[Grug]

Ok, now I know officially Homeworld doesn't have shields and afterburners on all their fighters but thing is, FS2 and TAP gameplay can sometimes seem very dull without them. So I'm generally leaning towards putting them back into TAP.

Now, I know most ppl will be upset at this so I have come up with a few compromises:

- We may be able to adjust the shields effects to that of the white 'deflections / impacts' in Homeworld. Ie the heaps of little white 'impacts' which are usually not exaclty lined up with the ships hull. So this could kind of keeps the Homeworld 'look' for TAP.

-Also the 'shields' could be adjusted to be fairly weak, but enough to absorb a few hits from an opponents fire.

-Using the SCP we can enable the 'repair corvette' to repair hull damage as well, so the hull would still remain as a ships vital life source, the 'shields' or 'deflection array' or something would count only to the very short term battles etc + adding to balance out a few things.

Now shields I could go either way, but afterburners I feel fairly strongly towards having again...

-Instead of calling them 'afterburners' they could be called 'engage full throttle'  or something.

-They would burn shorter but stronger. They don't actually take you over your max speed, just gets you there faster. The sounds would be changed to something a little less dramatic, and so wouldnt be too out of place.


Ok now the main reasons for having the 'afterburners' back in is because:
a) It is a key part to FS2's gameplay, and thus eliminating it completely greatly reduces the gameplay.
b) The ship AI is pretty much useless without them, it becomes too easy to destroy them or too frustrating to get them if the speeds are increased (and no not just due to my crap ability:P )
c) Afterburners are just plain fun, and neccessary for FS2

===========================================

Ok, I do strongly believe that this will be going ahead, however, if people can provide better compromises / reasons / suggestions, to how these could be handled speak now or forever hold your peace...

[Krackers87]

or it can go over max speed and be called

overload engines

or something to that effect

[jc4jc]

That is a great Idea I'm all for it.

[Flaser]

Don't use shields.

Instead treat the invisible shield arcs as armor plate quadranst - this would have to be some SCP trick.

So you have in effect 4 times the armor of the original fighter.

As for the overload engines - make them work, so that once the aft bar - this time heat gague - reaches the limit (this can be done IMHO usign some rework of the existing ani) the engine should be damaged - once again this is an SCP trick, which was already asked for IIRC, but if it possible I think it could fit better with the concept.

[Grug]

prob with upping the armor is that it takes much too long to kill enemy fighters without missiles etc. i was suggesting 'shields' so u can have the armor still at normal values (TAP wise anywho) but the 'shields' or 'deflectors' suck up the occasional stray shot which is really just there to deter, +if  u tried TAP vs a flak turret, at the current point fighters die very quickly... (even though flak isnt in HW it is in HW2 and when / if we expand onto that then it will become a bit of an annoyance...

but yeh i understodd very little of what flaser posted, (about the shields and armor anyway) so dont spose u could enlighten me to what these 'quadranst' thing is? or did u mean quadrant?

i like the sound of the heat gague overheat limit concept, it does fit the description a bit better...
does any1 have some thread links to these due to my lack in finding anything in the amass of SCP forums...

but yeh sounds good ppl.

[DragonClaw]

I think he means to have a unreplenishable/nonrechargable shield that displays as armor when it gets hit, which isn't a bad idea.

[Grug]

huh?
still not gettin it...

as in replacing a damage modifier on the hull? ie you put more power/shielding/reflecting (startrek enterprise rip off) into the hull and you take less damage?

[Flaser]

I suggested using the shiled system for simularing armor plates.

There should be no shield animation, only the shield hit detection code could be used to simulate the armor plates.

As some SCP guru _avgr I think, since he fooled around with the shield code.
What you need is the detection part of the code and some tweaking to disable the effects.

By assigning every ship a shield recharge rate of 0 and disabling the actula shield effects you can simulate armor plates.

So there are 4 areas of a ship, that have to get penetrated befor any of the actual nasty damage effects take place.

Think of smg. like the Mechwarrior games' damage handling, where you had an armor on all limbs and areas of the mehc, and it had to be removed before any actual damage could take place (though it was possible to take out some of the weapons even before).

What I suggest is to use the already existing shield code to process the system.

[Grug]

ah right... now it makes sense

hmm it would proabably work better if it still recharged but just really slow. so it would take a few minutes to recharge back to full... but yeh that sounds like it could work...
thanx flaser.
could prob simulate it by changing the ani to be nothing at all and mute the sound fx or change it to something else like a twang... but yeh suits the situation much more coherently...