Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: TalonHunterUT on October 09, 2009, 02:28:34 am
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Just want to know if the Armor Quadrants will/can be included, or Does FSO not support that particular feature of WC? (used to play WC in the days of Windows 3.0 :D )
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This is another feature that we had to cut due to time pressure. Including it would require a complete overhaul of the damage and shield code which just takes too long.
We however might have the chance to make use of existing but not final code to change the number of shield quadrants. Since over time WC ships had a different number of quadrants here, sometimes 4 sometimes 2 this should be interesting for modders who want to include ships from different wc eras.
The armor layer however will not be included at this point, but rest assured that the damage a ship can take will be handled in a way that the gameplay doesn't suffer and will feel enough like wc3 :)
If any coder is willing to give this a shot though, go ahead. but we cannot guarantee that you'll be able to finish in time for us to use it and we will not delay release for this feature, and including it is far more complicated than you might think.
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I know how to make armour quadrants and not only quadrants, as it's possible to have as many armour parts as you want.
You need to use subsystems with "carry no damage flag", they will not show up on shield icon like in WC, but will work in similar way, of course if set up properly.
I'm planning to implement this in my mod (though with six armour elements on fighters and entire segments on capships) and if you want, I can also add this to WCS ships (though it will most likely change the current balance).
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That's not how we do things. I'm sure you could improvize something, but if we do it, we do it the WC way. So either it works exactly like in WC3, including HUD display and everything attached, or we don't do it. An invisible armor system isn't really worth the effort. Nobody will notice it ingame if the HUD doesn't display the change.
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I know how to make armour quadrants and not only quadrants, as it's possible to have as many armour parts as you want.
You need to use subsystems with "carry no damage flag", they will not show up on shield icon like in WC, but will work in similar way, of course if set up properly.
I'm planning to implement this in my mod (though with six armour elements on fighters and entire segments on capships) and if you want, I can also add this to WCS ships (though it will most likely change the current balance).
Does it actually work though? I tried it out and it seemed to have issues of some sorts. When invisible the things didn't even get hit as I recall unless I was doing something wrong.
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HUD displays the change, but only when armor gets hit, as it's a set of normal subsystems covering the hull, they are just untargetable an does not carry their damage over to hull.
I think that icon can be done with some complicated scipting, what I can do is to set up the subsystems and data required for them to work. In fact, anyone with PCS2 can do this, but would be a lot of work to apply it to each fighter.
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Which is why it's not an option.
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Tolwyn, what is with that AWESOME badge?
/me calls the Intrepid to inform them of the awesome badgeyness.
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on a somewhat different topic.
I have heard from everyone's favourite cheerleader, Starlord, that Wing Commander includes weapons which do damage over different distances. Is this something that'll be included in the final release?
Just that a few things like armour, and variable weapon damages are things which apply to Renegade Legion as well. In fact, RL is looking more and more like a ripoff of WC and SW which it probably is hahaha.
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That's the very first time I heard about this... :)
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Well actually, i think it's mostly reminiscent of WC1: I always had the feeling that for instance the neutron gun would shred a fighter at very close range, but barely scratch it's paint at range limit (yet the impact registers).
However, I may be wrong...
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From what I know WC weapons had different ranges (that will be true in Saga as well), but I really really doubt their damage was depending on the distance and I'm very positive that it didn't make a difference in WC1, let alone become less damaging on short distance.
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I have written sort of a support for 'secondary shield' layer. Which when used with normal shields (which can use the 1/2/4 segmented shield code) allow for making sort of ablative armor segments 'between' the shields and actual hull. IIRC i have version that is not 100% ready yet though as it lacks support for drawing the segments on screen but otherwise it should work - but as it requires the shield code changes which are not yet in the trunk either so no idea when/if/ifever it will be added to the trunk.
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As I said, IF anyone finishes this in time for release, we can use it. But it is not a priority anymore since it doesn't make a huge difference in gameplay and also requires a huge HUD overhaul, recreation of new HUD elements for the ships etc etc
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I have written sort of a support for 'secondary shield' layer. Which when used with normal shields (which can use the 1/2/4 segmented shield code) allow for making sort of ablative armor segments 'between' the shields and actual hull. IIRC i have version that is not 100% ready yet though as it lacks support for drawing the segments on screen but otherwise it should work - but as it requires the shield code changes which are not yet in the trunk either so no idea when/if/ifever it will be added to the trunk.
Does the code allow for uneven secondary shield strengths?
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I have written sort of a support for 'secondary shield' layer. Which when used with normal shields (which can use the 1/2/4 segmented shield code) allow for making sort of ablative armor segments 'between' the shields and actual hull. IIRC i have version that is not 100% ready yet though as it lacks support for drawing the segments on screen but otherwise it should work - but as it requires the shield code changes which are not yet in the trunk either so no idea when/if/ifever it will be added to the trunk.
Does the code allow for uneven secondary shield strengths?
For both shields - so yes it does.
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I have written sort of a support for 'secondary shield' layer. Which when used with normal shields (which can use the 1/2/4 segmented shield code) allow for making sort of ablative armor segments 'between' the shields and actual hull. IIRC i have version that is not 100% ready yet though as it lacks support for drawing the segments on screen but otherwise it should work - but as it requires the shield code changes which are not yet in the trunk either so no idea when/if/ifever it will be added to the trunk.
Does the code allow for uneven secondary shield strengths?
For both shields - so yes it does.
Cool beans. If I ever bother to do some real work on RenLeg that might come in handy. A lot handier than creating "armour" subsystems for every fighter that don't truely work.
Now what would be really cool, is if there was a weapon flag that allowed a given weapon to do a partial shield pierce. So if a gun did say . . . 100 damge, and had shield pierce set to .2 it would do 80 to shields and 20 to hull. That combined with "armour" would allow for different gun types like railguns, and so forth. Though I don't know how many mods would really make use of that and whether it would be worthwhile.
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Already doable.. shields can have their own 'armor type' so the control is done via armor.tbl.
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Wowzers! i seem to have sparked something here :) , Cant wait for the next chapter/episode in Saga, keep up the great work Tolwyn (only got one problem, i hated the character Tolwyn[got no problem with you though :D] from day one :) )
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(only got one problem, i hated the character Tolwyn[got no problem with you though Big grin] from day one )
Don't mind that, they are pretty much the same. We all have a boddle of this bio-nano stuff, thing standing next to us so we keep on working ^_^
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And I thought it was a cool and harmless lavalamp :D
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:bump:
This is another feature that we had to cut due to time pressure. Including it would require a complete overhaul of the damage and shield code which just takes too long.
We however might have the chance to make use of existing but not final code to change the number of shield quadrants. Since over time WC ships had a different number of quadrants here, sometimes 4 sometimes 2 this should be interesting for modders who want to include ships from different wc eras.
The armor layer however will not be included at this point, but rest assured that the damage a ship can take will be handled in a way that the gameplay doesn't suffer and will feel enough like wc3 :)
If any coder is willing to give this a shot though, go ahead. but we cannot guarantee that you'll be able to finish in time for us to use it and we will not delay release for this feature, and including it is far more complicated than you might think.
Any one have anything new to say on this?
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Not that I have anything to do with WCsaga, but Tachyon used a 2 shield quadrant system
instead of 4. So if this was worked on we might have some use for it down the road.
In the last 6 months or so we got all our shield icons converted to 4 quadrant, so it's sort of
so-so on the interest list... but it would be more accurate to the universe.