been up to over the past few months !

[GLoups!]

compare to the stock version of the leviathan, this one is even more fun than the old one, do not forget that it does not contain the alt fire (left mouse click) radius devastating transformation (or I'm wrong ?!) that make this in fact a full-fledged vehicle..and need a little more skill to use all the possibility.

[Wormbo]

The artillery turret aiming was in the previous version already, just not on video yet.
[edit]And actually the code isn't that new either, I only polished it for the Perses and Eradicator. Originally I wrote it a few years ago for a UT3-Style mutator that I ended up giving away to GreatEmerald - who, as I found out much later, is a total modding newbie.[/edit]

And correct, the Perses can't deploy.

[Pegasus]

I see, thanks for elaborating there. I remember going through the UT3-styled vecs' code awhile back to see what all was different about 'em in terms of mechanics/features, but somehow I must've missed the targeting st.mesh tweak - loved the parabolic visualization even then though (although I think it was coloured yellow there?). Now I wonder if there's any other usability improvements in those vecs I also overlooked that I should go back n' hunt for...

Also,

[...]a UT3-Style mutator that I ended up giving away to GreatEmerald - who, as I found out much later, is a total modding newbie.[...]

Heh, it's a good thing the UT community isn't big enough to be able to sustain news n' gossip sites around it, otherwise I imagine that juicy lil bit above would be just the spark they'd need to light up some drama that could sustain itself for weeks, even if it's from a "newbishness" remark one would only make in jest. Nothing but respect for the both of ya, obviously .

Btw, don't think that the absolute silent treatment on the Bad Piggies subject went unnoticed either! What are you not telling us, mr. Wormbo? Was the siren song of customizable pig locomotion finally enough to draw you away from creating similar content for UT? Because if so, I'd like to point out we have plenty of bad piggies around here too . And, who knows, whatever oddball inspiration one could draw from there might even help cross-pollinate ideas and inject some novelty to new content in this neck of the woods too. What I'm saying is, it's time to make the first UT2004 - Bad Piggies custom vehicle design conference a reality!

Ahem. Sorry, got a little carried away there for a tick.


PS: Man, I can only imagine all the bro MASes giving the Perses shit about not even deploying.
PPS: I might've had an unusually sugar-rich breakfast today.

[Wormbo]

I only played the Bad Piggies demo, and while I thought it was fun, I'm more of an Angry Birds player.

TBH, I wonder if I should restore the deploying ability of the Perses to whip out an even larger rocket launcher for the driver. I have a working Earthshaker Missile implementation somewhere, and I guess I could create a Blackshark Missile as well.
(Deploying would happen via the Jump key, as for the UT3 Hellfire SPMA, since alt fire is already taken for zoom.)

[Karma_geddon]

May I propose some playtesting? As we did with the Draco?

[Wormbo]

Release candidate 1 is available in the first post.

No really big changes, just balancing tweaks and bug fixes. Quoting from my post at the Omni forums:

Changes from beta 4 so far:

• Fixed Napalm Rocket kill message (still referred to the Draco)
• Increased Frag shrapnel base damage against players to 20 (damage against vehicles and nodes stays the same)
• Modified the mutator to replace all Leviathan variants (most maps only have one type of these anyway) and also upgrade any older versions of the Perses (PersesMAS does not extend the ONSMobileAssaultStation class, so technically it's not a Leviathan variant for the mutator)
• Homing missiles take visibility (as in Invisibility) into account, a bit like Bot AI does. Essentially if you somehow activated the invisibility combo, the maximum lock-on range of a Homing Missile against you would be reduced to about 250 UU. The idea is to not lock on to vehicles like the Stealth Badger, which also uses that property.

What I didn't mention in the damage listing in my previous post: Frag shrapnel and napalm glob damage values listed only apply against players. Frag shrapnel has a base damage of 20 * 0.6 = 12 against vehicles and nodes, napalm even only 7 * 0.25 = 1.75 (i.e. 1 really, but 3 with UDamage) per round of damage. Then again, in 5 seconds, a glob can hit up to 20-25 times, and there are 10 of them in total. Thus the maximum damage potential against a single target is around 250 to 300. Players on foot don't really stand a chance, because against them the Napalm does seven times more damage.
What I also didn't mention: The Frag shrapnel damage is based on the shrapnel's absolute speed and shrapnel uses falling physics. That means, the shrapnel will lose some speed (and thus damage) by simply traveling upwards or gain speed/damage by traveling downwards. The effect probably isn't very significant, considering the high initial speed compared to the default gravity (950 UU/s²) and the low life span. The total speed/damage for vertical upward travel is about 15%.

[Pegasus]

May I propose some playtesting? As we did with the Draco?

Tbh here, contrary to the Draco where its main weapon (the dual flamethrowers) represented an innovative, but still a quite unknown, quantity in terms of practicality, feasibility, novelty, fun and a number of other factors that needed to be tested to give us some sense of those aspects, when it comes to the Perses, well, everything about it is kinda derivative to the point where I doubt players would have much trouble understanding how to use it or how to fight it: if you're in one, just lead your moving targets as much as needed; if not, move around to dodge incoming missiles of any variety, avoid coming in direct LoS of any of the various phallic metaphors mounted atop it (:p), aaaand that's pretty much it.

Still, as you may've noticed, GLoups has been putting together and presenting his first original map these days, and he's already opted to include this vehicle in 2/some(?) of its central nodes' UltimateVehicleFactory pools, so the chance to get a feel for how it works is there right now. Sooo, yeah, get it, try it, play with it, and let Wormbo know what criticisms you might have on it, if so inclined .

[Karma_geddon]

Yep, I noticed... That's why I didn't pushed the playtesting thing
I have plans to give a try to GLoups map, definitely, and so to try the feel of the Perses too.