[Wanderer]

These would IMHO be quite usefull features

i) Armor that affects also subsystems, current armor.tbl doesn't. (posted earlier to SCP Forums)

ii) Armor that affects the damage from the shockwaves. (posted earlier to SCP Forums)

iii) Ability to control the free flight time of secondary weapons, the standard 1/4s might be a bit too small for slow secondaries (like bombs launched from capship turrets)

iv) Ability for FRED to read data also from x-shp.tbms (annoying little thing)

Opinions?

[WMCoolmon]

i) Sounds good, probably doable
ii) Not sure how doable this is, since shockwaves aren't technically a weapon.
iv) Should already be in there. Make sure that FRED is using the same -mod commandline as fs2_open, and the modular tables are in a data/tables directory.

[Wanderer]

ii) Is the most important of these. Though not any urgent matter. It would really have its uses in Starfox mod though. I was just wondering that you had included the $shockwave damage: so if it might be possible. Well if it is not, then we'll have to come up with something else...

[WMCoolmon]

Damn!!

New feature rush with my sugar rush.

weapons.tbl[/u]
$Shockwave Damage Type: after "$Shockwave damage:" (see the weapons.tbl wiki) sets the damage type of the shockwave.
$Free flight time: right before "$LaunchSnd:" should adjust the free flight time of homing secondary weapons.

ships.tbl
$Shockwave Damage Type: before" $Shockwave speed:"

For subsystems:
$Armor Type: after the initial "$Subsystem:" will set the armor type for that subsystem. Since you can hit multiple subsystems with one hit (damage is based on radius from subsys center), each subsystem will use its own individual armor type. However, if the subsystem that the impact is closest to has an armor type, it will override the ship's hull armor type. If the closest subsystem has no armor type, then the usual hull armor type will be used for any damage applied to the hull.
+carry-no-damage: after "+non-targetable" (See ships.tbl wiki) will specify that damage to the subsystem will not carry over to the ship's hull.

All untested, but I've identified the coding areas that had to be changed, which was most of the work. Needless to say, this should do things like make armor.tbl useful, and let you use subsystems as shields for the hull.

Also, the countermeasures are probably messed, if you have any helpful input on what's wrong with them, I could use it. None of this stuff is going in CVS til that's fixed.

Build: http://fs2source.warpcore.org/exes/latest/fs2_open_Csx.zip

Edit: Build was down while I made subsystem behavior better. Still no testing though.

[Wanderer]

Wow!

It seems that 'not urgent' means quite a bit different for you than what it does for me...
All for the better

I'll try it ASAP which is perhaps in 8 hours... I'll try the countermeasures too when i get down to it
And the $Free flight time is in milliseconds?

[WMCoolmon]

It's actually in seconds, but you can use decimal values. Come to think of it everything else uses milliseconds tough.

I was actually going to just apply #2, then realized how to apply #1, while doing that I figured out how to remove the subsystem damage carryover,  then figured I might as well do a quick search for #3. Plus, you asked nicely.

[FireCrack]

hmm....

damage types for collision, a default damage type?

[Wanderer]

First report after brief tests:

Standard armor.tbl works fine, as said earlier in Mantis, multiple calculations, multiple armor types and multiple damage types all work fine as far as i can tell.

Subsystem armor causes (unlike damage to ships) subsystems to gain hitpoints instead of doing nothing if the damage value was negative. For hull hitpoints similar incidence cause no hitpoints to be gained or lost. Laser turret having 3687% hitpoints remaining is quite funny... Perhaps i could use the cutoff 'calculation' to beat this one. This was with using the standard hull armor only, subsys armors were not activated.

Shockwave damage for weapons seems to work fine. Tests for ship shockwaves were failed due my own stupidity (altered table entry of a wrong ship and then started testing ).

Follow ups coming soon.

[Starman01]

$Shockwave Damage Type: after "$Shockwave damage:" (see the weapons.tbl wiki) sets the damage type of the shockwave.

Hey, this brings me back to an old (minor) request from the  WCS-Project Would it be also possible, to make here a EMP-Effect to the shockwave. I suppose it should be, because EMP is also a weapon-effect on a missile. What do you think ?

[Wanderer]

Now some more info -

+carry-no-damage (without  the colon) works, no damage is tranferred to the hull. Great for turrets.

$Free flight time: works, only oddity arises from the fact that (for example) missiles launched from a ship travel at 25 % of weapon velocity + the firing ships speed before the free flight time ends and speed is instantly (the problem) increased to 100 %. But it is not a big problem.

Shockwaves from the ships seem to do damage despite of armor and weapon shockwaves do not. Though this needs still some testing for my part. Subsystem armor seems to work in both 'default' and also in 'separately set for subsystems' case

Tomorrow or at the weekend i will tackle on with the countermeasures.

[AqueousShadow]

Just wanted to say thank you, WMC. I realize that you're giving us, the SF mod, a good amount of your time, and I just want to let you know that we appreciate it.

[Bobboau]

hey if you have found the no cary over code, is there an easy way to do the opposite, have a subsystem that cannot be damaged (all damage goes to the hull)

[WMCoolmon]

Yeah, the function basically runs through the subsys and applies the damage, then was supposed to return the leftover damage to the hull. But apparently it broke the balance severely (Making Anubis' able to withstand 10 rockeyes) so :V: just returned the damage passed to the function. (I switched the return variable to the leftover-damage one) To apply all damage to the hull, you'd just have to keep the return value the same, and skip the two loops that sort and apply damage to the subsystems.

[jr2]

Hi peoples,
maybe I'm crazy, and maybe it's not possible, BUT...
what if the missile tracking indicators displayed on missile launch (arrows that move around the center view in the HUD) displayed the distance from your ship to tracking missile in small numbers tacked on outside of the arrow?  That would help when timing countermeasure releases / afterburners engaging.  The enemy AIs all seem to be able to time theirs perfectly, but how'm I supposed to know how far away a missile is, or if it's even tracking me?  (if the missile was tracking someone else, it wouldn't get too close, so I might not try to evade every time a missile launches)

[jr2]

Just another crazy idea,
maybe the engine glow/trail could be modified so it's barely a glow peeping out the back on stop, an progressively stretches to full size/brightness as throttle goes up?
PS I hope this is the right forum for these, if not someone please let me know before I inflict you guys with more.  :-D

[jr2]

I have to include this for my brother, he'll kill me if I don't,
On the 3d shockwaves by DaBrain, maybe they'd look even better if the outer edge of them had a tear-drop type thickness that narrows to the current thin layer as it get closer to the center of the explosion.  (like in the FS1 cutscene of the Lucifer exploding, if I remember correctly)  ...or does this post belong in a different section?
Anyways, thanks for the time...

[CaptJosh]

You know, there is an "edit" button on your posts.

[StratComm]

Hi peoples,
maybe I'm crazy, and maybe it's not possible, BUT...
what if the missile tracking indicators displayed on missile launch (arrows that move around the center view in the HUD) displayed the distance from your ship to tracking missile in small numbers tacked on outside of the arrow? That would help when timing countermeasure releases / afterburners engaging. The enemy AIs all seem to be able to time theirs perfectly, but how'm I supposed to know how far away a missile is, or if it's even tracking me? (if the missile was tracking someone else, it wouldn't get too close, so I might not try to evade every time a missile launches)

That's what the beeping is for.  The more frequent the beeps, the closer the missile.  It's a fairly intuitive system as it is now and it's covered in the training missions.  It's also one of the skills aquired when playing.  IMHO, adding a numeric readout would just make the HUD more cluttered and more often than not add little to the gameplay.  Also, all missiles that get indicators on the HUD are "tracking" you, only most of them are dumbfires most of the time and so tend to just lose lock.

Just another crazy idea,
maybe the engine glow/trail could be modified so it's barely a glow peeping out the back on stop, an progressively stretches to full size/brightness as throttle goes up?
PS I hope this is the right forum for these, if not someone please let me know before I inflict you guys with more. :-D

They already scale, sort of.  The lengths don't go short enough by any means, I agree, but it's an issue that we're aware of and want to see (eventually) fixed.

I have to include this for my brother, he'll kill me if I don't,
On the 3d shockwaves by DaBrain, maybe they'd look even better if the outer edge of them had a tear-drop type thickness that narrows to the current thin layer as it get closer to the center of the explosion. (like in the FS1 cutscene of the Lucifer exploding, if I remember correctly) ...or does this post belong in a different section?
Anyways, thanks for the time...

A media issue and better suited to either FS modding or the FSUpgrade forums.  That said, it would be worth playing with to see how the effect came out.  It wouldn't require any further editing to the graphics, just a different model.  However, I think it'd get overruled pretty quickly as once you give the shockwave a non-negligable volume you then make it obvious that the graphic is actually just a shell.  It would look pretty strange from inside.

[Wanderer]

I added a $Countermeasure type: TypeT field to a ships.tbl entry and quickly build an entry for countermeasure that would use belial.pof as its model, i got the standard cmeasure.pof instead.

Also if i add $lifetime min and $lifetime max entries i get limitless lifetime for missiles AND countermeasures. In this testcase those were in addition to the lifetime entry but even standard countermeasure had limitless lifetime. However countermeasure flag seems to work missiles, with it they tend to blow up each other...

I might be doing something wrong, could you (WMC) PM the table entries you used for testing?

[WMCoolmon]

Well, I have a quick guess...try changing the default countermeasure entry's model. I think the most likely thing is that the default countermeasure-selecting code is accidentally overriding the $Countermeasure type selection or something.

I didn't really do much testing of that when I implemented it, I'm pretty sure that the variable works (because of a mess-up involving weapon indices and resorting), but the table->variable code I didn't test.