I'm trying to make the siege tank base invisible while the turret is visible. I deselected the Is Visible checkbox in Sprites.dat but when the unit's created, it's still visible. And now when the unit comes out of siege mode back into tank mode, it freezes. What I mean is, all orders do nothing, enemy units ignore it, and I can't click it. Oh and it doesn't reveal the map anymore. If I set a blank grp for the tank then I won't be able to select it, will I?

There is an opcode to make an image invisible. Put that in the tank base's iscript. It's tmphidegraphicsstart or something like that.

Why not give the base the pallete "cloaked" and use the "enemy cloak" mapping? That way you won't see it.

Ah yes, tmprmgraphicstart. I considered that but doesn't that also hide any overlays and crap on the unit, thus messing up spell effects and such?

Heh, I just realized that I could very probably just get rid of the tank and siege subunits and just use the base units instead of going through the trouble of hiding the base. Can anyone think of a reason for that not working?

I think it should be possible to make a siege tank that has no turret and still transforms properly.

Ah, thanks!

Damnit, it seems that getting rid of the subunit is not as simple as setting the subunit 1 property to None. Now the game crashes about halfway through the production of a siege tank. Sorry for being such a bother, but has anyone else successfully stripped the siege tank of its turret-ness. I also tried setting the overlay file to None, but no luck.

Probably the least painless way would be to make a 1px GRP with the same amount of frames as the turret, and replace.

As for the crashing, was all you changed the subunit in Units.dat? You'd need to edit the Iscript and omit all the cross-image communication in its scripts. The AI tab under Units.dat may need changing, too.

Hmm I also gave it a new iscript which was formed like a regular unit iscript. Also I don't see anything in the AI tab that relates to subunit usage...

EDIT:
So no one has any idea how to de-turret-ify the Siege Tank?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 20 2009, 10:52 pm by Lord_Jeremy.

Damnit. Well here's another oddity. I tried setting the subunits for the Goliath, Tank, and Siege to None in datedit on a new mod and it worked just fine. The units were built successfully and moved around and stuff without any crash. Thus, I'm worried that somehow my other mod's units.dat has been corrupted or somesuch. For some reason, the game crashes when the Tank is built up to about halfway. As far as I know, the mod was working just fine up until I removed the subunit for the Tank. I must've done something else or the dat got corrupted. Can anyone think of any reason for the game to crash halfway through the build process?

EDIT:
Ah I feel like an idiot. There was an error in the unit's iscript. I accidentally put the Death animation header after the Init animation header and didn't put a goto in between. That's what I get for writing my own script from scratch...

FURTHER EDIT:
Well I discovered that apparently sieging and likely unsieging a tank without a turret will cause the game to crash. I confirmed this with a brand new mod changing only the turret settings for the two Tank incarnations. Damnit!

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 30 2009, 10:09 pm by Lord_Jeremy.