Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: G0atmaster on March 26, 2012, 11:30:35 am
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Especially when there are hundreds of them! Especially the ones that get faster and faster, til my wingmates can't keep up! Missions where I have to protect people from them, especially 3 or 4 waypoints deep, are the worst.
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From what I heard, in WC3 you couldn't kill capship missiles at all. Why the WCS team chose to make them destroyable at all is their call to make (probably credibility, dramatic and balance purposes), but it makes sense in this context to make them hard to kill.
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quote myself from the WCS forums (sorta):
Those missiles can be taken out with glide enabled ships like the Arrow.
Head towards them hit AB, enable glide, get on their six or get into the center of their "formation", hit AB until you match their speed and hit glide again. Then pick one by one.
It's like picking cherrys from a tree. :)
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From what I heard, in WC3 you couldn't kill capship missiles at all.
Pretty sure this isn't the case; I have unfond memories of chasing down cap missiles while trying to protect a transport from two Kilrathi corvettes
Unless Skippers were special.
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Skippers were definitely destroyable
I don't actually recall anticap ship missiles in wc3 aside from skippers.
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I recall shooting them down in WC3 quite a bit.
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Skippers and biomissiles were destructible in WC3. I don't recall shooting regualr capship missiles down, but they might have been. Torpedoes also could have been destructible, just not by laser turrets.
Ah, and one note about biomissiles. Destorying them was fairly easy, and Hobbes (or most likely any other wingman, I flew it with Hobbes) did quite well killing the destroyer that launcher them. So I don't see why does WCS act as if the Locanda attack was sucessfull. On my playthought, it wasn't. When my father played WC3, he also stopped it. So I don't see why WCS assumes that I failed this mission.
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The story was written that way because in the "Heart of the Tiger" novel the Kilrathi did hit Locanda with bio-weapons.
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Ah, right. The novel. If the writer's playthrought was like in the novel, then it's a miracle he finished the game. Blair from the novel couldn't fly himself out of a paper bag. I didn't like it too much, partially for that reason.
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I am wondering if radius doubling is turned off though. Check the tables and see if "no radius doubling" is set for them.
That assumes they're weapons, not ships of course.
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I doubt Saga even supports this flag. In any case, it's not set.
They could have gotten rid of radius doubling in code though, could somebody who knows tell us if that's the case?
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Basically in FS2 by default the radius of all bombs is doubled, so as far as collision detection is concerned they're twice as big as they actually are. Weapons with that flag, hardcoded removal of the doubling or the missiles actually being ships (Don't they count towards your kills? If they do, they're ships not actual weapons) would all have the effect of making them seem harder to hit than similar sized weapons in FS2.
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Some of the capship missiles count as kills (i.e. from the Valkyries atmosphere mission), but none of the other ones I've taken down have counted as kills? Perhaps some are tabled as ships, and others are not?
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AFAIK only the ones in the Valkyries missions are ships, because they travel a set distance and disappear (or I assume they disappear, I never gave any of them the chance to disappear because I blew them all up). The others, which are targeted at capships, are launched either by nearby Kilrathi capships or by special launcher entities that are an invisible box with an equally invisible turret. Destroying capship missiles in general is a PITA though and I suspect radius doubling is disabled.
(I'm right before the mission with the skippers. I dread them so much I'm considering making a table hack to reduce their damage to 1 before playing the mission. Skippers were horrible in WC3 and I expect they'll be horrible in WCS.)
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They're easier to see and to target here, just let the wingmen kill the corvette and place yourself between the convoy and the enemy ship. Then, you can shot Skippers down without problems.
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What Dragon said about the skippers. You also get an audio cue that one is launched so you can keep your eyes peeled for them.
Also yeah, the predator ones in the Valkyrie missions are ships, since they get listed under your stats as ship kills.
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That's the only mission in which they appear though (or so it seems to me by M44). In all others, they're weapons.
Also, the Skippers are much, much easier to kill than in WC3. My father once even managed to get hit by one (lesson: do not go straight at the corvette from very near the transport). Those things were nasty back then, in WCS, I doubt they'd even detonate on collision with a fighter.
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One thing I noticed is that capship missiles that you need to destroy in some missions tend to be invulnerable until a certain point. The following scenario always repeats:
- I get to a sequence where a bunch of capship missiles appear and I'm told to intercept;
- I engage afterburners to get to them faster;
- I keep shooting at them like crazy, pretty sure at least some shots should have hit them, but they won't die. Firing a heatseeker at one made the heatseeker start orbiting it like crazy, then blow up right next to it without taking it out;
- At a certain point the missiles become vulnerable and I can suddenly pick them off easily.
Easily reproducible in the mission (I forget the name) where you have to escort a bunch of ships and a frigate all carrying refugees. The Caernavron class frigate says it offloaded most of it's ordinance to make room for more refugees at some point, if it helps. The mission has like 3 missile intercepting sessions that are identical and it happens on all of them (you probably could have pruned this a bit, 3 identical missile intercepting sessions aren't that much fun tbh).
Overall, great effort that I find could use some polish here or there. Most notabily, it would benefit by having a checkpoint system. But what I outlined above sounds like a bug..
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The missiles are set up to be invulnerable for a short time after launch.
Can't remember if this is default FS behaviour though.
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The missiles are set up to be invulnerable for a short time after launch.
Can't remember if this is default FS behaviour though.
I am pretty sure it is. Checking out the wiki now.
EDIT - there it is. Default FS behaviour says bombs are invulnerable for a second and a half.
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl#.24Delay_Before_Allowing_Bombs_to_Be_Shot_Down:
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Well, it took me a lot longer than a second and a half to afterburn to them. These bombs are invulnerable for at least a minute or so.
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Hm, might be that the delay was increased, need to check the tables unless someone beats me to it.
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They are nearly impossible to hit for another reason for me.
The saga's hud code works greatly for the main hud but when it comes to bracket and lead indicator, it remains streched as the original and when you play in 5760*1080 well fighters and bigger ship are ok but not missile.
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The issue is that most of the cannon mounts in WC are lower mounted by a significant margin so if you centre the reticule on a target your guns hit slightly low in general, most of the time this is not an issue because targets are large enough that you still hit what you want. With the missiles being ships in that mission you are trying to hit a very small target at a significant enough range that you need to take it into account
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I've noticed this as well, they seem to be invulnerable/don't register collisions for most of the flight time and only after they are closer to the target (not sure how close) they become vulnerable.
I'm sure it's not me missing the missiles, I practically went through a missile one time and it didn't crash on me, nor I got killed or anything, also missile locked and fired on them do not hit.
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Just pulled the pof file open and i didnt realise the missiles were so narrow, we are talking 2.12 meters high, 2.45 meters tall and 12.22 long which is a tiny target. Compare that to a darket at 6.78, 16.39 and 23.92 or arrow at 5.5, 12.13 and 15.74. Is there any collision detection issues with objects and hit profiles that narrow?