Preview: TOW missle attack sequence for Mech Inf

[cracker]

Here's a sample of the TOW missle attack sequence for the HAMI (Heavy Armored Mechanized Infantry) vehicle that will provide an alternative unit to the standard Bradley fighting vehicle included in the game.

There is a nastier version of this unit called the "Night Stalker" that carries 6 active tow missles and has the stalk mounted night vision TOW aiming sight for engaging enemy from defensive positions behind buildings and fortifications.

Please make sure you vote in the camouflage testing Poll to help decide what camo patterns and color schemes to implement for the units.

 

[Ed O'War]

That looks pretty cool. Will it have more than one attack animation?

 

[cracker]

I am still experimenting with the attack animations and defense files since some of these have no examples active in the current CIV3 game. (have to experiment to figure out what they do and how to best use them to provide a rich unit experience.)

The attack plan for the HAMI is:

1) Single TOW Missile attack followed by
2) a Bushmaster 25mm chain gun Burst attack
and then
3) a single shot Bushmaster attack that loops and repeats until the combat is resolved.

(this final type of attack is similar to the current attack by the CIV3 Mech Infantry unit, but technically the 25mm cannon on the Bradley vehicle does not cause much recoil. The weapon's primary fire mode is short preset bursts that are electronically selected.)

Some of the other units in this Mechanized warfare package will have a number of other different styles of attack including:

a) multiple launch and indirect TOW attacks
b) turret mounted Minigun attack with Bushmaster shots.
c) ye olde "Bury them alive" style attack
d) the "BeeHive" burst
and my personal favorite "The White Phosphorus" Shell.

 

[Colonel Kraken]

Wow, Cracker, that's cool as heck! I look forward to getting that unit.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Cracker I realy like your APC unit, but have you tested the size agaist other units. Its O.K. to have big units as long as you can see the active unit cursor underneath the unit. Otherwise it can be difficult to see which unit is active (imagine if you will that you have 40 APC units and 39 of them have moved. if you can't see the active unit cursor, you have to go through each unit in turn clicking on them to see if they can move. I personaly think that the tanks should be as big as you can make them, but proportional to each other (Light tank should be about 1/2 the size of the heavy tank, and about 2/3 the size of the medium tank)).

 

[TheDS]

Nice anim! A suggestion:

To make it smoother, a couple more frames need to be added so the missile doesn't look like it's jumping so much. The speed is okay (though a real missile would probably be a lot faster). You will also need a few frames at the end where nothing is happening, so it doesn't look like the tank is a missile farm.

A further suggestion: Use this anim for it's BOMBARD function. That's right, make it capable of using artillery. A lot of people are crying because they can't load cruise missiles onto subs or cruisers. Instead, give the units a reasonable bombard ability to simulate the cruise missile attack. I give cruisers and nuc subs a range of 8 (TLAMs are REALLY long range) and otherwise their bombard resembles that of the cruise missile. Now if only we had an appropriate animation for that....

 

[cracker]

Remember how the animations actually work:

Only the last attack animation in the sequence actually loops, so if we specify an A, B, and a C attack then the A and B attacks are only used single pass in the sequence.

The attack sequence for this unit will be:

TOW missile attack = Attack A
25 mm burst attack = Attack B
single shot 25 mm attack = Attack C

(this information was posted in the third message of this thread)

I should have adjusted the animation frame timing in the gif file to provide an artifical pause and this would have helped you better visualize things.

To TheDS,

I really appreciate your knowledgable and insightful comments but remember that reality and animation theatre are two different things.

Sometimes we go for making the graphics interesting and different versus purely realistic.

A good example of theatre -vs- reality is the attack animation for the standard mech infantry in the Out-of-the-box game. The sound of the gun and the recoil of the Bradley vehicle look absolutely nothing like what a real Bradley vehicle looks like when it fires its main gun. Think of 5, 10, 15, and 30 round bursts of fire all in just seconds. If the gun really recoiled like the CIV3 animation then all the crew members would be scrambled eggs after the first time someone pulled the trigger.

 

[TheDS]

Err... Yes, I understand that, and that's why I put the "(though a real missile would probably be a lot faster)" in parenthesis, and suggested an animation that had a few more frames, so it would be smoother.

 

[Level]

Actually when you have three attacks it loops all of them.