Author Topic: Helicopter Bot  (Read 2553 times)

Might not be possible, I wouldn't know. A bot that you can spawn which is a helicopter which you can use wrench to change around like the normal bot, make it move around and change whether its hostile (I'm thinking of an apache or something like that)

I think you can do this by changing the datablock of a bot

I think you can do this by changing the datablock of a bot
is this something that would remain in my builds? like if i made a bot a helicopter and saved it in a build, and reloaded blockland the next day would it still be a helicopter? and would it retain the functionalities of the helicopter, like shooting and all that stuff? cos im wanting something that has the shooting, the changing of height and the whole nine yards

You could just add supports and place a bot hole on top of the helicopter, remove the collision on the hole and let the bot fall onto the helicopter, it saves a lot of time and most likely will behave the same exact way. But I doubt the chopper is gonna be driven properly unless you have like some kind of add-don that makes steering easier, other then that that's my only suggestion that could probably work.

You could just add supports and place a bot hole on top of the helicopter, remove the collision on the hole and let the bot fall onto the helicopter, it saves a lot of time and most likely will behave the same exact way. But I doubt the chopper is gonna be driven properly unless you have like some kind of add-don that makes steering easier, other then that that's my only suggestion that could probably work.
Won't work. Whenever I try it, the bot turns brain-dead and flies in circles endlessly.

There was one issue I had to overcome that should be mentioned:
When telling an AIPlayer to look at a position using %obj.setAimLocation(), Torque wrongly adds the base vehicle's rotation to the AI's eye transform.
Here is what it looks like if you dont fix the rotation. The turrets should be aiming at 1 point
I point this out because I think this is the reason why vehicles go in circles if driven by a bot.  With this issue fixed, mods like AIVehicles could be possible.

To avoid having to use vehicles, someone could try to make the helicopter bot fly or hover via jets, don't know how to actually implement it though just throwing the idea out there


he said he overcame it

in that case, is a helicopter bot feasible?

A helicopter bot is definitely feasible but I don't see any way you'd get around coding your own AI for it. It would end up being easier than trying to jury rig hole bots into doing anything correctly, but would still be technically challenging.

A bot would seem to be the simplest solution, you could give it a lot of air control and use setMove and setAim methods to move it around in the sky. I can't remember if you can change jet speed, but you could easily control a bot's altitude by manipulating it's velocity directly. This would be smoother than using a vehicle but you would be sacrificing the ability to rotate it on more than one axis, though if I recall correctly there is an animation trick used in the skateboard add-on that you could use to change the pitch of the helicopter.

potentially raycast upwards at different angles to find potential shooting solutions
and then have the helicopter try to fly around in those areas, while doing large box searches to find flyable airspace around it
actually doesn't sound too hard to do that AI