My current state of development for the Command & Control object "Bomb: Simulates large scale bombing raids". It generates groups of bomb bursts randomly placed within a 1x1km area.
There were a number of unsatisfactory elements, in my estimation. Here are the changes I've made:
- GREATLY reduced the number of fires/smokes! Previously, when this object was placed on a city (map_T RGB values of 17 to 20, for City0 through City3), the first 100 bursts would create a fire (with 25% randomly assigned a smoke column) really QUICKLY. This was ridiculous. And it's needlessly wasteful of precious resources. I re-jigged this to create a new fire (and always with a smoke column) at such an occasional rate that during the life time of 5 minutes for these fires about a half dozen would be maintained in existence. Of course, all the while bomb bursts are continuing to occur.
- As just noted above, I made all fires have a smoke column, as opposed to the 25% previously. A half dozen fires with smokes is a lot less demanding than 100 fires and 25 smokes in the original implementation.
- Randomized the size of the fires.
- Reduced the distance at which the effect initiates, from 10km to 5.
- Removed the dependence on map_T RGB values for the generation of associated fire/smoke. As noted above, formerly the fires/smokes would occur only on map tiles assigned to the City0-3 texture slots. I've made these fires now possible everywhere, which also makes a certain sense given the much lower frequency of occurrence.
- Randomized and increased power for both effects and destruction. Power and radius for the bursts were previously 7 and 30, respectively. They are now randomized to 7-30 and 3.5-15, respectively.
- Removed the dependence on TypeBomber, which meant that this object would generate ONLY when a bomber was within its set threshold distance. Now all planes can initiate the object.
- Increased the areal coverage possible for each group of related bursts, from 40m square to 100m square. While the full area within which these bursts can occur is 1km on a side, each discrete burst in a group (of about a dozen) was originally set to fall within 20m (40m box) of its reference position. That was much too tight, to my taste, with bursts pretty near merging together. I opened this up to a 100m box.
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Topic: C&C large scale bomb drop object improvements (Read 167 times)
