[Nuke]

i have a few subtle little changes that might greatly improve the variety of weapons that can be created for player and for capship use.


Prox Flag:
a flag that tells a missile or laser to explode when an enemy ship enters the weapons inner blast radius. it would be simmalar to flak, but for fighter weapons.


Deflection Angles:
allows you to specify how far off aim your shot may go. in stupid peoples terms, a scatter effect.


Pof Firepoint Normals:
someone enable theese! it would let us set up our firepoints so that the shots will converge at a certain point, or scatter apart. also it would allow us to have rear firing primaries, and missiles that can fire out of side facing missile bays.


Primaries With Ammo:
a way to have machine guns, rail guns, gatling guns, gauss cannons, shotguns and other good old fashond ammo crunching ballistic weapons. the first step is ammo consumption (reloads by support).


Mixed Ammo:
this is the second step to balistic weapons. it divides up a single weapon entry into multiple ammo types (armor pircing, shield disrution, tracer, high explosive, armor pircing incendiary for subsystems). a tag that specifies ratios of each type, and what types are used. each type only refers to parts of the entry that are relevant. for example only a tracer would referance the rendering tags, explosive would reference the explosion tags and so on.


Homing Primaries:
self explanitory, for weapons like the emd gun and omega from descent.


More Primary Rendering Options.
for eye candy obsessed individuals like myself. animated weapon textures, pulsating glows, spinning missiles, transparent thruster flames on missiles, nd tags on missiles. rendered energy glow on secondaries (static flare). more geometry options for lasers, multiple trails and so on.


Custom Particle Spew Animation
the ability to set the animation used when you use the particle spew flag (another rendering option).


Linked Beam Turrets:
it would be cool to link 4 separate beam turrets together so that they all fire at the same time and converge to a single target point. i do not mean excalibur style (beams converge to form a big beam), although that would be cool too.


A New Missile Targeting Option:
laser guided, this type requires constant line of sight with your target to keep it locked on. there is no rendered laser (sensors iluminate your target if its in a certain fire cone). if another ship has a lock on the enemy, or the enemy is tagged, then you can fire your missile and it will know where to go on its own. the missile will not fire without a lock (manditory "no dumbfire" flag).


Chain Fire vs Group Fire (not so subtle):
freespace automaticly group fires primaries and chain fires missiles and turrets. although this seemes fo little importance to most people, i think that you should be able to customize the way a ship's weapons fire. this should be done on a ship by ship, bank by bank, turret by turret basis for all except missiles. i already like the way that missiles fire and i cannot even think of a better way.

for example that shivan fighter in the battle of deneb movie chain fires its primaries. my chaos fighter has 2 primary banks of 6 and 5 guns. id like to change the first bank to fire 2 guns at a time cycling through each pair and firing 3x faster. it would have the same damage for firing time but it would apear to fire faster. it would not be a toggle that the pilot could choose, but would be an entry in the ships table that specifys how the guns fire for that ship (for each bank).

for turrets it would be cool to have 2 or more beams firing from one turret at the same time. missile turrets could throw out multiple missiles at one time.


Another Integrated Weapon System:
as much as i didnt want to bring my older ideas into this, another idea for an iws. i always had this idea for a plasma cannon that had 4 contailment beams, projected from the launcher that held the plasma ball together. theese beams would be gimballed to allow the plasma ball to home in on its target. if any beams are broken, the ball looses containmend and explodes into a little shockwave. it would require 5 firing points 1 for the plasma ball and 1 for each containment beam. it would anso have to have 4 points on the projectile to indicate end firing points. this is one of those eye candy weapons.

[LAW ENFORCER]

nuke, I think you just wrote a large part of my weapon wishlist there.

You must have put a lot of thought into that.... or you just really like space sims and there gun methods!

[Carl]

that would be $\/\/33+, but it would take '/3@12$

[Bri_Dog]

*pulls out C++ for dummys*

[Galemp]

Yeah... D3 weapon effects. More than just stretched ellipses!

I want certain primaries to only fire one hardpoint at a time, like the EMD and Microwave. There could be a "cycle" tag in the weapons table. Capship turrets already do this; if you have more than one hardpoint on a turret it cycles through them when firing.

That reminds me, I want that to change so if a turret has two barrels they both fire at once.

[Alikchi]

How about making it a variable in the tables?

[IceFire]

Sounds like what I want for my new project

[an0n]

How about someone just fixing it so that there are multiple lead indicators. You double fire a Maxim and Subach right into the lead indicator but because the indicator is grouped for both, it doesn't show the right position for either weapon.

[Alikchi]

So that's what happens? I always wondered

[Raven2001]

yeah, these changes would really come handy

[Brummel]

hmm, I wonder whether we wanted to fight in a sim - or only would have fun but no hard fighting for blowing up cap ships/bombers. I'm just wondering about the direction of intentions

[Nuke]

my main intention is that when i take a hit of acid, and then play freespace, i totally freak out

but really i just want to break some of the stuff in freespace that gets really old, really fast. if you think that im looking to destroy the balence between fighters and capships, go get my mod and try to shot down a ragnarok class corvette

for peoples issue with the lead indicator, i sugest a toggle or option setting indicating the meathod used in lead indication. such settings primary bank 1, primary bank 2, selected secondary weapon, average lead of primaries, average lead of all guns. lead of most powerfull weapon and so on.

i think that changes to the firing pattern of primary weapons should be on a ship by ship basis rather than a weapon by weapon basis. this would better facilitate the weapon platform concept that freespace has been using. a ship with more power can handel simultanious firing of all guns better than an underpowered ship. a good example is that a bank of six is very power consuming and would produce too much heat if fired in grouped volleys. a cycled volly puts more shots between you and your target and that better helps leading (better than staring at the lead indicator).

associated with the weapon cycling would also apply a firewait factor. a bank of 2 guns can more efficiently handel higher fire rates. firing rate already changes when you group your banks (it halves them both), that sugest that the weapons used in freespace already have variable fire rates. so a smal ship with only 2 guns could have a factor of 0.9 (default weapon fire wait * 0.9) so that uns may fire faster. a bank of six firing 2 guns at a time would have a factor of 0.333 so that the guns fire 3 times faster, but only 2 at a time. each individual gun still obeys the firewait in the weapon table.

integrated weapon systems are part of the ship with their own type of ammo and their own unique properties. beam cannons, gatling guns, tracking plasma cannons, blingfire weapons systems, ya know the stuff that is to heavy to just stick in a weapon bay. ships like the A-10, that are built around a heavyer than usual weapon system. 2 of my ships, tha apis and the nemisis would binifit from this (anyone who wants my help to test this stuff, let me know). im not sure if the integrated weapon system would work better by itself or in addition to the weapons platfor system.

[Nuke]

another flag idea

inertia+

this flag makes a secondary weapon's velocity your ship's current velocity added to the weapon velocity tag. this makes the bomb or missile fly faster if you are flying fast, slower if you are flying slow. for example if you are flying at 50 m/s and the weapon's velocity tag is 100 m/s, that makes the total speed of the bomb 150 m/s.

[Tar-Palantir]

I though that happen anyway, you're always told to launch the Helios etc shortly after hitting your afterburners. Could be wrong though.

[penguin]

Originally posted by Tar-Palantir
I though that happen anyway, you're always told to launch the Helios etc shortly after hitting your afterburners. Could be wrong though.

You are told that, but Command is a liar

[Grey Wolf]

The laser bombs in the Honor Harrington books would be nice. And also sort of a scripted bomb. Sort of you launch it, and  when you hit the trigger again, the bomb accelerates like it had an afterburner.

[Nuke]

that would also be good. but most of the effects that have been described as "scripted" could be duplicated if more types of flags and tags could be added into the freespace code.

this particular flag could be "faststrike" with a few of tags that accompany it, such as afterburn speed, acceleration, and burndistance. if the missile does its burn and misses then it should slef destruct instead of come back around (it burned up its remaining fuel in the burn). an effect similar to the one used in behind enemy lines where the sam blew its casing to flak up the plating and then went in for the kill.

[Nuke]

dont let this one die, keep adding to it.