Attack while moving

[titi]

Something I really miss is in Megaglest is a real "move attack" skill. For example a tank which shoots while it passes the enemy.

Some problems I see when doing this:
- The AI will not use it in the right way
- The automated attacking of your own units will also not know how to use this feature in the right way

If soemone has an idea how the units should be have, please tell us.

And something what you will soon want to have with this are something like turrets  for tanks. So two models representing one unit. One turns to the enemy ( the turret ), and the other model rotates according to the movement. of the object.

[Omega]

It seems rather difficult to use, though. Would the unit just keep on moving until it's out of range? How would it behave in groups with units that have to stop to attack? How do you target a unit will moving somewhere else at the same time?

[titi]

The best idea is to look at other games and how they handle it 

I remember  hiverise did something like this and I think the spring engine can do something like this do.

I know this is really diffcult, but will add many new possibilities

[MoLAoS]

Mechs in spring have multiple weapons and will attack nearby targets while moving with their various weapons. they tend to stick to a target till it dies with each weapon, also factoring in the range of the attack so they will switch if the old target is out of range. Attack animations are mostly independent of move animations because spring uses machines which means little animation change is necessary.

[softcoder]

How about implementing this as an 'attack patrol' where you specify point A and B and the units moves back and forth while attacking things in his sight range?

[titi_son]

maybe but there are also 2 bad points on that idea:

1. You have to "teach" Cpu to play
2. What happens with a big group of units? (Maybe Speed-Problems because high pathfinding activity; You units run towards enemy because way is blocked by the other units)

[softcoder]

These issues are there no matter which approach you take assuming the unit will 'attack' and 'move'

[Coldfusionstorm]

But is this skill type / command type not mostly useless without turret support? (points on a model where a turret can rotate acordingly to enemy target location?.

Im saying this because there is stil talk about a new model format.

Or can it perhaps better payoff to improve the current 3d model format?

[titi]

Turret support shouldn't be too hard to do, just let the unit have two seperate models per skill, one is the turret. which rotates and so on. The hard part is the moving/attacking behaviour, especially regarding the AI. Things like drive by shooting can easily be managed by humans, but AI will have trouble to choose the right way to attack.