Originally posted by LtNarol
ok, say you want to make a mission where you're patroling an asteriod field, boring milkrun of a mission where all you do for the first 5 minutes is fly paterns through the field following a wingman. Wouldnt it be nice if you gave the player the option of hitting a key (say "a" for example) and the player ship automatically follows your wingman until the player hits the key again? If it was a checkbox, the player would not be able to enable/disable this.
If you wanted the fighter to dock with a station, you hit a key and the ai takes over, pilot the ship to the thing and docks it. Check boxes dont work so well for that. like i said earlier, there are reasons why we have SEXPs in the first place.
While we're on this topic, it would be very nice if we can have a new ai command SEXP: follow ship.
You misunderstood what I meant by having a checkbox. My checkbox was to allow/disallow the player to do that. You'd have something in the control configuration of "AI Enable Button" where the player maps a button to that (requires source/engine modifications). Then, assuming the player mapped "a" to that function, he could hit "a" to enable his fighter to be taken over by the AI (perhaps allowing his own ship to appear in the command box so he can issue commands such as "form up" to his own fighter). The checkbox could be used to disallow that function to exist in a mission.
I guess I misunderstood what you were saying too. I assumed you meant having a SEXP which would take over a players' ship (when Colossus is-destroyed, AI take-over Alpha 1). That particular case (and others similar to it) seems totally useless.....but then again - we'll always find some situation where we wish we had it. (-; Anyway, I see now that what you meant wasn't like that situation there, having SEXP support for something like that would be useful as well.
It could be done kinda like the Invulnerable ship checkbox - it can be checked - but later disabled through SEXPs. But instead of enabling/disabling the AI control of a players' ship, we'd be enabling/disabling the player's CHOICE to allow AI control of his ship.
Also, when I think of Wing Commander/X-Wing series games, they don't have the AI take over the ship when you get near the mothership (errr....capship). You hit "Space" or request clearance or whatever, and then the screen goes blank. In XWA, you watch the fighter dock in the bay - but that's a scripted sequence that's actually happening in a model that's totally different and unrelated to the model you saw when you hit the spacebar. You'll notice in XWA that the fighterbay you see after you dock is MUCH larger than the fighterbay you see before you start docking. (-:
Having an AI landing procedure seems kinda overrated and possibly bug-prone though. (imagine initiating AI landing procedures while there's some capship protrusion between your ship and the landing bay - WHAMMO....kinda looks stupid) But if it were done right, it could be kinda cool. I really don't see anything wrong with simply allowing the player to fly near the capship, hit Alt+J, and have SEXP events control whether the warp animation is displayed, or if the screen simply goes blank and the player is treated to a debriefing (indicating that he docked, similar to XvT/TIE Fighter/X-Wing/Wing Commander style).
Sorry if that rambled a bit more than I intended originally. (-:
--TurboNed