[Nuke]

there are two aproches to implementing weapons onto a fighter. the first is the weapon platform concept. this is what freespace does. the other way is the integrated weapons concept (seen in starlancer) that allows each ship to have weapons built in as part of the ship. such weapons have advantages over the swappable ones, such as blindfire capabilities and faster fire rates. why is this on the source board you may ask, well i have a ship designer's perspective on how to set up such systems. if anyone were to go for it id modify a few of my ships to test it.

as of now i can think of two types of integrated weapon systems:

gatling guns. yes good old fashioned gatling guns. for them to be cool they need to be visible from the outside of the ship, and would need to spin when you are firing. muzzel flashes and smoke for the eye candy factor. for realisim they would need to have spinup and spindown delays. gatling guns use mixed ammo (high explosive, armor pircing, and tracer). explosives explode, armor does better at getting through the hull and getting to the subsystems, tracers are the glowing rounds that aide in aiming. deflection angles would also be good. ammo reloads from the support ship.

to add a gatling gun to a ship you need a submodel with rotation properties, possibly with a pof turret entry (firing points on each barel). the rotational physics would be specified in the ship table max speed, accel and decel. the trick is to make the code know when to fire the gun based on its position. you could specify the degrees of seperation between barrel.

a weapon table entry would also be needed. instead of having one for each ammo type you only need one. rendering tags will only be used for tracer rounds, explosion tags only applied to high explosive rounds and so on. ammo ratio tags would specify percentages of each type.

to make things more interesting you could have a fixed barrel guns where the gun is fired in a helix pattern. or have a laser gatling.


the other system type is blindfire. to implement you have a regular every day turret. it needs to be capable of pointing forward. it will try lock onto the fighter (a croshair moving across the screen indicating if its locked on or chasing). the command to fire is yours of course and the ship table would specify a targeting cone.

you could have a laser designator in the blind fire turret for calling in an ssm barage or for tagging.


the integrated weapon system would have a toggle key that toggles 5 modes (disarmed, slaved to primary, slaved to secondary, replace primary, and replace secondary).

[Bri_Dog]

I like your mod pack:yes:

[Nuke]

cool, im glad to hear people are actually downloading it. i think my hit counter is broke.

[Bri_Dog]

my bad for not responding to the topic. I'm blank when it comes to programming and such.

Is your mod gonna grow at all?

[Nuke]

im always putting together new ships. thats all i can really do. i might start digging through souce code to try to add those weapon enhancements im always raving about. the original idea was to build a ship of each class but that was not the case. ive done more terran ships than any other spicies. i have two vasudan ships in the current release of the mod. the other six are terran. i just put together my first shivan fighter, but its not yet been added to the ship pack.

my biggest concern about my mod is that it wont be used in a major campaign. im not worried about table limits, or polycounts. those are small problems, and most people with the freespace code have already solved them. around the time i released the chaos there was someone working on a huge campaign (the one that was going to use vbb personas, myself included, as characters). i forget what its name was. i lost track of whoever it was making the missions. someone asked if they could use a reskin of the chaos model in a campaign, but i never got a chance to check it out. that was about the time i lost my internet connection at home. i was out of the community for at least 8 months. during that time i managed to learn how to skin my ships. the valkyrie mkII was the first followed by the missile criuser (now known as ragnarok). my personal favorate skin job would have to be the phoenix.

i think the biggest problem with the freespace community is that no one is forming any mod teams. the babylon project is about the only one that i can think of at the moment. im not really good at taking requests, i must be inspired by something before i can start a model. i tried to get people interested in a "descent in space" conversion. i produced a pretty good pyro gx model and converted the phoenix from descent 3 to a skinned pof. someone, i dont know who it was, mde a cob file of each and every one of the descent 1 and 2 robots. it was enough to make an interesting conversion, but noone was interested.

as for ships id still like to do, a carrier is something i would make, but i have no clue on what the thing would look like. ideas for fighters are always comming through, those i will probibly never run out of. because of my little scaling error with the seker (which was supposed to be a slightly smaller ship) id like to do a smaller, even faster interceptor. its only weapons would be a pair of gatling guns, reloaded by support ship. but this will wait until someone takes my integrated weapon system idea seriously.

ive made sentry guns, but only did them to figure out how to do turrets. turrets were the focus of the apis and nemisis. notice that the ragnarok only has 2 rotating turrets and no turret debrits, this is because i had just barely got the things figured out. i had planned to improve the turrets, but once the ship was skinned i liked it so much that i really didnt want to risk screwing anything up. not to mention that the ragnarok has well over 1000 polys.

[IceFire]

Nuke....I may have need for your endless ship creativity at some point

[Nico]

I started a campaign about "descent in space",  two years ago. I have a quite good GX too, as well, as a few D3 models ( phoenix, gl, magnum, hood, tanker, etc ), and the D1 diamond claw bot (don't remember the exact name ). It was about mercs, and merged the descent and freespace plot somehow (not much freespace anyway, as it happened in sol after the node collapsed, so no shivans or anything ). I had to cancel it tho, by that time i couldn't  get a single freder to help me out. pofs were simple btw, no debris, no lods and no thruster models, but it was way enough for what I intended. I had an interesting plot, centered around characters, stuff like that. I guess once OTT is done, i might play with the idea ago, who knows.

[LtNarol]

Nuke, would you be interested in joining the 158th?  With your talents, i think we can work out an arrangement...

[Nuke]

if not for my frequent communications blackouts, i would gladly join up with any team working on any major campaign. i will be out of communication for a couple weeks so i will see what happens.

i was only planning a minor d2 mod, a pyro and a couple bots. but now that weve got the code, we can do so much more. ive never found a need for levels of detail. any current mid range computer system with a semi decent video card can run massive battles with many ships. thruster flames and shiels only take an hour (usully less) to do.