Wednesday, January 11, 2012

This is not the update I planned....

But as a lot of you know these things don't work the way we want sometimes. I planned on talking about the new GDI Ion Cannon designs that I came up with (they are great, just go with that). That will have to wait until next sunday.

Recently I did a post explaining my process of how I was adding the Scrin Echo power into the game. Here is the good news.

1. I have developed a way to have a spell power to become modified based on the upgrade chosen. This means for example I could have a "megaton bomb" drop power that drops Vapor bombs if upgrade A is chosen or fire bombs if upgrade B is chosen. Cool right? I can think of a lot of ways that this could be useful (Thinking Invid here really, but possibly also NOD).

2. I got the echo power to work, when you echo all Scrin units phase out then all scrin infantry echo in additional basic versions of themselves.


Now for the bad news.

Apparently if you have more than 20 Scrin infantry units on the field and you echo it causes the game to crash. It appears to be linked to the engines inability to handle a sudden influx of over 60 units at once, but I can't be 100% sure thats whats causing the problem. The engine only crashes though when there are a lot of units that are suddenly echoing in. At about 8 to 12 units and an echo there are no problems.

So that leaves us with what to do. I really like the echo idea and want to make something out of it. I'm just not sure what at this point. The idea of a player ONLY having a hand full of units when they echo is absurd, we all know that armies get up into the 50's and 100's of units in some of these games.

If anyone has an idea of how else to do this let me know. Your idea doesn't have to explain HOW the code works, just a "when this happens how about this?" type of explanation will work. Otherwise my next step is that the echo phases everyone out then summons in some free units at the point of the echo. Not nearly as cool as I wanted, but it may be what I have to do.

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