Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > The FRED Workshop

AI and puncture weapons

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Galemp:
Simple question, complex answer: With FRED and table modding, how can I designate ships as valid targets for ONLY puncture weapons?

As an example, let's take the first Silent Threat / ST:R mission, Silence All Voices. In the original mission, it's a battle royale with Terrans and Vasudans attacking each other, and the player (as GTI) 'sanitizes' the area by killing everyone leaving no survivors. But let's say we wanted to be more conservative; what if the GTI is assigned to arrest everyone?

The FreeSpace AI is set up to destroy, not disable. But in this scenario, your wingmen should A) engage the enemy with puncture weapons only, then B) move on after disabling the targets. The cumbersome way to handle this would be to set AI orders to disable every ship, and then protect-ship or change-IFF after they're disabled, but this requires a ton of events.

It's also difficult to give wingmen orders to protect or engage if they're armed with lethal weapons, or if they continue hammering on helpless targets in futility. This isn't even getting into capital ships and turret-mounted weapons; they need to defend themselves from bombs, but not bombers.

Is there a ship property in FRED, or something in IFF_defs.tbl, that can blanket designate certain targets (or a certain IFF) as valid for capture but not destruction?

General Battuta:
It's pretty easy to force ships to prioritize bombs before bombers with set-turret-target-order.

Axem:
I believe disarmed and disabled ships are already auto-protected (or ignored) to the ai. I think the intent with that is if you're disabling/disarming a ship, you're intending to probably capture it too. So in theory, you should be able to just give your wings a bunch of disable orders and it should work itself out. (Note I've never actually tried this!)

General Battuta:
I believe disabled enemy fighters will self-destruct after a bit.

Axem:
Ah yes, disabled or disarmed fighters in a wing will self destruct after 90 seconds... That was the cause of the "Kill Scar" bug in BtRL.

Well then you could have a when-argument when a ship is disabled or disarmed to "repair" their engines to 1 (and guardian the subsystem) and then force a play-dead order with a 200 priority so it'll stay harmless. (Change the IFF to unknown too if you like!)

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