Status of Engineer Class

Just bringing people up to date.

In DruidsRPGcvs Classes, we have

ClassEngineer

Mod to DruidUpgradeInv to support ClassEngineer

DruidShieldRegen and DruidShieldRegenInv for Shield Regeneration

In DruidsRPGExperimental Classes, we have

AbilityLoadedEngineer

Turret, Building, Vehicle Points abilities

ConstructionHealthBonus ability

Armor regen, with it's Inv

Armor Vampire

Classes for the Sentinel controllers

EngineerInteraction, to show engineer stuff.

Engineer Link Gun - infinite, with more powerful but shorter beam

and the various other classes required to support
These files just need to be copied into your DruidRPGcvs folder.

In DruidsRPGExperimental top level, we have

UT2004RPG.ini - sample of what to add

DruidEngStatics.usx - new StaticMeshes

DruidEngTextures.utx - new textures

It needs a good thrashing to get any remaining bugs out, but seems ok on my single PC set-up. I thought it would be good to get the code out so the rest of you can try it and come up with recommendations etc.

Lots of the abilities will need to be balanced in terms of cost and effectiveness, and even the number of levels. So have a play, then let's discuss.

Have fun

Wow. Needless to say, we're impressed! We'll have to crank it up this weekend and see how it is. We can either start a second instance of unreal on the big server or light up the backup server here at home.

I'll publish some details if we make that go.

Dru

We need to discuss the levels and costs for each of the abilities.

Code:

Current Costs
 ClassEngineer        1 lvl    costs 1 point
 LoadedEngineer      15 lvls   costs 2-16 points per level
 TurretPoints        20 lvls   costs 2-21 points per level
 VehiclePoints       20 lvls   costs 2-21 points per level
 BuildingPoints      20 lvls   costs 2-21 points per level
 ConstructionHealth  10 lvls   costs 2-38 points per level
 ArmorRegeneration    5 lvls   costs 15-35 points per level
 ArmorVampire        10 lvls   costs 10-55 points per level
 ShieldRegeneration  15 lvls   costs 5 points per level

Notes

There are no buildings yet, so not much point enabling the BuildingPoints

Limited to 3 turrets, 2 vehicles and 1 building.

Max cost of a turret is currently 3 points, so why would you need more than 9 turret points? Perhaps turrets are too cheap?

So, the mimimum to be reasonably viable as an Engineer is

Code:

 HealthBonus    +100   cost 50 points     realistic minimum for all classes
 WeaponSpeed     +30   cost 30 points     useful due to inf weapon
 ClassEngineer               1 point
 LoadedEngineer lvl 5  cost 20 points     to get sentinels and manta
 TurretPoints   lvl 3  cost  9 points     to get a sentinel
 VehiclePoints  lvl 4  cost 14 points     to get a manta

Total 124 points, or player level 19.

To succeed better, you probably need
Code:

 Damage Bonus   +50    cost 50 points     required for ArmorVampire
 ArmorVampire   lvl 2  cost 25 points

New total cost 199 points, or player level 30.

I thought I'd do an update before the build.

Things that I think are probably ok to put on general release (although some of the points etc may need tweaking)

ClassEngineer. Including low level enhancements of armor regen and health regen. Players need this to get the low level benefits, and to start up any new Engineer characters. Includes EngineerInteraction and the EngineerLinkGun

DruidShieldRegen should be ok. 15 levels, 5 points per level to buy

DruidArmorRegen should be ok. 5 levels, 15-35 points per level to buy. Perhaps a bit pricey, but the higher levels have to spend their points on something

DruidArmorVampire should be ok. 10 levels 10-55 points per level to buy.

We could let LoadedEngineer, AbilityVehiclePoints and AbilityConstructionHealthBonus go. They seem to work reasonably well. Might want to look at what vehicles for what cost.

The stuff I am not entirely happy with are the Sentinels. So I think we ought to restrict Turrets and Sentinels for the moment. The problems I have are:

Some Turrets/Sentinels have deeper bases than others, so sometimes the base is half buried in the ground. No big problem - just looks strange

Sentinels do not rotate before firing on the enemy. Well, they do as a listen server but not dedicated, so yes it's a replication thing. Again, no big deal, just doesn't look brilliant

Vehicles, turrets, Link Sentinels and Ball Turret Sentinels all have a yellow bar above them, so you can tell how healthy they are, and if you need to heal them. The Sentinel doesn't. I don't know why. It will be some obscure flag somewhere.

You get the xp from sentinel kills, but you do not get the score or adrenaline. Nor do they show on the F3 status [EDIT:fixed]

I think we need a larger list of turrets and sentinels to give a good progression as you get more turret points. I have just added the Ball Turret Sentinel, which seems to work ok (apart from not rotating). I also think we need to consider how much health etc turrets/sentinels should have [EDIT:can now set health in ini file]

Things still to do on the Engineer class:

No buildings yet. I was thinking about a shield wall first, then perhaps a shield house.

Perhaps have the EngineerLinkGun be able to heal player shields? Discussion required on a separate thread.

The whole explosives expert side of things

For a simple sentinel, I was thinking of a 'lightning rod tower'. Relatively low health

Druid, for information, just in case you are adding turrets and sentinels at this build. I think this is correct:

Link Turret, 400 health, 214 damage/sec

Minigun Turret, 500 health, 145 damage/sec

Sentinel, 1000 health, 80 damage/sec

Link Sentinel, 400 health, 214 damage/sec

Ball Turret Sentinel, 650 health, 180 damage/sec

Would it be useful to have the starting health configurable in the ini file? Then we could have different instances of a Sentinel that had different starting healths, cost different amounts of points?

Szlat wrote:

You get the xp from sentinel kills, but you do not get the score or adrenaline. Nor do they show on the F3 status

I think I have fixed this one now.

I added a ScoreKill function to AbilityLoadedEngineer. It checks that the killer was a sentinel, and gives the player points accordingly.

So, the score in F1 includes the sentinel score in with the player's score,
and F3 stats also list the sentinels (Although it won't distinguish between a Link Turret and a Link Sentinel - it calls both by the vehicle class name which is Link Turret.)
It's a suprise - I didn't realise they were killing that many monsters!

I tried for ages to get the turrets and sentinels to gracefully drop from the air down to the ground, but failed miserably. They refused to budge. No matter what settings I changed, they just stayed in the air. So, if any brainy person out there knows how to do it, go ahead.

In the meantime, I have put a hack in so that if the turret/sentinel is spawned in the air, it does a vertical downwards trace until it hits something, then spawns there. So, it spawns on the ground, instead of a graceful drop.

There was a feature of UT2004RPG that when a player entered a vehicle, it always reset the health and healthmax of the vehicle back to defaults and added on the player health bonus. Thus negating the effect of AbilityConstructionHealthBonus. I also wanted to allow the config file to specify the starting health, rather than it being always set to the default for the class.
So, I have changed it. In the ini file you can now specify what health a turret should spawn with. To that will be added any AbilityConstructionHealthBonus you have.
Minor anomalies so far:

I put the fix in the RPGClass.ModifyVehicle function, so it only applies to players who have a class. Although not perfect, I am relatively at ease with that.

At the moment, it seems to display the turret health incorrectly on the hud until it takes damage. I am looking into this one, but thought I'd still submit as is, because it is better than the previous version

I still have two problems with health bars

I haven't got them to display for Sentinels. Don't know why they should be different but they are.

The health bar seems to get a bit too long sometimes. I will have to investigate what determines the length of the vehicle health bar, and try to work that out. First I have to find the right bit of code.

The biggest visual nasty for sentinels is the way in which they do not rotate, so I will look into that before tackling any of the above. But I think it will be as successful as trying to get them to drop

Engineer Link should be no drop - if it is, check no drop on death.

BotFodder wrote:

Engineer Link should be no drop - if it is, check no drop on death.

I thought it was no drop. Have you seen it dropped?

I died and it was tossed. You might have to work on "DropFrom" ...

You are right. Fixed in cvs.