Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Nuke on July 11, 2003, 01:32:12 pm
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i like all the stuff people have been doing with the cloaking feature, i cant wait till its in the official scp. but noone has talked about how to go about how it will work. here's my idea:
add a cloak gauge to the ets. it will default to 0% when the game loads. as you add energy to the cloaking device from your other systems you begin to cloak. the ship is not visible at 100% power to the cloak. if power is about 50% the ship is semi visible. also as the ship's cloak gauge is increased the radar signature decreases, the target dot will start to flicker and eventually go out. this adds the potential of having some interesting gameplay.
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Its a bit pointless to do this unless the AI is upgraded to take cloaking into account. Until that happens it won't handle any differently from stealth (i.e mostly handled by SEXPs).
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I think cloaking should only be for certain ships, like maybe the Pegasus and Ptah. SO we should add a tag or something to the ships .tbl entry.
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i've always thought the sexp route would be better until the AI can do something.
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And you can use the "key-pressed" sexp to have the player turn cloaking on and off. Just have a repeat count of 5000 or something so it works more than once. :nod:
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I think that for the player craft cloaking shouldn't be Sexp controlled. For AI ships yes, some scripting would be needed.
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Maybe we could do both, sort of like stealth. We have stealth sexps, and stealth flags.
But we would need to have an ai upgrade to make the ai acutally use the cloaking.
EDIT: If your wingmen have the right ship, you could order them to cloak via the comms menu. Or by a keyboard shortcut.
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solatar has a good point, versitility is a good thing. my point is that cloaking should require its own power bar on the ets gauge. in order to use cloak, you must divert alot of power from your other systems. for a complete cloak you must divert all power. half power cloak makes lockons slower, makes your skip semi transparent, limits the range at which the ship can be spoted on radar, and make missile hits less likely.
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I'm of the opinion that it'd be better with a simple on/off switch instead of the gradual phasing like Nuke is saying. Under cloak, we can simply have weapons not fire (cloak == game thinks gun energy/missile count is zero), and afterburning would effectively nullify the benefits of cloaking, which would be invisibility to both sight and sensors.
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fine, make it startrek-esque. i think something new and original, such as a phasing cloak would be better gameplay wise.
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A phasing cloak was seen in a Next Generation episode. Hardly 'new and original' as you put it. ^_^
I'm in agreement in turning off weapons, shields, and guns while the cloak is enabled (while cloaking, under cloak, and decloaking). Using the afterburners could force a decloak or damage the cloaking device, perhaps.
Sid.
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Originally posted by SadisticSid
I'm in agreement in turning off weapons, shields, and guns while the cloak is enabled (while cloaking, under cloak, and decloaking). Using the afterburners could force a decloak or damage the cloaking device, perhaps.
Sid.
Agreed...you want to be invisible to everyone...fine, no other perks :)
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not that kinda phase you dumbarse. i mean a gradual cloak, that incremints the level of sensor/visual distortion based on how much power you have allocated to the cloaking device.
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It does make sense. You could fire while cloacked, but since all the power is directed tocloacking, you would ran out of juice right fast. Same for afterburner. But you could loose shileds while cloacked....it has to have a downside.
*fighters with 10000 weapon energy are NOT advised:D
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Hi!:)
I think the cloak should function only for certain amount of time, then the fighter drops out of cloak because the energy reserves are depleted, and the cloak's energy has to reload slowly, like the gun energy or the afterburner.
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Originally posted by Lynx
Hi!:)
I think the cloak should function only for certain amount of time, then the fighter drops out of cloak because the energy reserves are depleted, and the cloak's energy has to reload slowly, like the gun energy or the afterburner.
I like this idea; have it recharge at a set rate (albeit fairly slowly, you wouldn't want to be phasing in and out of cloak all the time) and more energy devoted to cloak (from weapons, shields, and engines) would increase the amount of time you could use it and speed up its recharging. This way you incorporate the power alotment without phasing, and there are consequences to using cloak all in one.
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You could always make it so the afterburners, weapons, and shields don't recharge at all while cloaked. It would be akin to setting the ETS to 0 for all three systems.
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or you can have a distorted cloaking while firing/using afterburning, like if ship is fading in and out while you press the trigger, with a fading radar signature too
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Fuzzy red blip instead of no blip, while afterburning and firing... and you'd have the disadvantage of finite AB and weapons energy. Sounds good!
EDIT: Post 3100. I never noticed when I made 3000 posts. :nervous: I need to get a life...
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i think it would be cool if you could fire when cloaked, however doing so will partially decloak you. when you cease firing the cloaking device gradually recloaks you over a couple seconds. same should go for afterburners. i still think the variable cloak thing has potential for some awesome gameplay.
a new ets is a must though, the more gauges you have, the less power to go around. power is a concern to any ship with a cloaking device. when cloaked your shield, weapon, and afterburner energyshould slowly drain. thus the longer you stay cloaked, the more vulnerable your ship will be when you decloak.
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Originally posted by Lynx
Hi!:)
I think the cloak should function only for certain amount of time, then the fighter drops out of cloak because the energy reserves are depleted, and the cloak's energy has to reload slowly, like the gun energy or the afterburner.
Sounds a bit Starlancery to me.
The partial decloak on weapon/burner usage sounds like a good idea - far less annoying that a total decloak.
I think Nuke had the speed issue right though, going too fast should also decloak you.
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Your ideas sound good for FS, but please also think of TCs. What I'm thinking of here is the Dragon in WC4 for example.
I think everything should be controlled by the ships.tbl as follows:
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$cloakdevice YES
+cloaklimit YES ;; if the ship cloaks only for limited time
+cloaktime 50 ;; max time ship is cloaked in seconds
+cloakreload 20 ;; cloaking device reload time in seconds
+cloakfireprim YES ;; if ship can fire primaries while cloaked
+cloakfiresec YES ;; if ship can fire secondaries while cloaked
// +cloakfiretert YES ;; if ship can fire tertiaries while cloaked //only if tertiary weapons are added
+cloakshields 10 ;; percentage of normal shields that works while cloaked (might be above 100 ?)
+recloaktime 0.1 ;; in seconds
+recloaksound cloak.wav ;; obvious
+recloakeffect recloak.pcx ;; effect for recloaking
+decloaktime 0.2 ;; in seconds
+decloaksound decloak.wav ;; obvious
+decloakeffect decloak.pcx ;; effect for decloaking
+cloakedeffect cloaked.pcx ;; effect for being cloaked
+cloakedsound cloaked.wav ;; sound if cloaked ship passes near the player
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And additional fields for your other features
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Alternatively you could replace the time-limit with a cloakenergy-storage as well as use- and reload-rates and a specified minimum that's needed for the device to be activated again.
Also, you could specify velocity/acceleration limits for the device to work and such.
That way everything would stay moddable. :cool:
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There's more to coding, Mav, then just making up what the finished table entry should look like.
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thats true, freespace's code made my brain hurt. that is why i dont code for the scp. but his idea is good, dont hardcode all the details of cloaking.
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I think we should go half-half here on how to handle the cloaking the device - ships with the cloaking device get an additioanl HUD gauge and an additional system they can transfer energy to. The amount of energy assigned to the cloak system determines how fast it recharges - the effect of transferring energy would have to be pretty significant since the idea would be that a ship could permanently cloak by putting a lot of power into the cloaking system, or cloak for only a short period of time by putting less power in - conversely having more for its weapons, engines and shields however.
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second to ships.tbl control, maybe also with a field that if you go over a certain speed (or percentage, depending on the ship), your emissions can be easily detected by enemy radar?
also, has anyone but me considered how silly the word "cloak" sounds???? it's an odd word... oh well :)
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it's all well and good talking about how to handle the player side of cloaking but unless we sort out what the AI does when it encounters a cloaked ship it's pretty worthless. At the moment cloaking is just stealth by another name. It's either on or off.
Is anyone actually looking at the AI with a view to changing an enemy ships actions around a cloaked or partially cloaked ship? What happens if the mission designer wants to say a ship can be found despite the cloak (as happens to every single cloaked vessel that goes up against a federation ship :D ).
It's just that I'd hate to see everyone get all worked up about how cloaking should work and then find out no one understands the AI enough to actually change anything beyond having it on or off.
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also awacs ships should be able to light up the radar signature of a cloaked ship, revealing a blinking dot. when you cloase in on the dot and come within about 300 meters from the cloaked ship, your sensors could do a slow scan and eventually narrow down on the location of the ship. a large targeting box would apear, and would slowly shrink down on the enemy ship untill it's location is identified. letting the ship get too far away makes you loos its location, requiring a new wide angle scan.
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y dont you make a awaks like ship that can cloak\decloak ships around it? that kinda gets rid of the idea "as ship that small cant have cloaking device"
it would get rid of the energy problem so you could fire and use afterburners.......
ofc im not talking about eleminating individual cloak but i like JC dentons idea......
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Sounds like an idea I posted ages ago about putting in support for ships with wide-area shield generators that projected in one direction, so you could have a counter to long range capship beams and long-range bombing. I liked it mostly for the idea of having fighters fighting along the shield perimeter, so part of the strategy would be weaving between the two sides of it.
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Originally posted by Mav
Alternatively you could replace the time-limit with a cloakenergy-storage as well as use- and reload-rates and a specified minimum that's needed for the device to be activated again.
Also, you could specify velocity/acceleration limits for the device to work and such.
That way everything would stay moddable. :cool:
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