[Iain Baker]

Hi all!

I don’t know about you, but the most irritating / immersion wrecking aspects of FS are ships such as the Ravana and the Raksasha firing their beams through their own hulls. I have asked several times if this can be fixed, and each time I have been told (paraphrasing) “No, because it would break some missions’ balance. Mod creators can set the check hull flag on weapons themselves for individual mods.”

Can anyone provide an example of a mission that would be broken if these ships couldn’t fire through their own hulls – i.e. the ships behaving as they are supposed to? I would argue that any mission whose balance is predicated on a bug is itself broken.

I have noticed this happening in several mods, suggesting that the mod creator didn’t do the ‘check hull’ flag for that ship/weapon. Is there a reason for this I’m not aware of, or is it more likely due to the mod creator either being unaware of such flag or it being too difficult/time-consuming to do?

For example – the Raksasha’s belly-mounted AAA beam can shoot through its hull and hit targets above it. To fix this would a mod author need to apply the check hull flag for this weapon for each individual Raksasha ship in their campaign, or can it be applied to all Raks used as a global flag or similar? The latter would presumably be preferable since the Rak is a fairly commonly used ship. If a mission would become unbalanced without the Rak’s belly AAA shooting through itself, perhaps the turret above the engines could be turned into a AAA. This would protect the Rak’s dorsal area without relying on a glitch.

Personally, I would prefer this glitch to be fixed on all ships it happens to (or at least the Rak since its so common) and if it unbalances a few missions then so be it. Considering how many mods/campaigns there are available now unbalancing a few missions would seem a worthwhile trade to fix this widespread problem.  This is just my two cents of course. Perhaps other people are not as bothered about this as I am? What’s everyone else’s thoughts on this?

[Droid803]

First off - It's not a glitch.
It's a feature. It's SAA uses quantum tunneling technology to track and hit targets through the Rak's own hull by specifically controlling the waveform to prevent self-interaction. Quite an engineering marvel as expected of the Shivans. Why are you proposing that we remove a well known and documented feature of the ship?

Check hull is applied in ships.tbl (or -shp.tbm), it's a global setting that affects all instances of that turret of all ships of that class.
Mission balance is a (surprisingly) delicate thing some times. Something about a butterfly effect. It's hard to see what would be broken until you make the change and then things actually start getting broken, upon which you start people pulling their hairs out at "why did my mission that was working suddenly stop working without me having done anything to it!" - which is the most frustrating feeling when debugging anything.
Replacing yet another turret is an even worse idea. You introduce yet ANOTHER change which affects mission balance and then you start going down the slippery slope.
It's a terrible idea.

If you're going to make your own campaign, feel free to include the check hull flag, but for retail campaign (and mediaVPs), it better not change.

TL;DR - I don't see it as a problem, so there's no justification for making any change that could potentially break anything. You may see it as a problem - feel free to make the change on your end. Don't force it upon me and potentially break things that I don't want broken, or make me fix things I have no interest in fixing because it works just fine right now and I'm perfectly happy with it.

[EatThePath]

To avoid reduplicating the work if you work on multiple projects, I guess you could just make a mod that adds those flags to everything and stick it in your loading order, and even publish it for people who might want to play with retail+mvps+that and see how it plays.

[Iain Baker]

To avoid reduplicating the work if you work on multiple projects, I guess you could just make a mod that adds those flags to everything and stick it in your loading order, and even publish it for people who might want to play with retail+mvps+that and see how it plays.

Sounds like a plan. Only problem is that I don't know how, doh!

[Kie99]

It would be nice to have it as a global flag that the user could change, and/or something that could be set in the campaign file, rather than having to do each individual ship as seems to be the indication above.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

To be honest, I always thought refusing to use "check hull" was an odd line in the sand, since FSU has over the years enacted more drastic balance changes, such as replacing NTF Fighters to better match mission dialogue/briefing, or making it so that the Sathanas' flak guns can actually be damaged even by retail wingmen.

To me, turrets shooting through their own hull is both more immersion breaking, and less impacting than some of these other changes. I mean, the Rakshasa isn't gonna be much more **** at defending itself, and there's only one mission where you actually fight a Ravana, and I'd argue that it would make the "insane" difficulty level difficulty spike much less jarring.
The only other notorious hull-shooter I can think of is the Hecate, and for it too I'm not so sure how much more impotent it would be at defending itself.

Of course, there's always the question of user-made campaigns, but while the Ravana is a popular destroyer there, in my experience the player's interactions with it tend to boil down to "shoot the LReds (and maybe the SReds)". And technically, it's not the FSU's job to ensure balance gets preserved in those, and thanks to Knossos, these mods would either stick with older mediavps, or need to be deliberately updated to use a hypothetical newer MVPs with the check hull.

[mjn.mixael]

The longer I have led FSU, the more clear it's become that it hasn't always had the same regard for preserving retail mission balance.

As I recall the mission with the Ravana would get soft locked if check hull was used because the Ravana then wouldn't be able to fire it's beam on the targets it needs to. We'd have to completely rearrange the ships in the mission to get it to work. I don't know if there are similar issues with other ships and missions.

I'm not aware of the NTF fighter change. If I had been leading at the time, I wouldn't have done it. In fact there's one spot where a Vasudan command ship says that they are being attacked by Maras (iirc) but the actual mission used Asteroths. So I changed the audio instead of changing the ships.

The flak gun thing changes mission balance *slightly*, but it won't soft lock the mission. Soooooo. Sorry, I guess?

We have thought-through reasons why we've made the choices we've made. Reducing some beams' firing cone by 50% or more (depending on the hull in question) is a major change.

[Asteroth]

I wasn't aware of any soft-locking, but Slaying Ravana becomes trivial if it can't fire through itself. The Ravana has a god awful turret layout, and allowing it to fire through itself is the only thing that saves it. This could've been solved with a Ravana with a more sensical layout, which we had for awhile, but... I didn't make the new Ravana.

If it's broken in retail it's going to stay broken, and mod makers need to opt-in to the fixes. I think this is becoming an endemic issue for FSO in general, the sheer amount of opt-in fixes and the massive burden of knowledge required, but thats a separate issue.

[JSRNerdo]

To avoid reduplicating the work if you work on multiple projects, I guess you could just make a mod that adds those flags to everything and stick it in your loading order, and even publish it for people who might want to play with retail+mvps+that and see how it plays.

I actually do have a retail-shp.tbm for this that's just the BP ships.tbl with only the check hull flags attached to all turrets. It even includes different subsystem names for beam cannons and AAA beams. Can't attach it here for some reason though.

[attachment deleted to save space]

[X3N0-Life-Form]

As I recall the mission with the Ravana would get soft locked if check hull was used because the Ravana then wouldn't be able to fire it's beam on the targets it needs to. We'd have to completely rearrange the ships in the mission to get it to work. I don't know if there are similar issues with other ships and missions.

Really ? I am genuinely surprised, as I implied in my post, I was under the impression that only Slaying Ravana would be affected, which I didn't consider to be much of a loss (*****ing about this particular mission is one of my favorite topic when discussing retail missions).

The flak gun thing changes mission balance *slightly*, but it won't soft lock the mission. Soooooo. Sorry, I guess?

We have thought-through reasons why we've made the choices we've made. Reducing some beams' firing cone by 50% or more (depending on the hull in question) is a major change.

No need for any kind of apology for anything, I'm the one that should have known better. I'm well aware that any addition to the MVPs is thought through extensively, even if I am unaware (and don't need to be aware) of the thought process and discussions that lead to the final product. I should note that my "complaint" is doubly irrelevant since I usually play my own modified version of the campaign instead of the retail or MVP version.

I am grateful that you shared your perspective on the matter, given the insights you've gained on such things over the years.



If no one minds, I'd still like to elaborate on the perspective I was coming from. Last time I "check hull"'d everything :
- It made Slaying Ravana easier on Insane since you only have to deal with several turrets + every fighters in-mission instead of every turret in range + every fighter. I had always assumed it would change much in lower difficulties since so few turrets can fire at you anyway, I guess I was wrong about that :/
I'm also unaware of any target in this mission it needs to fire on, the Khenmu is well outside any beam's cone, and is therefore almost unkillable, meaning the other ships never even join the mission to be shot at.
- It didn't change anything in The Great Hunt, the corvettes both still get fired upon.
- I didn't check if the Nebiros could still fire during Dunkerque, but I figured it wouldn't change much to tweak its position.
- The Beast can still fire on the Colossus during Their Finest Hour.

[0rph3u5]

It would be nice to have it as a global flag that the user could change, and/or something that could be set in the campaign file, rather than having to do each individual ship as seems to be the indication above.

Well, than you would run into the problem with VLS turrets that would have to opt-out of the global check hull-flag.

The Ravana has a god awful turret layout,

Yeah, you shouldn't be able to shoot its hull for all the turrets its should have /sarcasm

[Iain Baker]

Lots of interesting viewpoints here, and it's good to see both sides thought processes 

Re preserving /retail mission balance: I would argue that if a mission / level / boss battle etc. in any game is only balanced due to something in it doing something it's not supposed to then it was never really balanced in the first place - it's just a mess.

I imagine this particular issue is due to FS2's rather rushed development cycle - they probably didn't have time to thoroughly play-test and bug fix everything, so they left non-game breaking glitches as they were. Therefore in this instance by preserving retail mission balance we are preserving something that should never have been left like that in the first place.

I tend to modify pretty much every game I play to some extent - assuming I know how of course - but then I'm a fussy git.  I also play several games which needed considerable modding and community patching to make playable - STALKER and VTMB for example. It is perhaps due to this that I am now not overly concerned with preserving the vanilla experience of something if said experience has issues with it.

Also technically hardly anyone is playing the vanilla FS2 experience these days since we now have widescreen HD TV/monitors, gaming mice with additional buttons, joysticks and HOTAS systems which might not have been available back then, we don't need the CDs to play the game and the graphics and sounds have been upgraded significantly by the MPV eyecandy. If someone wanted to play old school they would have to play the non-upgraded retail FS2. Even then it is not completely the same, since even the low def models have a shine/gloss finish on them which I don't remember them having in retail. (I could be wrong on this- it has been 20 years after all  )

Anyway, that's just my two cents. Feel free to ignore me.

PS - if someone could tell me how to do the check hull thing I would be very grateful, since I could then fix it for myself. Actually, now that I think of it, it might be worth creating a thread for this so that others can fix it for themselves too. 

[Droid803]

Yeah, there's a lot of things that's "imperfect" about FS2 - some things straight up don't work as advertised, dialogue and/or tech descriptions that are plain flat out lying to you, there's missions where ships are totally gimped because forgot to unlock their beams so they straight up can't shoot any beams at all (for no discernable in-story reason).
It's "balanced" that way though. Or rather, it's how it's been so that's the only measuring stick we can use for how easy/difficult it should be.

Sure, you could say it wasn't balanced to begin with, but changing any of that would essentially amount to remaking the entire mission including a bunch of creative decisions you're not going to get everyone on board on. Which of those need fixing? Which of those do you leave alone? When all it's said and done it'll probably end up being some "Remix" of FS2 and not really the retail FS2 experience anymore.
I mean, this sort of change is exactly what something like FreeSpace Blue does. That sounds like exactly what you're looking for and are describing.

Otherwise you just risk the soft locks or plain broken missions if you just put in the changes and disregard the consequences, but eh, that's probably even worse.

[wookieejedi]

From a dev perspective, I can say that many changes are added to the code to allow new behavior but they have to be opted into. Preserving backwards compatibility has been recognized as one of the core pillars of the SCP. It allows folks to still play retail, but also allows folks to play older campaigns. One of this community's many strengths is the vast array of community created content, thus ensuring that content is not broken by new additions to retail is very important.

Again, adding those options as an opt in feature or mini-mod are very encouraged because it helps teach folks how to mod. I'm also someone who will always try to mod games I play, hence the OT mod and eventual joining of FotG. I'll note that I had no programming experience when I started, but just reading the excellent documentation on the wiki and asking on the forum (now Discord) allows anyone to get started!

[starlord]

Wasn’t this done in fact in FSblue?

[Iain Baker]

Wasn’t this done in fact in FSblue?

Quite possibly. It has been a long time since I played it. Even longer since I played FS2 retail (like 20 years longer) ;-)