Author Topic: i hate antifighter beams  (Read 7451 times)

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i hate antifighter beams
i hate them i hate them i hate them

Okay, look. You can have a weapon that's impossible to dodge. (Although in my opinion you really shouldn't; I'm against hitscan in general.) You can have a weapon that ignores shields and immediately ****s up all your subsystems. You can even have a weapon that knocks you around.

But YOU CAN'T HAVE A WEAPON THAT DOES ALL THREE OF THOSE THINGS AT THE SAME TIME.

The worst part of it is that I can't even blame the mission designer, because I'm playtesting one of my own ****ing missions. And the only way to reduce the annoyance would be to just remove the AF beams entirely, and that would probably make the mission trivially easy. Plus I hate making direct changes like that.

Blargh.

 

Offline Spoon

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Urutorahappī!!

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[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
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[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline Axem

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
AAA Beams are pretty annoying. One thing you can do to mitigate their annoyingness a bit is switch your hostile beams to AAAh instead of AAAfs. AAAhs are meant to be used by hostile ships and have lower accuracy values (compared to AAAf (friendly)).

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Instead of a die roll they should target a point in space you'll be in (say) a few milliseconds and if you're flying erratically they'd miss.

 

Offline rubixcube

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Re: i hate antifighter beams

You could always tweak the weapons tables to give them a mass value of zero.

Instead of a die roll they should target a point in space you'll be in (say) a few milliseconds and if you're flying erratically they'd miss.

Is that how the beam miss values work? So if the miss value is 3 the beam has a 1/3 chance of hitting?
« Last Edit: September 03, 2017, 07:26:38 pm by rubixcube »
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Offline Mongoose

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Avoid the beam and you won't get hit, pilot!

...wait.

 
Re: i hate antifighter beams
Instead of a die roll they should target a point in space you'll be in (say) a few milliseconds and if you're flying erratically they'd miss.

Yeah, I've thought about this. It'd be almost a bit like the telegraphed-attack thing that shows up in some games -- you see the turret light up, and if you get out of the way quickly enough, it misses.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: i hate antifighter beams

You could always tweak the weapons tables to give them a mass value of zero.

Instead of a die roll they should target a point in space you'll be in (say) a few milliseconds and if you're flying erratically they'd miss.

Is that how the beam miss values work? So if the miss value is 3 the beam has a 1/3 chance of hitting?

Uh, not sure I'm following you.

 
Re: i hate antifighter beams
I believe Dimensional Eclipse has beams that don't pierce shields (and probably a bajillion other mods as well, but it's the first that comes to mind).

I'm not sure what continuity you're working with, but you can always change all of those aspects. You can create an anti-fighter beam that shoots with inherent inaccuracy (although i'm unsure if the specific anti-fighter beam that shoots 3 pulses type takes the $Fof flag), the beam doesn't have to pierce shields, and you can lower the beamwhack. (And you could always set the subsystem damage of the beam to zero, as well, if you're just worried about that.)

Personally I love anti-fighter beams precisely because I am in favour of anything with more beams.

 

Offline Spoon

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
FS2 AAA beams were the primary reason why I opted to not have beams pierce shields, in WoD.
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
I believe that there was a time in FSO history when beam-piercing was accidentally disabled and people noticed that when they got hit by AAA it destroyed their shields in that vector.  That may have been when shield piercing became optional.
The Trivial Psychic Strikes Again!

 

Offline Kie99

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
While we're criticising beam mechanics it always seems a bit silly to me how beams go from being sniper like at 1500 metres but totally ineffectual at 1501 metres.  Would it be possible to have beams degrade in accuracy/damage over distance rather than going from 100% to zero?
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Offline Spoon

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
While we're criticising beam mechanics it always seems a bit silly to me how beams go from being sniper like at 1500 metres but totally ineffectual at 1501 metres.  Would it be possible to have beams degrade in accuracy/damage over distance rather than going from 100% to zero?
That is possible
+Attenuation:
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline rubixcube

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Re: i hate antifighter beams

You could always tweak the weapons tables to give them a mass value of zero.

Instead of a die roll they should target a point in space you'll be in (say) a few milliseconds and if you're flying erratically they'd miss.

Is that how the beam miss values work? So if the miss value is 3 the beam has a 1/3 chance of hitting?

Uh, not sure I'm following you.

The beams have a property called miss factor, the higher it is, the more innaccurate the beam is. But I was always curious what exactly it meant; how does a miss factor of 100 compare with a miss factor of 2 for instance?
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Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
The beams have a property called miss factor, the higher it is, the more innaccurate the beam is. But I was always curious what exactly it meant; how does a miss factor of 100 compare with a miss factor of 2 for instance?
The beam code picks a random float between 0.0f and 1.0f + miss factor * accuracy, where accuracy is supplied by the beam_fire_info struct and is usually 1.0f but sometimes is an extremely tiny value (used for beam-fire and similar situations). This random value is then multiplied by 1.0f - (the strength of the weapons subsystem) so that ships with heavily damaged weapons systems are more inaccurate. Finally, this value is multiplied by the radius of the target ship to determine how much to move the beam's aim point away from a straight line to the target (implementation-wise, it actually picks a random point on a circle with a radius equal to the aim value multiplied by the radius of the target object). So, a miss factor of 2 means that the beam has a 1 in 3 chance of firing within the radius of the target, and a miss factor of 0 doesn't guarantee a hit as long as the target isn't perfectly spherical (and maybe not even then because beams don't always target the dead center of the target object). If you want a beam to always hit dead on whatever it aims at, you should actually give it a miss factor of -1 (and then you'll experience the somewhat humorous fact that beam-fire becomes less accurate for that beam, not more).
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(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."
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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Is beam-fire a different thing from fire-beam?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Wait what the ****! Weapons subsys damage alters beam accuracy?

 
Re: i hate antifighter beams
Wait what the ****! Weapons subsys damage alters beam accuracy?

... Wait what, you did not know this?

  
Re: i hate antifighter beams
Even I knew that. Well, sort of. I knew that destroying the weapons subsystem reduced turret accuracy. I didn't know it scaled with health.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Re: i hate antifighter beams
Is beam-fire a different thing from fire-beam?
No, sorry, it's just called OP_BEAM_FIRE in the code so I always get it backwards.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Codethulhu GitHub wgah'nagl fhtagn.

schrödinbug (noun) - a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place.

When you gaze long into BMPMAN, BMPMAN also gazes into you.

"I am one of the best FREDders on Earth" -General Battuta

<Aesaar> literary criticism is vladimir putin

<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. :P
<MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".
(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."
<MageKing17> **** ME
<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID
<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.
<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.
<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"
(...)
<MageKing17> so
<MageKing17> more than two hours
<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion
<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

<IronWorks> I am useful for FSO stuff again. This is a red-letter day!
* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.