[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by TopAce
OK, I like in pre-school:

1. AAA flcikering = You are flying in a spaceship(a fighter or a bomber) which can travel in space, and shoot lasers and missiles. There is a weapon named as 'AAA' turrets, those are the beams which fire upon fighters. If the AAA hits a fighter, the game pushes you to a different direction which makes the game VERY unplayable and is very annoying. Why cannot the player remain flying straight after hit by an AAA?

That's called beam whacking. Most people want it for some reason. It annoys me, too.

2. Your fighter has shields. Shield is(in theory, but not in FreeSpace) an energy field that protects your ship's hull from damage. In FreeSpace, you get hit while you have 100% shields and the shot damages your hull and destroys your weapon subsystems often. This is typical if you get a shot from the front. So the hit will get through your hull if you hadn't shields at all.

Beams are shield piercing by default. Set the flag "no pierce shields" in weapons.tbl on a beam to prevent it from piercing shields.

[TopAce]

I meant the second one to any kind of weapons.
You get hit by a Subach HL-7 from the front, you have 100% shields and 100% hull. After hit you have 100% shields, 88% hull and 0% weapons. This is that I was thinking about.

[Bobboau]

Beams are shield piercing by default. Set the flag "no pierce shields" in weapons.tbl on a beam to prevent it from piercing shields.

oh, the heritic!
burn him, BURN HIM!!!
(that was sarcastic by the way)

[TopAce]

Originally posted by Bobboau

....burn him, BURN HIM!!!
...

We are just trying to understand each other. Friendly Flamethrower fire(FFF) is off by default.

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by TopAce
I meant the second one to any kind of weapons.
You get hit by a Subach HL-7 from the front, you have 100% shields and 100% hull. After hit you have 100% shields, 88% hull and 0% weapons. This is that I was thinking about.

That's not supposed to happen, but there seems to be some glitch in the collision detection code. One of my modifications was to make the shields absorb the shot anyway if it somehow got through the shield mesh (due to this glitch). Only works with singular shields, though.

[TopAce]

Originally posted by _argv[-1]

That's not supposed to happen, but there seems to be some glitch in the collision detection code. One of my modifications was to make the shields absorb the shot anyway if it somehow got through the shield mesh (due to this glitch). Only works with singular shields, though.

What FS version are you talking about? I use original Volition FreeSpace. Are you talking about only your version of FS_open?

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by TopAce


What FS version are you talking about? I use original Volition FreeSpace. Are you talking about only your version of FS_open?

In Volition FS2, there is the collision detection glitch that sometimes allows shots to get through shields when they shouldn't. In my modified fs2_open, I work around this in said manner.

[Kazan]

beam whacking is a realism thing -- beams are particle streams, ie mass

lots of mass with lots of veloity = lots of force applied to target when hit = whacking

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Kazan
beam whacking is a realism thing -- beams are particle streams, ie mass

lots of mass with lots of veloity = lots of force applied to target when hit = whacking

Fine, but I still say it should just be modded to use the Mass parameter from the table to determine the magnitude of the whacking. There would need to be a flag to enable this, though, since the stock tables do not specify a proper mass for beams, so the default must be used then.

Since my removal of the 50% penalty on rate of fire of linked primary weapons seems to be a point of contention, I'll throw in another argument against the penalty:

It's unfair. Take the Ulysses and Thoth fighter classes, for example. The Ulysses has two primary banks, with two gun mounts each. The Thoth has one primary bank, with four gun mounts. Despite the fact that the Ulysses and Thoth are supposed to be almost identical, the Thoth has a major firepower advantage over the Ulysses, because of this rate of fire penalty. The same holds true for the Bakha and Sekhmet classes. The marginal advantage of being able to mount different weapons on each of the Ulysses' and Bakha's two primary banks does not, in my opinion, balance out against the major firepower penalty versus a single primary bank with many gun mounts.

I believe this rate of fire penalty is a holdover from Descent. There, when you picked up the Quad Lasers powerup, you would have four guns, but one out of every four blasts from the weapon would do no damage; hence, Quad Lasers would only increase your firepower by 50% rather than 100%. In Descent, this is not unfair, because there is only one ship class, and the same weapon is mounted on all four gun mounts. FreeSpace attempts to do this by imposing the 50% rate of fire penalty on linked primaries. However, in FreeSpace, you have the above described unfairness due to the multiple ship classes with different primary weapon configurations.

Personally, what I'd like to see is being able to mount a particular weapon on each gun mount, and do away with the concept of primary banks altogether. The coolness of such a system should be obvious. Unfortunately, this requires some major reworking of the loadout screen, which, while not a bad thing, is probably very difficult due to Volition's incomprehensible user interface code.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New Energy System
As many of you have no doubt noticed, there is a Power Output setting in ships.tbl. It does absolutely nothing right now. I've gone and completely changed that.

Actually, the Power Output setting does do something: it controls the rate of ETS recharge.  Setting it to 0 means that nothing recharges - afterburners, shields, or weapon energy reserve.

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Goober5000


Actually, the Power Output setting does do something: it controls the rate of ETS recharge.  Setting it to 0 means that nothing recharges - afterburners, shields, or weapon energy reserve.

That's what I thought. But take a look at the source and you'll find out that these are recharged at a rate proportional to their capacity and multiplied by ETS settings; power output is not part of the equation. Search through the source for meaningful uses of the power output setting if you don't believe me.

Way back in the day, when FreeSpace resembled Descent much more than it does now, ships had a single 'energy' quantity, like in Descent. The Power Output setting specified how fast this energy bank would recharge. It's commented out somewhere in hudets.cpp (which, by the way, is responsible for pretty much everything to do with ship energy systems, not just the HUD gauges).

[Goober5000]

Okay... but I know that setting Power Output to 0 prevents stuff from recharging, having already tried it myself.

[Flaser]

What I meant about the 'huge', 'superca' and ect. flags is that I don't like the system at all.

What do we want?

• Big Ships should have a fair toughness
• Big Guns should counter that
• Small Ships shouldn't be able to just take down a ship that though

My problem is that all these flags jsut circumvent the problem instead modeling things properly.

I already posted a damage model a while ago that could solve the trouble:

Armor treshold/resistance

Each ship should have an armor treshold, so it would substact a certain amount of damage from each shot it recieves. Bigger ships have better armor, so a better treshold.

The armor also has a resistance factor - it tells how much would the armor recieve from the damage. So an armor with 20 resistance will take 1/5 of the damage that remains after the treshold was substracted, and the ship's hull will only recieve 4/5 of the damage.

Thereby a big ship can brush of weapons without a real punch, meanwhile it also has a resistance to indicate its toughness when you DO hit it with something of a puch.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Remember that turrets fire only one gun at a time, as opposed to 2 to 8 in primary banks. In practice, the energy consumption of the turret is not noticeable. This change is more interesting on big ships, where their main guns will put a drain on their power systems. Anyway, being able to turn your turret on/off would be a lot of work, since one has to mess with Volition's incomprehensible user interface code.

Well, if you were to mount a beam on that turret, then there could be issues with power.  Even a Maxim continually firing is noticable though, especially if you have power diverted for other reasons.

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Same thing, but before, you could damage a big damage ship down to about 50% hull before it would become completely invulnerable. For some reason, AI ships were able to damage corvettes with small weapons very quickly before reaching that invulnerability threshold. With this change, big damage ships are completely invulnerable at all times to small weapons, period.

Hey, I like to feel like I'm helping take down a corvette/destroyer with my Maxims and tempests!  It may not be pivitol, but it can help.  I'll address it again in a minute.

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Weighting can be done, of course. As for 'noslash', I'm thinking to have a 'strict beam slash' meaning type A beams with 'strict beam slash' will never slash, and type B beams with 'strict beam slash' will always slash. Note that, with the 'big guns in front' flag, you could make the Golgotha's main beam type E (no aim, always shoots straight ahead), which never slashes, and seems more appropriate anyway. Currently, there is only one type E beam, and that is the MjolnirBeam (not #home). Again, this beam type shoots straight ahead only. Since the 'big guns in front' flag instructs the ship in question to face its target, a type E beam would still work.

I would much rather have a "+randomness" parameter or something that could be added to the beams than having to specify which beams not to randomize.  Scale from 0.0 to 1.0, that defines how often the beam will deviate from it's type behavior.  This could be assumed 0.0 if not present, and would allow customization and activation of this feature in one table addition.

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
In the second case, remember that huge protection also applies to huge beams, so it'll only shoot small weapons (fusion mortars, lasers, missiles, etc) at the target. In the first case, I guess so, but beam protection also affects fighter beams -- do we make an exception for them, so fighters can still hit the target?

Does this have any effect on bombers/bombs?  If you had a cap fight in a mission and wanted the player to defend a cap from bombers (while also not having it get destroyed by hostile capship beams) would this interfere?  You might try a "huge protect" as well, but "beam protect" still has its uses.

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
It is inherently optional -- you have to specify a non-zero $Shields: value in the table, and surface shields are enabled if the ship has no shield mesh. As for indications that you are damaging surface shields, the only indication at present is that the HUD mini-shield display right below the reticle shows shield damage, and you hear the usual shield buzz sound. There is no visual shield effect because I don't know how to do that.

I retract my comment, I forgot about the "Has Shields" checkbox in FRED

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Because there is no point. Small weapons don't hurt big damage ships. (Note: I had it not fire small weapons at all big ships; I just changed that to not fire small weapons at big damage ships, which small weapons cannot hurt.)

Ok, it would appear that there are two camps on this one... those of us who would like the arbitrary limit on hull damage to "Huge"/"Supercap" flagged ships removed completely (or scaled so that they take less damage after 25-50%) and those of us who would like that limit taken all the way up.  I personally don't see why there has to be some arbitrary limit to damage, and I would get very aggrivated at pounding away at a capship only to have 100% blink back at me indefinately.  But this is something that needs to be put to further discussion.  It affects mission balances all over the place, so it's a rather big deal.

[Kazan]

those changes to ship damage could potentially block the following occurances:
    Destruction
    Subsystem Destruction


or more simply put
    *MISSON SUCCESS*

[ChronoReverse]

If you mean _argv's changes, he's already stated that while the doesn't get damaged, the subsystem can still be destroyed.

Most of this stuff sounds really cool.

[Solatar]

I think that if a turret or subsystem is blown, the capital ship should take some damage from that. Maybe after all subsystems are down, the ship can start taking damage from fighter weapons?

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Since my removal of the 50% penalty on rate of fire of linked primary weapons seems to be a point of contention, I'll throw in another argument against the penalty:

It's unfair. Take the Ulysses and Thoth fighter classes, for example. The Ulysses has two primary banks, with two gun mounts each. The Thoth has one primary bank, with four gun mounts. Despite the fact that the Ulysses and Thoth are supposed to be almost identical, the Thoth has a major firepower advantage over the Ulysses, because of this rate of fire penalty. The same holds true for the Bakha and Sekhmet classes. The marginal advantage of being able to mount different weapons on each of the Ulysses' and Bakha's two primary banks does not, in my opinion, balance out against the major firepower penalty versus a single primary bank with many gun mounts.
 

thats what makes it fair. Either you have high firepower, or you can only mount one weapon. Ulysses can use Morn / Kayser or any other combos whereas thoth is limited to _one_ weapon.

It's meant to be like that, and changing it would unbalance FS2 a lot.

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Flaser
What I meant about the 'huge', 'superca' and ect. flags is that I don't like the system at all.

What do we want?

• Big Ships should have a fair toughness
• Big Guns should counter that
• Small Ships shouldn't be able to just take down a ship that though

My problem is that all these flags jsut circumvent the problem instead modeling things properly.

I already posted a damage model a while ago that could solve the trouble:

Armor treshold/resistance

Each ship should have an armor treshold, so it would substact a certain amount of damage from each shot it recieves. Bigger ships have better armor, so a better treshold.

The armor also has a resistance factor - it tells how much would the armor recieve from the damage. So an armor with 20 resistance will take 1/5 of the damage that remains after the treshold was substracted, and the ship's hull will only recieve 4/5 of the damage.

Thereby a big ship can brush of weapons without a real punch, meanwhile it also has a resistance to indicate its toughness when you DO hit it with something of a puch. [/B]

But the hull strength metric includes armor. Otherwise one shot from a BGreen in the right place would take down the Colossus.

Originally posted by Lightspeed


thats what makes it fair. Either you have high firepower, or you can only mount one weapon. Ulysses can use Morn / Kayser or any other combos whereas thoth is limited to _one_ weapon.

It's meant to be like that, and changing it would unbalance FS2 a lot.

Like I said, the advantage of mounting multiple weapons is marginal at best. Really, how often do you mount different weapons on each bank on a fighter with 4 gun mounts? I know I don't do that very often. Occasionally you need an SDG to disable something, but that's rare.

I know it's meant to be like that. I'm saying it's the Wrong Thing.

Originally posted by StratComm

Well, if you were to mount a beam on that turret, then there could be issues with power.  Even a Maxim continually firing is noticable though, especially if you have power diverted for other reasons.

Eh, not really. The power consumption on one AAAf (with power consumption set proportionately based on damage, the fact that it's a beam, etc) isn't really noticeable. Of course, I mounted it on a bomber class I called 'GTB Ursa Adv.' which has a power output of 7, which is a bit high for a bomber (fighters usually have around 2 to 4), but then again, the Ursa is huge and slow, so there's plenty of room to put a nice powerful reactor in it. I also did up a 'GVB Osiris Adv.' which carries a decently sized reactor (power output of 5, I think) but it mounts two AAAf. With both of them firing (at different targets, I might add), the power consumption gets a bit noticeable, but still not really. Also, note that bomber turrets won't fire at all if weapon energy is too low.

Hey, I like to feel like I'm helping take down a corvette/destroyer with my Maxims and tempests!  It may not be pivitol, but it can help.  I'll address it again in a minute.

Fun. Maxims and Tempests can cripple a corvette or destroyer (by taking out all its subsystems) but you need fire support to destroy the whole ship.

I would much rather have a "+randomness" parameter or something that could be added to the beams than having to specify which beams not to randomize.  Scale from 0.0 to 1.0, that defines how often the beam will deviate from it's type behavior.  This could be assumed 0.0 if not present, and would allow customization and activation of this feature in one table addition.

Can do.

Does this have any effect on bombers/bombs?  If you had a cap fight in a mission and wanted the player to defend a cap from bombers (while also not having it get destroyed by hostile capship beams) would this interfere?  You might try a "huge protect" as well, but "beam protect" still has its uses.

So, you're saying, you don't want other big ships shooting beams at it, but you do want bombers to shoot bombs at it?

Ok, it would appear that there are two camps on this one... those of us who would like the arbitrary limit on hull damage to "Huge"/"Supercap" flagged ships removed completely (or scaled so that they take less damage after 25-50%) and those of us who would like that limit taken all the way up.  I personally don't see why there has to be some arbitrary limit to damage, and I would get very aggrivated at pounding away at a capship only to have 100% blink back at me indefinately.  But this is something that needs to be put to further discussion.  It affects mission balances all over the place, so it's a rather big deal.

Yeah, although making big damage ships' hulls completely invulnerable to small weapons is basically what it is now, except that small weapons can (very slowly) hurt the hull down to 50% or so. Anyway, the point of big damage is that ships of that size have such tough armor that small weapons can't even dent it. Same as firing 9mm bullets at a tank -- even if you hit it 100 times in the same place, it's not going to do much. But if you shoot an anti-tank rocket at it, it has enough punch to penetrate the armor.

Originally posted by Solatar
I think that if a turret or subsystem is blown, the capital ship should take some damage from that. Maybe after all subsystems are down, the ship can start taking damage from fighter weapons?

Why? Hull armor isn't powered; it's just a really thick layer of cold metal over the hull of the ship. Shielded big ships are obviously unable to recharge their shields if their reactor(s) have been destroyed, of course.

Here's a report on my progress implementing various changes to my modding that's been requested here. Most of these are here because I like various changes and others don't, so I'll give people a choice!

• Added a struct 'Argv_options' that houses all of the options for my stuff in bitfields. This probably should be done for all options, but I don't want to mess with that.
• Added an option '-auto-ets' to turn on the auto ETS feature. (It's off by default.)
• Added an option '-no-implicit-disable-auto-target'. When specified, using the 'target nothing' command will not turn off auto targeting.
• Added an option '-no-auto-target-turret' which prevents the automatic targeting of turrets when targeting big ships.
• Added an option '-sound-from-own-turrets' which allows the player to hear shot sounds from her own turrets.
• Beam turrets on player ships were always making sounds, even though they shouldn't be. This was a Volition bug (presumably because they didn't expect player ships to carry beam turrets). Fixed.
• Added some new flags for ships.tbl entries: "beam free by default" and "beam lock by default". These affect the free status of all beam turrets on the ship, unless overridden by subsystem flags (see below) -- "beam free by default" means an implicit beam-free-all on this ship class, while "beam lock by default" means an implicit beam-lock-all on it (which is the default in regular FS2). Ships of type "fighter", "bomber", and "sentrygun" are implicitly "beam free by default". Use "beam lock by default" to override this, but the "beam lock by default" flag must occur after "fighter"/"bomber"/"sentrygun" or it will do nothing (since the code that processes "fighter"/"bomber"/"sentrygun" sets "beam free by default" when it encounters such a flag).
  
• Added a $Flags: field for subsystems. This works the same way as ship flags, but applies to subsystems, and obviously has a different set of flags. Currently there are only two: "beam free by default" and "beam lock by default". Ordinarily, the default beam free state of beam turrets is inherited from the ship's default beam free state (see above). However, these flags can be used to override that. If a subsystem is flagged with "beam lock by default", then it will be locked by default even if the parent ship is "beam free by default" (implicitly by being a fighter/bomber/sentrygun or explicitly). If it is flagged with "beam free by default", then it will be free by default even if the parent ship is "beam lock by default" (implicitly by not being a fighter/bomber/sentrygun or explicitly). In other words, the subsystem beam free flags override the beam free flags of the parent ship. Of course, both the ship flags for beam free and the subsystem flags for beam free are overridden by the beam-free, beam-lock, etc sexps.
  
• New weapon flag "random beam slash", causes type A beams to be randomly forced to type B, and vice versa. Need to add a way of specifying how random this should be.

By the way, I mistakenly took credit for the code that forces beams to type A when targeting subsystems. This is Volition's code. Sorry about that.

[Flipside]

I'm inclined to agree about the CapShip thing. On one hand, once you have taken out all the Subsystems, a Capship is out of your frame of reference anyway, it is no longer a threat. On the other, it takes the joy of seeing big ships on your scoreboard (except of course, when you are flying a bomber, which is designed to take down a capship)
All in all, even in modern warfare, the tales of a fighter not carrying an anti-shipping missile taking out something the size of a Destroyer ( roughly equivalent to a Freespace Cruiser ), are few and far between.

Flipside