What would a DRONE flag do?

[optic delusion]

With the state of RL warfare nowadays, it seems a drone flag in BZ is needed.
What would a DRONE flag do?

I ask this question just for a (hopefully) fun debate.
I've got a couple, maybe three ideas, and one of them might be possible to actually do. But...
I don't think many ideas will be possible to implement. What's needed is a keypress that is available to plugins, and we don't have that.

I'm thinking about it as an area-denial weapon.
Something like AIRSTRIKE, but it's amazingly hard to hit ground targets with airstrike.
What happens if you fire a shockwave underground? Could you use that to denote the drone's target area?
Or maybe a normal shot that somehow converts itself to a guided missile?

Idunno... what do you think?

[Rotten Pineapple]

There could be different kinds of drones.

One way to disable a tank with a small drone might be to fly into the turret and detonate inside. This might in turn detonate a loaded shot (if the victim is ready to fire) or destroy the bictims special equipment (flag). Whether this destroys the tank, removes a flag from the tank, or fails might depend on the victims flag type.

Another kind of drone might be a hacking drone. The drone messages the victim tank on the public channel (so we can all enjoy). If the victim replies then they get a bad flag (hacked) like radar out or reverse controls or maybe theres just another drone message (hack succeeds, and they explode or hack fails) and a kill/no kill.

[Zehra]

On no-radar maps, press a key and get a small "radar" which can be "flown/moved" across the map, on encountering a tank, it terminates in a patterned shot targeted towards the "enemy" tank with Invisible Bullet shots.

-Zehra

[Loymdayddaud]

A Drone flag could drop a bomb, perhaps?
A new radar for the drone, and use the fire key to make it go forward toward a pre-selected target. You yourself can't shoot while controlling the drone, but it is possible to move.
Then the "Drop Flag" key drops the bomb, and the drone disappears.

[Rotten Pineapple]

Further to the block-the-turret idea.

Green player fires the drone. It appears as a quadcopterish square bar and can lock on and move like GM.

When the drone reaches the target the Red tank receives a private message from itself '(gunner) enemy drone jammed turret! Stop tank to clear.'. The red tank must stop for N sec to clear the jam. Or red can keep moving with the jam in place

If the Red tank fires with the jammed turret the red tank dies and the shot doesnt fire.

Negatives: its complex and may need to be altered
Positives: makes people read messages. So many players are message unaware

[Zehra]

Just thought of flag passing + useless mines, and the landing point is a mine. (But that makes it way more like a grenade.)

Having some form of directed shots to players would make it less of a grenade, but some form of a area denying compare to area clearing. (Shockwave is as close to a nuke in BZFlag as we have.)

There was the "missile silo" plug-in some years back, so something similar to it would be ideal.

So you would have something similar to a drop and activate area denial system.

This reminds me of updating the general use "Turret" plug-in some years ago, along with the Shooting Gallery one rather recently.

So in theory, it is possible to make some form of point and drop remote "turret" where a player could control rather easily.

It would be good for it to have slow bullets and many of them or fast ones in a singular stream for limited durations.

Not exactly a drone per say, but more of point and drop turrets.

-Zehra

[optic delusion]

One of the first plugins I ever had was called "MISSLES"
It was supposed to be revenge from the player who got shot. Every time you made a kill, if fired a single guided missile, locked on to you, with a very long lifetime, but the missle's starting position was something like 0 0 80.
We used it on Passion FFA, and when there were lots of players there might be half a dozen missles flying around all the time. You only had to be a little careful to not get killed by it. Something about the high start point made it easy to avoid.

First appearance in my records was Dec. 15, 2006. We used it for a month and abandoned it cuz it was kinda stupid. Brought it back in 2009 for a valentine's day map, calling it "cupid's arrow". That valentine map never got truly completed.
I still have a binary but could not find source. Couldn't find it on the forum either. It might still work.

What I've heard... when you make a plugin that uses shockwave (grenade flag), you can make the size of the shock smaller than the size of the SW flag's shock, but you can't make it bigger. The missles plugin definitely had a longer lifetime than standard GM's, don't know why those work this way.

[Zehra]

Related thread: GM Following WW

I tried checking for archives on the links, but no luck there. It shouldn't be too difficult to recreate.

Here's roughly what I'd try to go on: The mechanics of (PassTheFlag 1.0.6 released &FlagThrow Plug-in - Started, but I need some help
) or (Grenade flag release - as seen on Apocalypse) or a hybrid form of both of them.

The "drop" location of the drone is a form of the UselessMine or similar. I like the idea of it maybe being some form of a temporary point to spawn some auto-lock weapon, like GM Following WW, instead of a simple shockwave as in Grenade or UselessMine. (Think of 5-10 seconds of an area being denied with GM's being spawned for a moment.)

But what if we keep the same point, but instead have it be some form of a temporary "turret", as in Turret Plugin Release?

In some ways, you get a temporary "controllable" version of a "drone", but it also needs a bit of skill to use well/effectively. Maybe yet, some form of controllable turret with miniature versions of "grenades".

There's a few more ways to branch this out, like having some form of thief shots to steal flags/prevent caps/general annoyance or some sort of tricky way of AirStrike/Grenade, but with a much more clever means of precise control.

Another idea: Two flags, drone operator, artillery strike. Drone operator sets sights for target, artillery strike triggers clearing of area if both are lined up. Prevents spawns in region where artillery strike is called for 10-30 seconds. Only useful with both flags being held. Useless in most cases, but preventing players from spawning on the team bases can be utilized to prevent easy flag captures.

-Zehra

[Rotten Pineapple]

SPACE LASER

Zehra suggested:
> Another idea: Two flags, drone operator, artillery strike. Drone operator sets sights for target, artillery strike triggers clearing of area if both are lined up.

I would expand this to an orbiting platform, which could be laser or GM or whatever. But a wider-beam space laser makes for an interesting possibility as they are occasionally found in other strategy games.

A SPACE LASER flag gives the tank the ability to target the space laser. The details are a matter for the devs. This could be by firing a single targeting shot on a very slow timer (perhaps 1 min or more to reload) which marks a spot on the game that will be targeted by a slow orbital laser. The shot could look like a plus or pulsate or whatever. The shot might be fired and stopped on the field in a similar way to grenade. The shot can be eliminated by time or a tank striking it (perhaps that tank dies if it does so).

Once the targeting shot is in place a large vertical laser beam comes down out of the heavens. It kills anything within a certain radius of the targeting shot. It looks like a vertical shaft of light in the visual. On radar it might be indicated by a white filled circle. It lingers for a while in case anyone is stupid enough to drive into it, and to deny access to an area.

This is intended to be different from (L) in that the laser is fired from the sky and descends vertically to the target. It is different from AS (SW) by not generating a series of pulsed shockwaves but a single constant area of denial. It might also last longer than AS.

IRL it takes time to targer/retarget an orbital laser. Corresponding game effects might include: (a) painting the laser at a random location and slowly moving it to the target spot, killing everything along the way, with a timeout or elimination of the target spot terminating the laser; (b) perhaps first harmlessly painting a big white X on the land for everyone to see, as well as a dotted circle, to ominously indicate whats coming -- then when the X hits the target the laser goes off for however many seconds (c) instead of a slow termporary effect, leaving the laser always on with targeting to be fought over by the teams; (d) perhaps there is no targeting shot but the tank with the flag is the target and sacrifices itself by firing the space laser, which remains lit for a while as area denial. (For real life precedent, the US Navy has a nuclear torpedo; the Japanese had the Kamikaze; etc).

Other fun questions: (i) can the space laser strike shaded objects?; (ii) can it be targeted to a shaded location, but only actually hit what is above it? (iii) what happens to shots that go into the area-of-denial affected by the space laser ?

[Zehra]

@Rotten

I love the idea of a SPACE LASER! I got reminded of three films: Diamonds are Forever, GoldenEye, Die Another Day.

Expanding on what you've said: I imagine a lot of the capabilities vary quite a bit, since depending on the orbital state of the laser weapon.
Example: Low Earth Orbit vs Geosynchronous/Geostationary orbit. Which in turn would indicate the time frame or rather "operational window" in where and when it could be active, or in the case of really large maps, where it could be operated. (LEO's would move across the map/be outside of the map, while GEO's would remain within them always.)

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Overall with Space Lasers: It's pretty much a level of some strategic flag/tool in the game which hasn't been really seen yet before. Compare to shockwave is pretty much is a tactical nuke, or geno which is roughly a debuff and knock out all enemies in a single turn.

It would become a tool which is difficult to use, requires time to prepare, but when used extremely well, it easily turns over game play in an instance. (For some reason, I am thinking of Boxy Wars.)

I can somewhat imagine there be some form of "control" mechanism for orbital weapons. One possibility is some map/world object which is the controls and requires some form of teamwork to operate continually to some extent. (I'd imagine current player counts making it somewhat tricky to work right.)

Random idea expanding on this quite a bit: There's a platform somewhere outside of the "main" action within the game. The platform is somewhat like a room and there is a "control" platform which has a mini-map of the "world" or it acts like the "turret" plug-in control system. There is another section with a bunch of custom flags which must be placed on a custom platform or platforms. The custom flags are listed as "communications"/"energy" or something related to satellite communications and they move/are reset off the platform every x seconds/minutes as they are "used" up. It's a powerful little tool in most situations, but it isn't as useful as can be expected. Any flag captures would reset the "active" modules/custom flags, so it can't be continually used without any drawback. (Plus having players outside of the "battlefield"/"playing area" means it's easy for the other team to oppose/CTF which defeats the purpose of having access to it.)

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Completely unrelated: What if there was various powerful "strategic" flags within the game? (Nukes act as a clear all/area remains unusable for x time, orbital laser to have a single moveable, but temporary beam which eliminates anything in its path, EMP blast knocks out all movement in xyz region when activated...etc)

Imagine if we had flags which act as manipulators of settings/features: Electronic Warfare (EW) prevents players from using hunt/identify, Radar Interference knocks out all radar within xyz radius, Stealth Technology grants all teammates the effects of "Stealth" for x seconds when active (doesn't disable any flags currently held), Guided Bullets (shots home in on enemies), Smoke Generator deploys a heavy fog which masks movement outside the heads up display (radar remains unaffected), Weapons Research triggers a buff effect on any flags held by teammates for over x seconds/minutes.

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Pretty much anything with custom shots is somewhat "easy" (except for all the math and logic needed to get it running), but requires a lot of planning on how to make the controls operation/viable. Other effects require a bit of trickery to get working. (I'll try to give out the pseudo-code for this some time in the future.)

-Zehra