[Bluemoon]

Hey Guys,

Last time I played TBP was may be 12 months ago, and WOW, haven't things improved!

Shadow Battlecrab model, B5 model! Whitestar!!!! And to top that nials with beam weapons.... !
Very cool indeed!

Anyways, enough sucking up 

All this content has me excitied, so I am going to be fredding up some missions to see how they go but I have a couple of 'challeges' that I am sure (hope?) someone can help with:


Shadow Vessel Warp In/ Warp Out
This is self explanatory, but I should clarify... is there are way to get the battle crabs to warp in as in the show? I see we can set custom jump point now, blue and yellow in colour, but is there anything implemented for the shadows?

More to the point, what do other fredders do when a battlecrab jumps in? Simply have it in game from the start?

Relistic Capship combat
Any tips on getting the capships to kick hell out of each other? At the moment, I am using waypoint paths at the moment, with 'fire-beam' directives, but feel they are some better hacks, tips that I am missing?


Wing of fighers using a jumpgate
Currently, if I was a wing of 12 fighters to use a jump gate, I can position them inside the jump gate, but when they jump in, I get 12 jump points forming. It looks bad.

As an alternative, I can create a customer jump point inside the jumpgate and then have the fighers jump in with no warp effect BUT they just appear from nowhere.

Any hacks I can use? Ideally I would like to create a customer jump point, and then accelerate the fighers in say at 250m/s from say 2500 meters behind the jumpgate... BUT I can't find the directives to do this? Is it even possible to make a ship fly faster than its hardcoded top speed using FRED?

What are others doing??


Many Thanks,

Bluemoon

[Primus]

For the Shadow warp in/out just use 'No Warp' setting.

Fighter jumping in from gate (what I do);
-Make a jumppoint size of the gate and position it inside the gate.
-Set the fighters to 'No Warp' and position them so it looks that they come from the jumppoint.
-Time the effect so, that the fighters jump in little after the jumppoint has fully opened.

Hope you get something out of this.

[Trivial Psychic]

I'm hoping that the SCP team will include an option to disable warp vortex rendering for arrivals and departures, but retain the accelleration and deceleration effects, in the arrival/departure cues.  Then, use the model-specific warping speeds (will likely be included one some later TBP release), and set the model warp speeds to 300 m/s or something.  Then, its just a matter of a sexp-rendered warp effect and timed arrivals without their own effect, and its all ready.

[0rph3u5]

capship combat is allways a tricky run....
1) don't do too much with 'fire beam', enable "all ships beam freed as default" in the mission specs
2) make wp routes and script their waypoint speed ("cap-waypoint-speed" can be found in the category special of avalible sexps)
3) you should get yourself the weapon's ranges from the guns of all ships involved...

in some very rare chases you can use the attack order (often for ships like the Vorchans or Olympus) but when using larger capships you need wps to give it a good look

here is an example for a nice capship encounter from me:

opening situation
1) Omega 1 is procceding on a wp path with a total speed of 20 to reach a jumpgate
2) Omega 2 is chasing Omega 1 on a wp path paralell to Omega 1's path with a speed of 40
3) both ships are 5600m away from each other
4) non of the ships is to change its course for any reason
5) all fighters are dogfightering
1st action:
Omega 2 get closer than 5000m to Omega 1 and opens fire with it's front pluse turrets (the shoots never hit Omega 1 'cause it is out of the turrets angles but a player who will fly towards omega 2 will see it firing and think his command ship (Omega 1) is in danger)
2nd action
Omega 2 closes on to 2500m to Omega 1 and fires her x-rays at Omega 1
3rd action
Omega 1 responds fire with it's rear x-rays and pulse turrets (although the pulse turrets engage fighters in most cases)
4th action a
omega 1 loses the fight and goes down since omega 2 brings the superior firepower into play
4th action b
fighters were able to destroy the x-rays of Omega 2 and Oemga 1 takes the defenceless Omega 2 apart
4th action c
fighters destroyed or damaged the engines of Omega 2 so it can't maintain a speed higher than 20 and falls behind

this battle is part of the campaign Awakening of the Beast which will be released in April 2006 - you will have to wait a while until you see it

[karajorma]

1) don't do too much with 'fire beam', enable "all ships beam freed as default" in the mission specs

There are quite a few people who would say the opposite of that so it's not a hard and fast rule. That said I'm not one of them. I always just beam-free my ships and let them duke it out unless I'm certain that I want all the fire concentrated on one enemy or something

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

Hey Bluemoon,



Welcome to the Hard Light Productions facility.  Current topside temperature is an unusually cold 900 degrees centigrade, but that will change.  The only things you really need to worry about around here are the odd Shivan attack, an0n, or an occasional flamewar.  In case of true emergency, allow women, children, and any non-Terran personnel to leave first.  If you require a weapon, there is a flamethrower under your seat, but due to budget cuts and the recent move, they are filled with water.  The plasma rifles in the weapons lockers are only accessible by an admin, V-god, or hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue.  If you are assigned to duct maintenance duty, you may encounter Carl, the HLP Shivan resident.  If you do, give him your lunch and he may go away.  If not, beg for death.  Perhaps he will make it relatively painless.  Thank you and have a pleasant stay.

[Bluemoon]

And suddenly it is clear what I need....   

Anyone got a matirx inlcuding the range, and firing angle of each weapon

I know I am asking a lot....  oh, unless there is a table I can hack? Any tips? (pls bear in mind, I have NO idea where the tables exist in TBP - I only ever see them for a ship in FRED)

Also, thanks for the time you all put in, great scenario 0rph3u5. The SCP codes do look like they are MORE than pulling their weight. Good luck to them.



Bluemoon

[karajorma]

The tables for TBP live inside the VP files. If you look at the tools page of my FAQ you can find out how to get at them.

[Bluemoon]

I assume you mean VPview... however, the links are broken. Can you hook me up with this elsewhere?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/tools.html

(my word, someone else who uses NTL... great service they have  )


Bluemoon

[Wanderer]

Try for example http://www.descent-network.com/cgi-bin/descmankit.cgi?kit=fskit and http://www.descent-network.com/cgi-bin/descman.cgi?module=modelview

[Bluemoon]

Great help so far guys, weapons.tbl contains the weapon ranges... but I can't find their firing arc anywhere.

In order to be clear, I mean the angle that the weapon has to be to the enemy ship in order for it to fire.

Any ideas?   

Bluemoon.

[karajorma]

The links worked for me. Are you having problems with the links to descent-network in my FAQ or the actual VPView link on Descent-Network?

[Wanderer]

Firing arcs are defined in the ships model file (.pof), not in table files.

[Jokke_r]

Current topside temperature is an unusually cold 900 degrees centigrade, but that will change.

Factual error, coldest temperature would be around 273.15° Celcius, or 0 Kelvin.

[berus]

Actually 0 Kelvin is MINUS 273 C.

But since the welcome post is talking about the "topside" temperature and not absolutes, 900 C can be unusually cold - if it's normally much warmer than this