[wesp5]

Another question to you specialists out there about a mission detail which I noticed while checking MAGs training campaign "Io Training Wing". Is it possible to make a friendly fighter ignore commands? Because your instructor will do whatever you tell him and this just doesn't feel right !

[Nightmare]

Go to ship editor (or double click on the ship), then on the box "Player Orders".

[0rph3u5]

Every order to the AI in-game is given a "Priority"-score, an order with a higher score will be executed first. Player orders have scores that range from 90 to 100, but the full range of scores is from 1 to 200.

[wesp5]

Inside the missions themselves would this be done by +Orders Accepted: 0?

[0rph3u5]

Inside the missions themselves would this be done by +Orders Accepted: 0?

The value of +orders accepted is a bit field, it is best to not alter it with a text editor.

[wesp5]

Inside the missions themselves would this be done by +Orders Accepted: 0?

The value of +orders accepted is a bit field, it is best to not alter it with a text editor.

OKay, I will copy the line over from a mission where it is set correctly then...

[karajorma]

What he means is that it's a better idea to change things like that in FRED. It's very easy to mess up things like that editing them in notepad.

[wesp5]

It works for the few missions where MAG forgot to set the correct value. But I have another question for you: In MAGs "Survivor" campaign he uses Drakh fighers as proximity mines and with fast debug I get the warning below. The mission works nevertheless, but is this something we should fix? If so how can it be done?

Warning: DH Fighter 11 is using the old special explosions method but does not appear to have variables for all the values

[Nightmare]

That's most likely unrelated to the mechanism, it probably refers to what you can edit in Ship Editor/"Special Exp".

[wesp5]

That's most likely unrelated to the mechanism, it probably refers to what you can edit in Ship Editor/"Special Exp".

So could this be fixed in the core ships table or even the Drakh fighter ship model?

[Nightmare]

No in FRED, at least that's what I would guess.

[wesp5]

No in FRED, at least that's what I would guess.

Okay, I found the setting now. But what does it mean? I need the explosions to do as little damage as possible! Would this mean lower numbers or higher?

[Nightmare]

Put 0 everywhere?

[karajorma]

Yeah. It's not a table problem at all. For some reason, both special explosion and special hits used SEXP variables to record the numbers that were entered in FRED. The variables were automatically created and couldn't be accessed by the modify-variable SEXP. This meant that if you tried to set these values for more than a certain number of ships, the game would mysteriously run out of SEXP variables (and back then you only had 100 of those). Although it wasn't the worst code in the game, the original choice to do things that way was 's fault and it was probably the strangest, most incomprehensible choice I ever saw in the code. So I altered the code so that if you entered a number in the special hits or special explosion section, the game simply wrote it to the mission file without creating these weird psuedo-SEXP variables.

The error means that one of these two editors has the wrong set up. I think that if you simply change the numbers then FRED will resave the values using the new way but I'm not certain.

[wesp5]

It seems as if only certain values are accepted, but still from the lowest (4) to the highest (88) working value I found in other files, it was pretty much impossible to finish the mission without dying. So I just disabled half of them and still it's hard to do! This is MAGs "Survivor" campaign. I'm pretty sure you can't ever win the original without cheating. Does anybody remember the reason for this?