The weapon behaves in a quite realistic manner: it's unguided, it flies in a straight line, and when it thinks it's over the target, it enters a steep dive and crashes.
The direction of flight is chosen by simply rotating the whole launcher, so that the vehicle would launch with a proper heading.
The target distance is chosen by spawning an invisible object over the target, which informs the missile, that it's time to crash.
The actual problem: how do you enable the player to acquire a target? I mean, the player can choose heading and distance, but how does she/he know where the missile would land?
We've tried several solutions, but so far nothing is satisfying:
The most obvious thing to do is to give the player an overhead "god" camera that would always look where the missile would land. By operating the controls, the player would make the camera move around, showing him where the bomb would drop.
We found out, however, that such solution gives too much information to the team. It's also not believable, which goes against our design principles.
Another option was to make the player only look through artillery cameras placed by spotters. Operating the missile controls would make a special "target marker" (a huge, semitransparent cylinder, actually) move around the map. The player would use the spotter camera to place the marker on the target and launch.
We planned to make the marker visible only to the V-1 operator by using Cockpit LOD-Objects. Unfortunately, we found out that placing the cockpit geometry in a RotationalBundle (which is required to make the marker actually move) causes the game to crash. As a result, we could not make the target marker only visible to the player operating the V-1.
There was an idea to replace the marker with an invisible object, but with a minimap icon that is only visible by the team. But then it turns out that minimap vehicle icons only show up when they are within a certain radius from your PCO, which makes the solution unusable for long distances.
Our last stand was to make ambitious, fully-realistic controls. The player would look at a table inside a bunker. On the table there would be a small target marker, that would move around the table in response to controls. Upon pressing 'm', the minimap would expand to cover the table and the marker. Then the marker would show exactly where on the map the missile would fall.
This, besides being obviously difficult and tedious to implement, also relies on player's minimap to be at last partially transparent. If the player sets her/his minimap to fully opaque, then the expanded map would fully obstruct the target marker, rendering the controls useless. It's also the most difficult of all methods so far.
We are stuck at this point. Do you have any suggestions or your own ideas?
EDIT: spelling.
