[highlander]

The Original Mirage Tank

(480 total words in this text)
(530 reads)



Originally, the Mirage Tank was supposed to be able to select the terrain object to disguise as in a similar manner to the Spy. However it was felt that this caused too much micro-management - you had to 'deploy' the tank (like the Siege Chopper in Yuri's Revenge) to get it to disguise, then it could only fire when disguised. Finally you had to 'undeploy' the tank to move it again.

You can reach a good compromise by giving the tank 2 weapons and making some adjustments - with one weapon, it can disguise as any terrain object, and the other is it's normal weapon. With some additional tweaking, you can put a better animation on it's normal weapon too.

The advantage of this is that you can then get the tank to disguise as lamp posts or rocks as well as any tree - more fitting, and also makes it more useful and effective between different maps with different terrain features.

Thankfully, half of the work is done as the code is left in the RULES file, all we have to do is tweak it.

Go to the [MGTK] entry and delete the Primary=MirageGun statement. Remove the comments so that it now has;-

Primary=TankMakeupKit
Secondary=MirageGun

Note that because of a mistake here, the tank would not normally get a better weapon when it reaches 'elite' - but with our new logic, it does, due to the presence of the EliteSecondary=MirageGunE statement which was never changed.

You should also edit the entries for all of its weapons (the Primary=, Secondary and EliteSecondary= weapons) so that each weapon has OmniFire=yes set - this prevents the tank turning to face its target thus giving itself away.

Next, we need to change the warhead used by the TankMakeUpKit weapon - if we dont do this, the tank can get confused when targetting enemy vehicles and wont attack them with the right weapon.

Find the [TankSnapshot] entry and change it so the first line is like this;-

Verses=0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%,0%

Now add a new animation to the end of the [Animations] list called CHRONOFS. Find the [MirageWH] and change it so the AnimList= looks like this;-

AnimList=CHRONOFS

This is an animation image that's in the game files but completely unused, so we get to make use of it thus add a little uniqueness. It actually looks better than the default one, which simply uses an effect used by 'Iron Curtained' units.

Finally, in the ART file, add this section so that the animation displays properly;-

[CHRONOFS]
Translucent=yes
Translucency=75
YDrawOffset=12

There you have it - one final thing to note is that you will notice the Mirage Tank as being one of the few tanks that has no seperate turret (it is built in) - this is required for this logic to work, as problems occur when the game tries to disguise 2 joined voxels like a tank and its turret into one terrain object. You are therefore restricted to such voxel units when using this weapon

i cant get it right