Driving in tactical view

You can now drive vehicles in tactical view. To control vehicle, click on it or on the steering wheel in team panel under driver’s portrait. Animations are a bit wonky and reminiscent of the first Emergency game, but that’s as good as it can get in game with movement limited to 8 directions. Vehicles have two gears – slow drive and fast drive, switchable just like walking and running (‘S’, ‘R’, double-click). Can’t sidestep, obviously, but can drive in reverse. Vehicles cannot sneak. Vehicles working: Ice Cream Van, Hummer, Jeep, El Dorado and, potentially, tanks.

Shooting from vehicle

Passengers can be selected and ordered to open fire from the inside. Enemies shoot at the vehicle too (nothing new here). Passengers are treated as sitting for calculation purposes.

Action points, passengers and exploits

Normally vehicle is treated as any other merc and has its own APs. It has obvious disadvantages – it’s possible to drive in the middle of the enemy group using vehicle’s 100AP, and then use all your mercs inside vehicle with their still full APs to kill everything that moves at point blank range – with even the driver participating! To prevent that you can set Tactical Gameplay Settings > AP_SHARED_AMONG_PASSENGERS_AND_VEHICLE_MODE with following calculation methods:

• 0 – No change.
• 1 – APs deducted from vehicle are also deducted from all passengers.
  Example 1: Passenger has 70 AP, vehicle 100 AP when turn starts. Passenger shoots for 20 AP, has 50 now. Vehicle drives for 60 AP – passenger loses 60 AP too, has now -10AP.
  Idea is that APs correspond to the time and time flows for all inside the moving vehicle even if they do nothing. Note it’s possible to end up with huge AP debt if you waste all APs, and then drive.
• 2 – APs deducted from vehicle are also deducted from all passengers, but adjusted to initial APs of any given passenger.
  Example 1: Passenger has 70 AP, vehicle 100 AP when turn starts. Passenger shoots for 20 AP, has 50 now. Vehicle drives for 60 AP – passenger loses 42 AP (60 / 100 * 70), has now 8AP.
  Same as above, but treats single AP not as a time unit but merc specific amount of things given merc can do in a specified time unit. Still possible to end up with huge AP debt.
• 3 – APs deducted from vehicle are also deducted from all passengers, but only to the certain threshold (default setting).
  Example 1: Passenger has 70 AP, vehicle 100 AP when turn starts. Passenger shoots for 20 AP, has 50 now. Vehicle drives for 60 AP – if passenger didn’t shoot, he would lose 42 AP (60 / 100 * 70) and have 28 APs now. Since it’s less than passenger’s current 50, he ends up with 28 APs.
  Example 2: Passenger has 70 AP, vehicle 100 AP when turn starts. Passenger shoots for 70 AP, has 0 now. Vehicle drives for 60 AP – if passenger didn’t shoot, he would lose 42 AP (60 / 100 * 70) and have 28 APs now. Since it’s more than passenger’s current 0, he ends up with 0 APs.
  Idea is similar to the 2, but acknowledges that actions can be concurrent – mercs shoot WHILE vehicle is moving, only sharing, umm, vehicle’s timeline at the specific moment.

You can also set AP_SHARED_AMONG_PASSENGERS_AND_VEHICLE_SCALE to scale how much APs will be deducted just due to riding.  Entering or exiting vehicle costs 30 AP. When driver exits, next person automatically takes control of the steering wheel.

To do:

– ramming enemies and structures,
– crits against vehicles (from commented out code: there were supposed to be different critical effects depending on which segment of vehicle was hit: tires, engine, gas tank, crew compartment).
– customised vehicle seats (FOV, protection, mounted guns, etc.; specific seat selectable on entering vehicle)
– wheelies, jumping ramps, drifting. OK, maybe not.
– force AI to use their own vehicles? Some car chases would be nice.