[Vasudan Admiral]

Originally posted by Wanderer
If you want new features, how about making armor system that would enable different armor to different submodels (turrets / radars / etc.) or even to different subystems (sensors etc.). This would make possible to table heavily armored capships with weakly armored turrets (that player can destroy) or to enable 'weak' points in the design.

All that's been there since retail. In the ships table, for each subsystem (turrets, radar, weapons, sensors, engines etc) you have two numbers after the subsystems name - this one's the radar dish from the Fenris: $Subsystem: radar01a-dish, 5, 0.0
and the rotating turret:
$Subsystem: turret09a-01-main, 8, 10.0

The first number there represents how many hitpoints this subsystem has as a percentage of the total hull hitpoints (can't exceed 100%) and the second is how long that turret takes to rotate (ie, big turrets turn more slowly).

[karajorma]

Originally posted by TrashMan
You know what? F*** retail!

How about we just say f**k you instead

Originally posted by TrashMan
This is FSO! Retail didn't have armor. It didn't have ballistic primaries! It didn't have a lot of stuff.

And NONE of that is used in the retail campaign. You're insisting on making a change to something that is used in retail and would have an effect on missions.

Originally posted by TrashMan
At leat make it a turn on/off feature if you fear it might break some campaigns (alltough that must be some sloppy campaign if they can be broken so easilly)

As Stratcomm pointed out there are lots of missions that depend on the fact that the designer has made the assumption that the player won't have enough time to disable enough of the craft to have an effect. That's a fair assumption to make as long as people don't start dicking about with the code.

Having a ships table flag that alters the behavious is fine but saying screw backwards compatability is a sign that whoever said it really isn't thinking things through.

[Wanderer]

I meant that with WMCs armor.tbl or the like you can make the ships take more damage from certain weapons. So what if you make a subsystem that that 0.0 as the subsystem HP multiplier entry and has no HPs (quite like hangarbays in some [V] designs, all damage goes to directly to ships HPs without damaging the subsystem) and input an armor entry for it that forces it to take more damage from certain weapons or even from all weapons (weak point concept). And as it is a subsystem it would still allow AI to use this, with proper fredding.

With heavily armored hull i meant that the hulls armor is so strong (again the armor.tbl) that no fighter weapon will even penetrate it and henceforth do not cause any damage to it.

[fluff]It could be perhaps reasoned that there is no point constructing massive battlewagons that can not withstand standard fighter primary weapons. Secondaries and beams are another matter. Also low turret armor might allow turrets to rotate faster and therefore turrets have reasonably low armor values.[/fluff]

Ofcourse the influence of this kind of a change is so low that there is perhaps no point what so ever to do it.

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by karajorma

And NONE of that is used in the retail campaign. You're insisting on making a change to something that is used in retail and would have an effect on missions.

That's why I sai an on/off feature..

besides, name me one mission that could be easily borken?

Everytime a ship is heading towards somewhere it has so many engines or so many hitpoint that there is no chance of you stoping it.

Ineni? Gone too fast.
Sathanas? You can'd disable it!

Aquitaine? I has 5 engines and not much HP. The shivans are gonna destroy it in 99,9% of all cases before they actually manage to disable it.

[WMCoolmon]

You forgot a few missions

[Vasudan Admiral]

I meant that with WMCs armor.tbl or the like you can make the ships take more damage from certain weapons.

Oh! That explains all then, my apologies.

On the subject of engines, the Moloch doesn't work because it has all engine glowpoints assigned to one engine subsystem (02). If you take it out, all glowpoints will vanish AFAIK.
The Deimos works because the glowpoints are separated by their appropriate engine block - as they're supposed to be. It's basically something that will need to be fixed on a model by model basis when they're HTLed.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by TrashMan


That's why I sai an on/off feature..

besides, name me one mission that could be easily borken?

Everytime a ship is heading towards somewhere it has so many engines or so many hitpoint that there is no chance of you stoping it.

I named one.  Way back when.  Rebels and Renegades.  The Iceni is supposed to spend a very precise time inside the active asteroid field.  If it loses an engine and slows down, then the entire mission gets changed.  But since one example just isn't good enough for you (even though one contradictory example is all that's needed for any logical proof) I'll go through the entire list.

• The Great Hunt
• Rebels and Renegades
• Love the Treason...
• Battle of the Wilderness
• Proving Grounds
• King's Gambit
• Endgame
• Clash of the Titans II
• Apocalypse

And that's just the retail campaign, and is actually assuming that the current damage model still applies for ships with only one engine subsystem.  Essentially any time a ship with more than one engine subsystem must complete its waypoints before some action is taken (mission completion, jumping out, etc) will be potentially effected.  And since that's a pretty fundamental way of scripting a mission, you've got major misconceptions about what balance is if you think it's ok to just muck around with scripted events.

[CaptJosh]

You raise excellent points, StratComm. Despite that, it would be nice to have an adaptive engine damage system toggle in case someone wanted to make a mod that would use it. I'm sure any number of us could think of some a way to take advantage of such a feature.

[StratComm]

The point is, there already is an adaptive damage model in place.  It may not be the adaptive model that some people want, but it is there and can be used to great effect if someone were to actually take the time to make it work in their missions.  I'd oppose a global command-line level flag if just for the fact that I really don't want to have to customize my launcher settings for each and every campaign that comes out (insert Kara's mod.ini pimpage) and for something as totally trivial as the way overall thrust scales with engine damage it's just not worth it in the end.

[CaptJosh]

Now that sounds like a good idea. An ini file that loads command line triggers needed for specific mods. It would make customization easier. Want to play The Babylon Project? Just load it. The ini file makes sure the settings are correct.  I think karajorma's on to something here.

[TrashMan]

Some of hte mission you descirbed are faulted.

The appearance of the Ravan for instance is tied with the damageing of the second cruiser and similar things hold true for other missions.

99% of all mission I've seen are tied with are-waypoints-done or some otehr event like hull strength or distance.

And let's not forget there's NOTHING from stopping you currently to try and disable any ship in those missions.
With or without that system, some mission can be broken is some ships are disabled.

Fortunately, the shivan AI is allways out to destroy, not disable and engines generally have lot's of HP. - and bigger engines, that give more thrust, have more HP.

So what would happen if in the Great Hunt for instance, one Deimos get's it engine blown? It would be a little slower - BIG DEAL. it would change nothing in the mission....

[karajorma]

Originally posted by StratComm
I'd oppose a global command-line level flag if just for the fact that I really don't want to have to customize my launcher settings for each and every campaign that comes out.

I'd suggest with going for a ships table flag anyway. You should be able to determine how much each engine affects the overall speed. It seems silly that the tiny engine at the front of the Deimos is generating as much thrust as the huge ones at the back.

That way the mod designer still has complete control and backwards compatability is preserved as the old tables won't have this new data and will just use the old model.


@Trashman I suggest you set a cap-waypoint-speed on those ships and see what happens to the mission balance rather than continually asserting nothing would happen.

[WMCoolmon]

Trashman:

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
You forgot a few missions

There is no reason to go back and test all those missions and hack in fixes to the code when it could be done with a special ship flag for just as much effort.

Now that sounds like a good idea. An ini file that loads command line triggers needed for specific mods. It would make customization easier. Want to play The Babylon Project? Just load it. The ini file makes sure the settings are correct. I think karajorma's on to something here.

*Dislikes this idea*

Command-line flags should be for player preferences only, IMHO. If a mod might conceivably want to turn something on and off, then it should be some kind of flag. (eg newtonian physics)

I don't want to have to start editting INI files just because the mod designer thinks that I *should* be playing with specular lighting on. (Although it may slow my comp down)

[StratComm]

Originally posted by TrashMan
Some of hte mission you descirbed are faulted.

The appearance of the Ravan for instance is tied with the damageing of the second cruiser and similar things hold true for other missions.

99% of all mission I've seen are tied with are-waypoints-done or some otehr event like hull strength or distance.

Mostly distance.  And what is distance besides a sign that the ship has traveled a set distance from some other point, which will be wholly dependant on its speed.  Longer time-to-completion, longer mission, broken timing and balance.

Originally posted by TrashMan
And let's not forget there's NOTHING from stopping you currently to try and disable any ship in those missions.
With or without that system, some mission can be broken is some ships are disabled.

Did I ever say anything about the player doing the disabling?  No, I did not.  I'm actually implying that an errant bomb or some other quasi-random factor would do that.  And since it's relatively random, you've got no control over how long it takes the relevant ship to move from one point to another anymore.

Originally posted by TrashMan
Fortunately, the shivan AI is allways out to destroy, not disable and engines generally have lot's of HP. - and bigger engines, that give more thrust, have more HP.

I've seen a number of ships get disabled by Shivan bombers.  It does actually happen.  It's rare that they take out more than one system if more are present, so having redundant engines currently acts as a buffer to that effect.  You're asking to change that.

Originally posted by TrashMan
So what would happen if in the Great Hunt for instance, one Deimos get's it engine blown? It would be a little slower - BIG DEAL. it would change nothing in the mission....

Except that the two corvettes will not be side-by-side like they are supposed to be.  Which means only one will engage the cruisers, only one will be in front of the Ravana.  That's different.

But what I suspect this all boils down to is that, instead of implimenting the mission properly with a scripted set of events, you want to plop things down and have them behave exactly as you expect (see "Battles too short?") which goes against the way things are done in Freespace in general.

[CaptJosh]

fair enough Coolmon, as far as that goes. But what about for necessary features to a mod. It would limit the amount of command line switches needed.

[StratComm]

Yeah it's supposed to be for this sort of thing, not graphical details.  Resisting the temptation to turn on graphics by default may be difficult, but being able to specify, say, cell shading, smart shields, and disabling beams from piercing shields across every player of the mod (or some other feature that otherwise breaks backwards compatibility) would be extremely useful to making sure mods don't have to worry about balancing for a dozen different combinations of options.

[WMCoolmon]

I'm not sure those should even be command-line options...but that's exactly the sort of thinking I'm talking about. If I have global command-line options, I'd like to be able to use them. And if they don't work, it's just a pain in the ass to go back and figure out why, what with intermod dependencies and such.

I'm not sure how cell shading is done, but it seems like a reasonable per-mission or even per-ship/weapon/object option. If it can only be turned on when fs2_open is started then maybe a .tbl option is in order.

[Spicious]

Originally posted by StratComm
Yeah it's supposed to be for this sort of thing, not graphical details.  Resisting the temptation to turn on graphics by default may be difficult, but being able to specify, say, cell shading, smart shields, and disabling beams from piercing shields across every player of the mod (or some other feature that otherwise breaks backwards compatibility) would be extremely useful to making sure mods don't have to worry about balancing for a dozen different combinations of options.

So shouldn't these gameplay altering features be mission, ship or weapon flags rather than command line options?

[Fury]

Originally posted by CaptJosh
TBP would probably appreciate it if there was a newtonian physics mod as well.

Not really, arcade physics with some newtonianish tricks has been TBP's gameplay style from the beginning. The staff has never really wanted full newtonian physics. If you want newtonian phycics, go and play "I've Found Her ".

That said, times change as does TBP's leadership, and I cannot predict future decisions on the matter.

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by StratComm


Mostly distance.  And what is distance besides a sign that the ship has traveled a set distance from some other point, which will be wholly dependant on its speed.  Longer time-to-completion, longer mission, broken timing and balance.

If a mission can be broken simply becouse a ship is slower or a little faster than usual, than that's bad FREDing.
Besides, for a mission taking one minute longer to complete - what's the deal. Don't tell me you consider that broken?

I can't think ofa single mission I made that could be broken that way.

Did I ever say anything about the player doing the disabling?  No, I did not.  I'm actually implying that an errant bomb or some other quasi-random factor would do that.  And since it's relatively random, you've got no control over how long it takes the relevant ship to move from one point to another anymore.

You never can know for sure. What if the shivans (by pure randomness) disable it? That's why tying events to ship speed is utterly dumb

I've seen a number of ships get disabled by Shivan bombers.  It does actually happen.  It's rare that they take out more than one system if more are present, so having redundant engines currently acts as a buffer to that effect.  You're asking to change that.

As I said, it would only slow the ship down, it won't make it any easier for the enemy to destroy the ship...

Except that the two corvettes will not be side-by-side like they are supposed to be.  Which means only one will engage the cruisers, only one will be in front of the Ravana.  That's different.

Not really
a) the speed difference is not that great
b) they stop at each cruiser so the second corvette would catch up
c) the ravana comes after the first cruiser is critical - it takes time for the corvettes to do that and that means plenty of time for the other corvette to catch up

But what I suspect this all boils down to is that, instead of implimenting the mission properly with a scripted set of events, you want to plop things down and have them behave exactly as you expect (see "Battles too short?") which goes against the way things are done in Freespace in general.

Unless you allready noticed I don't care how [V] did their missions. We now have new features and new SEXP's and new solutions to problems.

But for backwards compability sake, it would be best if there was a mission flag like "no traitor" that sets the engine damage model. That would make everyone happy.