wall o' text ahead
Had some fun with Clickbeetle's thrusters. I actually sent Click a PM asking if I could edit+include some of his parts in my mod or not... back in May. He never responded.
If he comes out and says that he's not cool with it though, I'll swap out the model for something else.
They come in 5 sizes and all of them are short enough to fit in a minimum height chassis (as well as put a control board/battery on top of them). Red thrusters are your standard fare boosters. Press extend to Sanic it up, the usual. Blue thrusters are more powerful and use "base = BurstPiston" instead of "base = ServoPiston". What this means is that you get larger boosts of speed out of warp boosters, at the price of it not being a constant speed boost.
I feel boosters can bring a lot to the table. You can use them to simulate floor magnets a la Bite Force, increase speed in a given direction, make a helicopter, or just fling yourself into the air like this is Super Mario or something. Before anyone asks, you can make a robot that entirely uses thrusters for movement, but it'll be a complete pain in the ass to control and aim at your opponent.
Here's a roughly 500kg robot getting under Search & Destroy XL, a SHW:
and here's the same robot, but with warp boosters, slamming into the Octagon's invisible ceiling:
You can also make designs that counter existing bot archetypes. What's a popup to do when you use thrusters to just push yourself off it's wedge? Or how about a SnS that gets hopped on by another robot? Or a HS that gets box rushed by a pain train of thrusters and car steering?
It should be noted, however, that thrusters are fairly heavy and require a reliable supply of gas. So don't just go and slap one on any old robot and think that it'll be instantly better because of it. Hint: it won't. This isn't like those dumb OP ironforge flamethrowers that autowin DPS fights for you. You have to put some thought into it and decide if you would actually benefit from a thruster or two. Thrusters are also exclusive to Extreme Mode (aka cheatbot2). I'll get you guys to use cheatbot2 one of these days.
BASICALLY: I balanced thrusters, and now people will actually have a reason to use them since they're in a TC mod now. Eyy.
On the problems brought up with the current release:
Tested out the burst motors myself, and I kind of agree. Went ahead and doubled the retract value of burst motors. The robots I've AI'd so far haven't started havoking to hell yet since the change, which is good.
I've trimmed the fat off of the armor selections down to 40, which I think should be OK (idk if you guys agree tho). 10 of each armor like in RW:RA2. Also re-organized the armor selection so that plastic 10 is weaker than aluminum 1, and aluminum 10 is weaker than titanium 1, et al. This makes it easier to estimate what armor you put on your robot based off of what sound it makes when you hit it. You know plastic = weak and steel = not weak.
Also, no more armor below 5.5kg
2 (1 kg
2 armor is just havok bait) and nothing above 80kg
2 (nobody's going to use steel 20, let's be real). Each armor type also has different gaps between armor choices:
Armor Type / Range of weights (weight gap between each armor thickness)
Plastic / 5.5-10 (0.5)
Aluminum / 11-20 (1)
Titanium / 22-40 (2)
Steel / 44-80 (4)
a few other misc problems have been ironed out as well. RAD motors are being looked at... I thought that they were fixed before I released the alpha, but I might have actually only fixed one of the 5 RAD motors that you can choose from.
I'll take a look at the shading and see what I can do. It seems to more-or-less be exclusive to the botlab though. Shading is determined by the tm_row BS at the bottom, right?
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