Tanks with fake turrets

[Ardis]

I've had this little problem for a while. The modified siege tank will have a minor bug when it transforms where a very small fraction of the tanks will lock in a "half-mode" where they will stay locked and not respond to any orders and will crash the game if left alone long enough. I think the bug first showed up when we tried to get the tank turret to always face the same direction as the base because the attack was given to the base unit instead of the turret.

What I planned to do was remove the turret from the tank and make it use a fake turret which is built onto the .grp file for when it transforms. It won't need the turret for its mobile mode because the turret locks into the main body. The turret is only supposed to be able to turn when the tank is in its siege mode where it will attack with the fake turret. My idea was to create a sprite of the tank in its siege mode with the turret attached and only make the turret turn for siege mode. Any ideas on how one could iscript such an odd idea?

This is what a locked up tank looks like,  and the button stays highlighted.
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i271/ ... CKTANK.png

[ShadowFlare]

You may be missing a sigorder in the part of the tank's iscript for switching modes.  That opcode tells Starcraft that the animation is done and it is ready to let the order continue.  Mostly likely just look at the original siege tank (or turret?) animations to find where it does it and then copy the line to the same place in your animations.

[Ardis]

Okay, I'm no expert at iscripting, but if the problem is what you describe, wouldn't ALL of the siege tanks freeze?

[ShadowFlare]

It could even be something like that you are missing the nobreakcodestart and nobreakcodeend (or whatever they were called) and that the animation is getting interrupted in some cases.

[Ardis]

The only thing I can think of is that I'm interrupting some action that doesn't have a proper nobrkcode and end because it usually happens when I give them new orders, the turret will freeze, but the base moves fine until I transform it. But I'm already working on a single unit tank to fix the problem and so I will have more empty image.dat slots for other units. I'll review the script to see what I can find.

[Xenon]

Isn't there a way to make the tank mode turret sprite invisible, and leave the iscript the way it is by default?

[Ardis]

Xenon, you're overlooking the whole point of this. The problem is that I don't have the sprites.dat, images.dat and flingy.dat entries I need, so I have to start cutting stuff indefinitely such as the real turrets to make room for other units that don't have a sprite for themselves yet. By not using the turrets, I freed up two more sprites.