[Vertigo 7]

Hiyas,

I just go TBP a few days ago. It's been several years since I played FS2 and I love B5 so when i discovered TBP I was ecstatics. I love this. Anyways... I'm screwing around with some custom missions and such and I was wondering If there was any way I can force a cap ship to level out when moving between waypoints... like for example... In my custom mission I created B5 and a Jump Gate roughly the same distance from each other as it appears in the TV series. (the gate is higher on the Y plane than the station) Anyways, I set a series of way points to make a gradual turn from the jump gate at a negative axis to head towards the station and another set of way points to park along side it. I have an Omega destroyer come in through the gate and park along side the station, however its rotated slightly along its Z axis. I know you can turn off ship banking while turning but I'd much rather see if I can have the ship rotate to a level plane while moving at certain points or if at all.

My next question is Lets say I want a series of events, like using the previously mention cap ship, have a shuttle depart from it and dock with the station and after a while the shuttle (or another one if I can't use the same one) leaves B5 and docks with the destroyer, then the destroyer leaves. I'm quite sure you can set up events to accomplish this but I haven't been able to figure out how.

And for my final question for now... I'm using the special warp effect for smaller ships to use the jump gate... is there a way to speed up the ships entering from hyperspace like how a cap ship is accelerated to 100+?  Even with using the ships own warp effect they take entirely too long to clear the physical jump gate. I set the initial speed on the ships to 100 (I'm assuming thats a percentage of max instead of actual speed since you can't exceed 100)

Thanks in advance! Any help is much appreciated
Anyhelp on this would be appreciated it!

[Vidmaster]

puh . okay.

I am not sure about rotating ships, perhaps by using the face commands under coordinate manipulation. I always use waypoint paths to rotate ships  .

Shuttle thing: You are going to need two shuttles, however you can give them the same name by using characters FS2 cannot display (not sure which ones on non-german keyboards). Let the first one launch from the Omega and fly on a waypoint path into B5's docking bay.  *FAKE ALERT* Use a ship-vanish or warpout without the warpout effect then. Later, let the second shuttle appear from B5's hangar and do the thing vice versa.
There ARE better ways but those are more complex.

Officially, you should be able to use set-z-speed with a true (=from the objects perspective) under coordinate manipulation but for some reason, I always fail when trying to use it in TBP.  (it worked in WCS some time ago)

[Vertigo 7]

Thanks for the response.

I think I may have spoken wrong. The cap ship is pointing in the right direction. I have a small way point path parallel to the station and the ship comes to a complete stop at the end of the path and it is level with the station. However, if you're behind or infront of the ship it is banked slightly. I guess it's along it's X axis rather than its Z axis. (damn freespace and its backward axis =p)

As far as the shuttle speed thing. If I'm not mistaken theres 2 different physics engines that FS2 can use (sorry I'm brain farting and can't remember the names) which one does TBP use and how does that affect ship speed?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Quickest solution for the ships not lining up correctly would just be to leave the moving one the way it is and rotate the stationary one on it's axis in FRED so it lines up. 

The z-axis thing does not work.  Apparently there is a way to get it to work in newer builds but that would break everything. 

[Vertigo 7]

Oi, breaking everything would not be good. Bleh ok. Maybe I'll just move the smaller ships starting point closer closer to the mouth of the jump gate and leave the warp effect in its position.

I read in another topic that some of the ships start at speed 0 and increase to cap or max as the case would be. I'm pretty sure I noted it on one of the shuttles I'm using. Is there any way to have it start at max speed then rather than 0?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

There's always the dock a small ship to the large one trick.  Take something fast, dock it to the big ship and it will push the big ship at the small ships max velocity.  Of course you need to have the small ship do the waypoint and warpout. 

[Vertigo 7]

I guess I better explain this a bit more... (BTW I'm not at my FS2 PC right now)

I currently have 3 way point paths. the first one is a gradual downslope turn from the jump gate in the direction of B5.
Theres another set of way points, only 2 points that are parallel to the station just off the starboard quarter.
the Third one is a small turn then a straight line that stops just before the bay point in front of the station

As it stands right now I have an Omega destroyer jump in at the jump gate at 30 seconds after mission start. It follows path 1 then heads to path 2 and comes to a stop just parallel of the station.
180 seconds after the Omega jumps in, I have a shuttle jump in and follow path 1 then path 3.
30 seconds after the shuttle jumps in a Centari Primus jumps in and only follows path 1.

Maybe I'm just being silly about this whole thing, I'm really more or less trying to see how I can manipulate multiple ships jumping in at the same point and following a set flight path... I guess consider it like a single runway air port, pretty much every plane will have the same approach path. Thats really all I'm doing here. If I can give the smaller ships the effect of being "thrown" from hyperspace that would solve my issue

Well the issue is the shuttle is so slow from warp in, the Centari Primus literally swallows the shuttle... It's kind of funny to watch... when the primus jumps in, its following the exact same trajectory as the shuttle and the shuttle ends up inside the primus's docking bay and gets pushed down the entire flight path...

Also I set the shuttle to depart at B5's docking bay and allowed depart orders from the player. I decided to time it to see how long it would take for the shuttle to get from the jump gate to the docking bay... 11 minutes (and thats in a straight line. order issued as soon as the shuttle jumped in). Granted, thats because I put the jump gate so far away from the station, but I'm going more for realism and effect, also it takes about 5 minutes for the destroyer to get from the jump gate following its flight paths and park next to the station. I didn't set a way point cap speed on the destroyer so it's moving at 40. I tried it at lower speeds but I felt like it was just moving entirely too slow.

I'm eventually going to have multiple holding flight paths to use for day to day b5 business. Like i said, this is really more for effect than anything but I'd very much like to tweak it to get it as close as possible to my vision

I truly think this whole TBP is amazing. My hats off to you guys, fantastic work!

[FUBAR-BDHR]

If you are using hyperspace for the arrival I think the arrival speed of the ship is based on it's mass so a large ship takes longer to slow down then a small one.  I think there is a way around it but I can't remember it right now.  One thing that might help is the set-cap-waypoint-speed sexp.  If you use a waypoint speed less then or equal to the max speed of the slowest ship then they shouldn't run into each other.  This assumes that the ship has enough time to get out of the way of the next ship.   

[Vertigo 7]

Absolutely, I agree. I'm not so much concerned with the order of the ships as I am the speed. The mission I'm working on right now is more or less going to be a base to build off of for later missions... a template if you will. I'll keep playing with it I suppose, I'm confident I'll stumble across the answer sooner or later.  Thanks for all your help =)

[Trivial Psychic]

There is a way to make all arriving ships from hyperspace use the same arrival speed, but you need to first have an advanced build that supports this feature, and you need to make some ship's table alterations, as listed HERE.  You can even make small ships use the same warp animation size, though you'll need to do trial and error to settle on the proper warping speed, animation size and duration.  You could extract the ships.tbl file and make the changes yourself, or you could create a test modular table file.

Also, I've been away from the FS community for some time, so these table alterations may be already in the generally used builds.

[IPAndrews]

Don't encourage people to make table modifications like this. Besides I looked at using that feature for the final release of TBP and it's buggy. It only works half the time. The other half of the time the ships carry on their original arrival path indefinitely without decelerating.

[Vertigo 7]

Actually what i ended up doing is extracting the .tbl file and copying the shuttle and gave it a mk-2 name and upped its speed =p That's doing the trick for me and copying the ship keeps me from modifying anything existing.