The terrain script seems to be affecting the jetpack as well. In certain conditions, namely boosting horizontally from the ground, there is an added acceleration forward. However, its so much that its hard to get any vertical lift when you tilt upwards.

The script, under most conditions, is not adding any new velocity on the X axis on a straight-up jump. The only time X velocity gets changed is if you're slamming against a wall or are hitting the right / left keys. That's it. At worst, in tight corridors you may see some ping-pong; I guess I'll go test that a bit and if necessary do some fine-tuning. If there are any characters in particular that are just plain having trouble, please let me know.

But most of that's not Lua, for certain. It's just thrust from the jetpacks that are angled backwards a bit behaving in an accurately simulated way. Different actors got different jumppacks with different angles of attack and weight-to-thrust ratios. It's a very complex bunch of variables involved. It got much better after I got rid of excess body lean and some other junk, but it's still not ideal.

What I think I'm going to do here is to develop an invisible thruster MOPixel that actually does the lifting and shoots straight down on all the jetpacks, and the current stuff will just be eye-candy. That really should fix a lot of issues both for players and most importantly for the AI. I'll get that done tomorrow when I'm wrapping up 1.04, which has a bunch of new stuff in it.

Version 1.04 released. Probably the last one before Sunday unless there are major bugs found

Changelog:

Finally got some time to spend on playing and scripting CC and I've done a bit of testing of this in the tutorial, it's a nice idea but it still needs polishing and some of the balance, at least when player controlled, is screwy. Still, I think I'll get a better impression when I play the metagame or missions where the ai fights back.

A couple problems I noticed and remembered (and there are a fair few more which I don't remember). More as I see them:
1) rocklet bugs out, velIntegrator on line 230 became nil. This happened when I got it stuck a bit on some ground after I kept pushing it left. How are you limiting its rotation, angular vel or rotangle? Either way it seems to give some trouble. You could try clearing all forces on it and setting its vel instead or just setting its vel and having the side thrusters not actually do anything.
2) I've noticed some weird behaviour in the dummies in mission tut where they started bouncing up and down when sitting on the floor. Though hilarious it was also rather concerning since none of them seemed to be using their jetpacks.
3) Not really a bug but: I really like the ronin dreadnought's jetpack, that's what I think jetpacks in general should be more like, a good way to get over obstacles but not unlimited flight. However, you should probably make it so it takes up all or most of its fuel on use since right now it still allows unlimited flight.

I do look forward to seeing future versions of this where everything's more polished and stable though

Yeah, running the Tutorial doesn't really do it any justice; most of the Dummies don't even have weapons because I haven't gotten around to fixing their loadouts yet. I'll fix that.

That said, you need to play Metafight; I pretty much built it around that gameplay because it's the only thing in CC I've actually found interesting. Try 3 vs. 1, Coa vs. Dummies; they're the base factions and the rest are more experimental. I'm still tweaking the Dummies, so it's all very WIP, but I think Coa's about done, other than maybe adding a couple of actors and doing various edits to their graphics.

It's not balanced for Maginot or Dummy Assault or the other canned missions, although Maginot on Nuts is actually fun now instead of "OMG, my Brain can't get out of the baaaaaaase" frustration.

I'll take a look at the Rocklet, but that's probably a Vanilla bug; I've hardly touched its internals on the AI side and velIntegrator isn't a variable in my script at all.

I think that I'm basically just going to have to re-write all of those AI scripts, they're overly complicated and they're fighting with the control scripts to some extent. That doesn't mean the control scripts are perfect; right now, for example, the Dropships don't spin out of control if they lose a motor, because I haven't coded a check for the Attachments yet. I'll get that done tonight.

On jetpacks, I'm still looking at the issues. The problem there is straightforward; either I get rid of stuff like Dvorak Caves because gameplay can't ever be reasonable, or I get the jetpacks balanced to where the AI can and does get out of holes and kill players.

My goal is to get it to the point where the AI can and does steer correctly; if that means they get unlimited jetpack fuel or get a boost to their velocity so that they always clear holes instead of running out of fuel, that's what it means. How it's handled for humans is another matter, but right now I'm trying to make the AI reliable and dangerous, instead of getting itself into holes it never manages to get back out of on a regular basis. It's a tricky problem.

I'd say giving the ai a boost is better than giving unlimited fuel, unless you can make it limited for players. Other than that, the cave and volcano maps are stupid and whoever made them should have taken into consideration the fact that they're a pain in the ass in CC. Even as a player they're more irritating than anything else because your actor still needs to be pretty light to get out of the giant pits. In short my vote is that you get rid of them.

On the note of attachments, you'll want to add attachment checking to your actor movement script too since I've seen crabs (and maybe ahumans) walking around happily without legs.

I'll give it a proper try in the metagame so I can give decent criticism about balance.

Good call on the no-legs thing, although in Vanilla you're allowed to move around with jetpacks; I've killed many a Dummy with a torso bleeding out, lol.

I'll have to think about that one for a bit; probably it's best to keep motion from happening unless you're in the air.

Yeah, that's probably the best way of dealing with it. Even vanilla has some random extra movement while in the air, just try crouching and holding forwards (it's very evident if you give the scene no gravity) so it wouldn't be a big change at all.
And yeah of course keep jetpacking without legs, it's a crucial part of CC, where no legs makes it easier for you to get around the place

Interesting. There are buried jetpacks that aren't really defined in the INIs in the standard actors. You can get rid of the mass of the jetpack particles and they're still showing an effect and a smallish amount of force is being applied.

I'm still sorting this mess out, but it looks like I need to mess around with building a standardized jetpack model that is explicitly designed and is in Base, that everything else can be built around, since I know that custom jetpacks for Actors aren't a big deal. Only problem is dealing with offsets and suchlike, since I want the fire to go straight down. That may require just using Lua to get around the limitations, although the code preventing excess Actor lean should get the job done.

This is turning into a fairly complex problem

Humble Indie Bundle owners of CC can now download this by using their key.

Wonderful, glad that's been taken care of. Wonder if that major bug I mentioned got fixed yet.

OK... finally got jetpacks sorted... I think.

I've basically made them quit doing certain things and have let Lua have control. They still look like they're doing stuff, but they aren't. And they only provide force straight up, period, and don't have burst issues (unless I want them to). So, for example, we could have jetpacks that give a strong initial "bump" of force on a quick tap, every time, instead of the unreliable burst timers that are currently in place...

This should allow me to get AIs to behave a little better. Needs much testing.

[EDIT]Did some tests. The AI doesn't know how to handle weak jump jets. It needs a strong upwards push that gives it a big delta-v or it gets hosed. Not surprising, given my previous test results. So, short, sharp jets with short jump times are generally better for the AI than low-power steady ones. That's also what most people want.

I think I can also get rid of infinite power-gliding, too, and force humans to stay in the jump range that the jump time was intended for. Now, wouldn't that be something...

I haven't dug into the Lua handling of obstacles much; it appears that the "omg obstacles over my head" issue is one where the AI picks bad paths on a regular basis with bad waypoints; it looks like that's fixable, if difficult (i.e., I may be too dumb to fix that). But it also appears that if I raise the search radius a bit and give it a decent amount of initial jump power, the AI handles every-day "how do I climb hill?" problems that used to stop it cold.[/EDIT]

At last, i'll be able to test this mod (sounds more like an unofficial patch...) with my HiB game.

Thanks, it seems very promising.

Should have build 1.05 done some time this evening; I'm about done with the new jump code, "just" need to apply it to all the troops and suchlike.

I built a working jump lockout, so that fuel limits actually matter and players can no longer just jet high above the battlefields but must use short, sharp bursts to jump and maneuver. Ideally, I'd arrive at a system where you'd use up your fuel rapidly and be locked out for some time.

That said, I don't like how I coded it and it's going to be problematic with the AI, as it basically overrides the built-in jumpjet code, because the variables I'd need to alter are read-only. So it probably won't be in the next build.

Along the way, I've learned a bunch of things:



Also, does everybody like the Dummy GPU OK? I wish I had time / pixel-art skills enough to do new arms and legs, but otherwise I feel pretty good about it; it fills a niche for the Dummies but isn't ridiculously OP.

Is there a reason why no unit can bend over when using a jetpack? This makes traversing the terrain quickly when using a jetpack quite difficult.

And occasionally when playing the Ronin, and I start a defense mission, around 75% of my units explode. Nothing to do with the MOID limit, because I've had it happen on levels where I had six people in a base with no stray weapons. Only happens with the Ronin.

It shouldn't be difficult, just slower. Basically, I took out crazy body-lean because it results in a lot of frustrating moments in CC where your soldier does a head-plant into the ground and gibs. That, and it really hoses the AI, which can't do it correctly and can't engage you if you're moving that fast.

I suppose I could do a check that allowed for faster in-air acceleration / movement, though- that would be fair to both the AI and to players, up to a point. I'll test that out and see if that's a good idea

On the Ronin thing: it shouldn't ever do that, I agree. I'll take a look at my code and see if there's anything else I should do to make it safer. Double-check the MOID count via CTRL-P, though; there are a lot of things that eat MOIDs that aren't necessarily characters, and perhaps there's an issue where MOIDs during the very start of play aren't reflective of how they are once play starts. Anyhow, I'll investigate it.