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Changes to Weapon Locks & Destroyed Subsystems

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Trivial Psychic:
I've noticed recently that there has been a change to the ability to obtain a target lock on a destroyed subsystem.  Basically, you can't.  Although that doesn't sound all that concerning, it makes it difficult to destroy some ships that require the use of Huge weapons, should all of its subsystems and turrets be destroyed.  Most torpedoes require a weapons lock to fire, and if it can't get a lock, then you can't fire it.  You also can't get a lock on subsystems that aren't assigned hitpoints, like fighterbays (unless it is assigned subsystem strength in the tables).  I don't know when this change occurred... yet.

mjn.mixael:
https://github.com/scp-fs2open/fs2open.github.com/pull/3614

What flag was added to opt out of the behavior is not on the wiki as far as I can tell.

Having read through the two related threads on Github now... I can't say how thoroughly I disagree with the decisions made. This is a broad sweeping change and should have never even been considered as an opt-out candidate rather than opt-in. This will affect retail. Blaming mission designers is bad form.

Mongoose:
Yeah, I can definitely remember missions where I wound up bombing a fully-disarmed ship and targeting a dead subsystem. Granted it's something of a niche case where there was not much going on and I was bored enough to take out everything, but it definitely happened.

EatThePath:
As the main reason that change went in, I feel I should chime in. At first this thread really confused me, because I was very focused on turrets and was confident that locking on to dead turrets was never possible without multilock. The issue of a ship with no subsystems left at all was raised a few times in discussions and potential ways to handle it discussed, but I'm not sure I ever fully realized/remembered that dead non-turret subsystems have always been target-able. My testing and attention consequently didn't involve that case at all.

Having now tested it, I see that indeed you can't lock them, despite the fact that you can still target them. Not being able to lock your targeted subsystem is definitely something I would consider a bug, and I'll be filing it at as such shortly if nobody else has beat me to it.

I only advocated the change as opt in because of how niche it's intended effects are. It should only affect the secondary seekers of multilock weapons, whose adoption has been quite limited as best I could determine. MJN, I must admit that having been so involved in this one, despite not making the final decision or the actual code, it stings a little that you would conclude that a retail-behavior change was knowingly and cavalierly made.

Also, https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Weapons.tbl#.22multilock_target_dead_subsys.22

Nohiki:
It always sort of confused me why missiles and beams do not use the same targeting mechanism? Beams can lock onto a model vertex IIRC if subsystem targeting is disabled/unavailable.

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