Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: _argv[-1] on August 28, 2003, 07:44:40 am
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For a while now, I've been maintaining a personal source tree based on fs2_open CVS, and adding various things to it that I think are neat. I figure I might as well put up a thread here, and see if anyone else also thinks they are neat. Here goes:
Singular Shield
Instead of having four shield quadrants, ships have only a single shield charge, like in Descent. Shield gauges still display where shield hits are coming from, though. This means that the AI, being terribly bad at shield management, doesn't have to bother with it anymore, and neither do you.
Auto ETS
ETS settings are adjusted automatically based on energy needs. This was always there for AI-controlled small ships, but now applies every frame to all ships, including the player's. This means that you might see a destroyer suddenly slow down if it fires its main guns, because of the new energy system, below. It is also much smarter than before.
Energy is diverted between shield and weapon energy in emergencies. Highest priority is given to afterburner charge, so that you can make a quick escape if needed. Some energy is always allocated to engines, unless you're using your AB or not moving. There are many other rules. This could, of course, be made ever smarter.
New Energy System
As many of you have no doubt noticed, there is a Power Output setting in ships.tbl. It does absolutely nothing right now. I've gone and completely changed that.
Power output is now distributed among engines, shields, and weapons. Power output for fighters is usually somewhere around 2 to 4; freighters and transports have around 10; cruisers have 25 to 75; corvettes have 100; destroyers have 100 to 200; supercaps have 1000. Weapon energy capacities are sized proportionately (e.g., supercaps have 10000 weapon energy capacity).
In addition to the ship having power output, all subsystems also have a power output. Subsystems without a power output line in the tbl will have a power output of 0. Most subsystems, like turrets, will not have a power output, but subsystems like engines and reactors obviously will. This is important because it is possible to disable and mostly disarm a ship by destroying the subsystems that provide its power. Destroy a Moloch's reactor, and it will quickly run out of power for its beams and lasers, leaving it with only flak and missiles to fire at enemies. If the ship has shields, it cannot recharge them without power output.
Turret weapons now consume weapon energy. This includes everything from a Subach HL-7 to a BFGreen. Some weapons, like flak and missiles, consume no energy for obvious reasons, but most weapons do. As you can probably imagine, BFGreens consume huge amounts of weapon energy, so ships mounting such heavy weapons need to have sufficient weapon energy capacity and power output to supply them with the energy they so ravenously consume. You can mount a BFGreen on a corvette, but it won't fire very long or very often -- there just isn't enough juice to keep it going.
A ship's power output can be drained via the add-power-drain and add-power-drain-pct sexps, and by esuck weapons (like the Lamprey, which is now useful), which reduces its effective power output and drains its weapon/shield/AB reserves. The power drain from esuck weapons is applied instantly and gradually wears off, while the power drain sexps both apply and wear off gradually, as appropriate. I've modified the Derelict mission 'Learning by Osmosis' to use these sexps to apply a power drain to the Escher to prevent it from moving or firing energy-consuming weapons. (Again, it can still fire flak and missile weapons.) Also, the strength of its engine subsystems remains unchanged; we don't need to change them anymore (and it looks awkward anyway). Power drain has a 'jitter', meaning that you will see the Escher's engines flicker on momentarily while it is drained. As the player destroys the energy mines, the Escher will slowly start to move and shoot again; destroying all of the energy mines will fully restore the Escher's power. Note that the add-power-drain(-pct) sexps are also used to remove a power drain, by specifying a negative power drain value. This can also be used to increase the ship's effective power output (so you can e.g. mount a BFGreen on a corvette and have it work properly).
Surface Shields
Most ships other than fighters and bombers do not have shield meshes. With surface shields, they can have shields anyway -- weapons fire that strikes the hull drains the shields until they are depleted, just like with normal shields. You can put surface shields on a ship of any size or type. An obvious application of this is the Lucifer in FS1, where surface shields were crudely emulated by making the ship invulnerable. To enable surface shields, just give a non-zero shield amount in the ships.tbl entry; if the ship does not have a shield mesh, then surface shields will be used instead. (Shielded Sathanas anyone?)
Big Guns In Front Flag
Ordinarily, when big ships attack each other, they will try to circle each other. This is correct behavior for ships like the Colossus, which have most of their firepower on their sides. This is not correct behavior for ships like the Sathanas, which have most of their firepower in front. Ships with the "big guns in front" flag will try to face their target instead of circling around it. Candidates for this include the Fenris, Leviathan, Aeolus, Deimos, Hecate, Sobek, Cain, Lilith, Rakshasa, Ravana, and Sathanas classes.
Miscellaneous
- Beams hitting shields do not (usually) cause whacking. Small beams never whack.
- Friendly beam fire does full damage.
- Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
- EMP does not screw with the HUD or cause targeting of random objects. Instead, EMP prevents targeting altogether.
- The 'deactivate targeting' command does not deactivate auto targeting. If auto targeting is on when this command is used, then auto targeting will kick in and automatically target something.
- Targeting a big ship will not auto-target one of its turrets.
- Weapons fire that somehow gets through shields and strikes the hull even though shields are up will still be absorbed by the shields. I think this only works with singular shields, though.
- New sexp 'max-speed' returns the current maximum speed of all of the named ships, taking into account effects like damaged engines. Useful in conjunction with set-waypoint-speed to keep convoys together.
- A negative Repeat Count on a mission event means to repeat indefinitely. No more garbage about repeat counts of 999. Useful with above to deal with changes in convoys' collective max speeds -- just recap the convoy's waypoint speed every second forever.
- The 'cap-waypoint-speed' sexp doesn't do an Int3() when trying to cap the waypoint speed of a ship that's not there, for reasons of convenience.
- Reallocated the bits in sexp operator numbers. There can now be 4095 operators instead of 256.
- Changes in effective max speed (due to ETS settings, most notably) affect maximum speed of lateral and reverse movement.
- Changed the 'beam protected' flag to mean protection from all 'huge' weapons (not just beams, and not small beams).
- Turrets no longer fire small weapons at big ships.
- Turrets fire at asteroids again.
- Turrets shoot at any hostile target, even if it is not perceived to be a threat (though apparently non-threatening hostiles are given a low priority).
- Turrets on bombers use same targeting code as big ships (instead of shooting only at the bomber's target). This is obviously useful for bombers with multiple turrets, like the Osiris.
- Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
- Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player. This was disabled because it supposedly gets annoying, but the lack of these sounds gets disconcerting. I want to know that my turret is firing properly, damn you!
- Fixed evil bug where turrets would not fire at all for up to 500 seconds after the start of a mission.
- Bumped MAX_SHIP_TYPES back up, to 400 this time. It was bumped up by DTP then reduced back to its original value; I assume this was for netplay reasons. I don't really care; I need this increased.
- When a player ship of max speed above around 90 jumps out, the warp effect is so far away that it closes before the player ship gets to it! Fixed.
- Increased MAX_SPLIT_SHIPS from 3 to 16. Kaboom!! I hit this limit, and at a cost of 1K per ship, it seemed reasonable to increase.
- Engine glow and wash damage is based on thrust instead of current speed. This is most obvious when an Orion jumps in but then sits still: even while it's decelerating but still moving, its engines are black as though it were disabled, and flying right next to its huge but inactive engines, while somewhat unnerving, does no damage.
- Shockwaves do full damage to subsystems. It was scaled down, which was causing problems.
- Damage scaling due to skill level is done for all ships, so wingmen won't die like flies on very easy.
- When taking blast damage, it used to be that the flashing 'Blast' message was only displayed when skill level was medium or lower. Now it is always displayed, regardless of skill level. Same with engine wash.
- Beam weapons do not fire if the shooter or target is in deathroll.
- Type A (normal) and B (slash) beams are randomly swapped, so the BFGreen will sometimes slash the target, and the TerSlash sometimes won't slash, for instance.
- When a beam is fired at a subsystem, it is forced to type A. Slash beams are not very good at hitting subsystems...
- Bombs and beams do not necessarily hurt big ships anymore. Now, weapons only hurt big ships if they are 'huge', 'big ship', or 'supercap'. Note that, contrary to comments in weapons.tbl, 'big ship' does not mean that the weapon can only be equipped by a big ship; it only means that the weapon will hurt big ships.
- Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
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The singular shield is the best feature.
But I don't understand why don't you update the fighter Ai behaviour, and why don't you fix some of the following most annoying things in FS2:
1. AAA flickering, the game is unplayable when you are hit
2. Any shots you get in gets throught your shield without trouble.
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KABOOM!!! :thepimp:
Your energy management is a number 1 upgrade and fills in a necessity that no one really noticed when it was quite necessary in fact - this makes things a bit more complex in planing and modding but as I see it, it jsut as much a blessing.
Your negative repeat count is the next best thing!
The only thing I can argue with is the matter how you chaged the weapons working *huge, supcap and ect. flags* - I think a whole new idea should be created that would finally balance out the irregulities, and create a semi-realistic system.
I have a damage-system in mind for capships, but it's so complecated; I won't bother you with it.
BTW I only started to learn C, so it's gona be a while 'til I make smg.
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I like. Lots.
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I hope the singular shield feature is optional. I'd more like to have a shield system where you can specify the strength of each shield quadrant, eg: $front shields:100 , $left/right shields:80, blablabla...That would be cool since tactics are more useful(where can I penetrate the shields more easily?)
BTW cool that big ships can now only be damaged by huge weapons. Now we finally have a working system to simulate phase shields as they were in WC2.:cool:
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there's a few things here I'd argue with, but I won't. The overwhelming majority of your changes are so good that I think they should be merged with the main tree.
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Aaargh. More maths to do. But good work all the same. Ought to keep the bug hunters happy :)
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_argv[-1], how come you haven't been merging stuff like this into the main branch? Talk with Inquisitor if you don't have CVS access - he'll set you up.
And I'd want to talk to you about some of these, since I don't know how recently you got your code - some of these are done and some of these would play havoc with existing missions and should be made optional. Do you have AIM or ICQ?
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Singular Shield
Instead of having four shield quadrants, ships have only a single shield charge, like in Descent. Shield gauges still display where shield hits are coming from, though. This means that the AI, being terribly bad at shield management, doesn't have to bother with it anymore, and neither do you.
As long as it stays optional its a good idea. This could be really useful for some of the mods out there :D
Auto ETS
ETS settings are adjusted automatically based on energy needs. This was always there for AI-controlled small ships, but now applies every frame to all ships, including the player's. This means that you might see a destroyer suddenly slow down if it fires its main guns, because of the new energy system, below. It is also much smarter than before.
Once again, should be optional -- maybe some sort of 'feature' mounted on the newest models? :)
New Energy System
As many of you have no doubt noticed, there is a Power Output setting in ships.tbl. It does absolutely nothing right now. I've gone and completely changed that.
Power output is now distributed among engines, shields, and weapons. Power output for fighters is usually somewhere around 2 to 4; freighters and transports have around 10; cruisers have 25 to 75; corvettes have 100; destroyers have 100 to 200; supercaps have 1000. Weapon energy capacities are sized proportionately (e.g., supercaps have 10000 weapon energy capacity).
In addition to the ship having power output, all subsystems also have a power output. Subsystems without a power output line in the tbl will have a power output of 0. Most subsystems, like turrets, will not have a power output, but subsystems like engines and reactors obviously will. This is important because it is possible to disable and mostly disarm a ship by destroying the subsystems that provide its power. Destroy a Moloch's reactor, and it will quickly run out of power for its beams and lasers, leaving it with only flak and missiles to fire at enemies. If the ship has shields, it cannot recharge them without power output.
I love the idea... this is definately one of the things that should be implemented in the SCP release ;)
Turret weapons now consume weapon energy. This includes everything from a Subach HL-7 to a BFGreen. Some weapons, like flak and missiles, consume no energy for obvious reasons, but most weapons do.
Not a bad idea, although if my turret would consume energy, I would like to have the ability to turn it on/off (like the auto target, or auto speed feature)
Surface Shields
Most ships other than fighters and bombers do not have shield meshes. With surface shields, they can have shields anyway -- weapons fire that strikes the hull drains the shields until they are depleted, just like with normal shields. You can put surface shields on a ship of any size or type. An obvious application of this is the Lucifer in FS1, where surface shields were crudely emulated by making the ship invulnerable. To enable surface shields, just give a non-zero shield amount in the ships.tbl entry; if the ship does not have a shield mesh, then surface shields will be used instead. (Shielded Sathanas anyone?)
Nice. I suppose the shields would still actually look like shields? Also, on bigger ships singular shield would have to be forced.
Big Guns In Front Flag
Ordinarily, when big ships attack each other, they will try to circle each other. This is correct behavior for ships like the Colossus, which have most of their firepower on their sides. This is not correct behavior for ships like the Sathanas, which have most of their firepower in front. Ships with the "big guns in front" flag will try to face their target instead of circling around it. Candidates for this include the Fenris, Leviathan, Aeolus, Deimos, Hecate, Sobek, Cain, Lilith, Rakshasa, Ravana, and Sathanas classes.
another great addition ;)
- Friendly beam fire does full damage.
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Good one :)
- Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
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I dont like the idea. It would unbalance the game even more than it is now.
- Weapons fire that somehow gets through shields and strikes the hull even though shields are up will still be absorbed by the shields. I think this only works with singular shields, though.
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Meh i found it quite useful to shoot fighters from inside their shields :D
- Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
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Well, i thought the existing system was okay. Any ship bigger than a Corvette was completely immune to primary weapons, and could only effectively destroyed with bombs.
- Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player. This was disabled because it supposedly gets annoying, but the lack of these sounds gets disconcerting. I want to know that my turret is firing properly, damn you!
- Fixed evil bug where turrets would not fire at all for up to 500 seconds after the start of a mission.
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Two other great thingies :D
- Bombs and beams do not necessarily hurt big ships anymore. Now, weapons only hurt big ships if they are 'huge', 'big ship', or 'supercap'. Note that, contrary to comments in weapons.tbl, 'big ship' does not mean that the weapon can only be equipped by a big ship; it only means that the weapon will hurt big ships.
- Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
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As i said, i like the current system ;)
anyway... some cool additions there :D
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Some of these are very good ideas. Others are definitely contrary to Volition's original designs. I'm gonna tackle the good things and the bad:
Power Output Settings
Fantastic. Something that will really help with balance; we can now mount huge weapons on smaller ships realistically. Does this mean that the Colossus can fire SGreens faster and longer?
Surface Shields
Wonderful! This will be a godsend for the Star Wars conversion. It will also render the shielded Lucifer obsolete but that's OK. I'm assuming the shield impact effect shows up, reasonably sized, conforming to the hull.
Big Guns In Front Flag
Terrific! Now we can tell Shivan cruisers to attack GTVA capital ships, and they'll behave properly.
A negative Repeat Count on a mission event means to repeat indefinitely.
:yes:
Turrets fire at asteroids again.
It's about time.
When a player ship of max speed above around 90 jumps out, the warp effect is so far away that it closes before the player ship gets to it! Fixed.
Well spotted!
Type A (normal) and B (slash) beams are randomly swapped, so the BFGreen will sometimes slash the target, and the TerSlash sometimes won't slash, for instance.
This will be interesting, but I'd like to have a 'Noslash' flag avaliable for type A beams. For example, there are no Shivan slash weapons, and it ought to stay that way. The same is true for primary beams found on the Odin, the Golgotha, and the Archangel. I recommend weighting slash weapons to be more slashy and nonslashers to be more nonslashy, say a 60-40 ratio rather than 50-50.
Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
Excellent! This is the sort of balancing we need to do for the entire 'huge' 'big damage' and 'supercap' system to stop those artificial cutoffs at certain percentages. I don't agree with your other balancings where large ships are completely invulnerable to smaller weapons (I can't shoot off turrets with the Maxim anymore?) but a system like this applied across the board would be super.
Now for the bad...
Turrets shoot at any hostile target, even if it is not perceived to be a threat (though apparently non-threatening hostiles are given a low priority).
Friendlies should never shoot at cargo unless ordered to. Otherwise you'd have a recovery op where all the freighters turrets are destroying the cargo they're trying to pick up!
Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
Definitely a no-no. That rate of fire penalty is crucial in maintaining play balance.
EMP does not screw with the HUD or cause targeting of random objects. Instead, EMP prevents targeting altogether.
The random targeting and HUD scrambling is what makes the EMP effect what it is. Leave it in!
The 'deactivate targeting' command does not deactivate auto targeting. If auto targeting is on when this command is used, then auto targeting will kick in and automatically target something.
This ought to be changed back; what happens if you turn off targeting when there are multiple hostiles?
Targeting a big ship will not auto-target one of its turrets.
This was implemented in the FS2 demo. (See the 'Bug Fix of the Day' on freespace2.com for details.) It was done so novice players who haven't gotten the hang of targeting turrets and subsystems yet can still shoot off turrets. What's the reason for turning it off anyway?
Changed the 'beam protected' flag to mean protection from all 'huge' weapons (not just beams, and not small beams).
I wouldn't do that if I were you; sometimes you want to protect small craft from AAA beam fire, and sometimes you want large ships to weaken a smaller ship with their bombs and not obliterate it with their beams.
Turrets no longer fire small weapons at big ships.
I'm assuming this is linked to your Power Output modifications. That's OK, since it frees up more energy for the beam cannons, but if the beams are disabled, the ship isn't in the field of view of a beam cannon, or if the ship doesn't even have any beam turrets it should use its laser turrets. You should either remove this restriction, or modify it so it will only use small guns when all the big ones are not avaliable.
Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
See above on the 25% damage comment. Instead small weapons should do the full damage (as always) but do 25% damage when the ship is at 10% hull. We -must- be able to destroy subsystems.
Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player. This was disabled because it supposedly gets annoying, but the lack of these sounds gets disconcerting. I want to know that my turret is firing properly, damn you!
You'll have to trust your turrets are doing their job. You can tell if the subsystem's been destroyed on the HUD, and you can always go to exterior view to watch your turrets dishing out damage.
Shockwaves do full damage to subsystems. It was scaled down, which was causing problems.
This was mentioned in the table comments; disabled because when a player is launching bombs, the shockwave would blow out your subsystems. We need the warheads to be able to destroy subsystems on the target while still allowing the bomber to be able to escape.
Beam weapons do not fire if the shooter or target is in deathroll.
This depends on how much of a deathroll you mean. The Colossus, for example, has an extended deathroll sequence and it would be far less dramatic if it wasn't firing its beams despirately trying to fend off its attacker before it blew up. A better solution would be to disable beams once it starts to break up, since that's when the geometry moves. The solution you're proposing can be easily achieved by is-destroyed-delay beam-lock all, while altering it to deactivate at the breakup is much more useful, being based on the ship class and size.
Overall, an excellent effort. Get the good stuff commited and work on the arguable stuff. :nod::yes:
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Ooh! Comments!!!
He're are a few:
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Singular Shield
Instead of having four shield quadrants, ships have only a single shield charge, like in Descent. Shield gauges still display where shield hits are coming from, though. This means that the AI, being terribly bad at shield management, doesn't have to bother with it anymore, and neither do you.
definately needs to be optional... that's one thing that was used for play balancing to some extent... shields on the player ship can be made effectively 4 times stronger than those of the AI since you can manage them. However, since having one shield rather than 4 quadrants is effectively the same as holding down 'q', there is no reason not to enable it on certain craft. Maybe a FRED thing?
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Auto ETS
ETS settings are adjusted automatically based on energy needs. This was always there for AI-controlled small ships, but now applies every frame to all ships, including the player's.
Apply to big ships: :yes:
Apply to player ship: :no:
Sometimes you have to run away in hopes that your shields (or weapons) will recharge before your opponent gets on you, so I think you'd need to be able to control ETS specifically. However, an auto-target/auto-match style toggle for "auto-balance power" would definately be good.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New Energy System
This one I really like. I always wondered why certain ships had reactors (and it wouldn't be hard to add them to the others)
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turret weapons now consume weapon energy.
As this is integral to your new ETS for caps system, great. However, see my comments on bomber turrets farther down the thread.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Surface Shields
Good so long as it is optional (perhaps FRED based as well as table based) and there is some indication that you are damaging shields. This should probably be accompanied by a further bump to the shield ani limit, as we'd probably want shield animations for everything now.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Big Guns In Front Flag
About **** time!
Further thoughts:
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Beams hitting shields do not (usually) cause whacking. Small beams never whack.
The "whacking" is a good thing, it disrupts the attacking ship and was an integral part of the concept of anti-fighter beams. Some mod fighters don't bounce properly, and it just doesn't feel right.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Friendly beam fire does full damage.
Neither here nor there on this one, I agree that players should not be stupid enough to sit in front of a friendly beam cannon for kicks, but chasing a fighter near a capship is already bad enough through flak. Getting glanced by a fighter beam that misses its target is hardly what I call fun. However, if you've run into the need to change it, it probably needs to be changed. I guess more importantly, friendly capships can hurt each other now.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
The penelty is there for a reason, though 2 linked banks of kaysers would deplete weapon reserves extremely quickly if fired at full speed so I don't really see the problem. However, the problems this creates for play balancing (especially if multiplayer ever gets implimented again) are significant.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
EMP does not screw with the HUD or cause targeting of random objects. Instead, EMP prevents targeting altogether.
Nah, leave it the way it was. Made EMP a true navigational hazard, rather than just an annoyance. If you want this kind, add it as an alternate effect that can be triggered in tables for weapons and FRED for nebulas.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
The 'deactivate targeting' command does not deactivate auto targeting. If auto targeting is on when this command is used, then auto targeting will kick in and automatically target something.
While I love this idea in theory, the reaquiring issue just doesn't seem right to me. Maybe if deactivating targeting placed all current hostiles onto an ignore list, and when new arrivals showed up then auto-target would re-aquire and reactivate targeting, but otherwise it seems really pointless to be able to turn it off and on like that.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Targeting a big ship will not auto-target one of its turrets.
Neither here nor there on this one. It's not like bringing up the box on the turret makes you shoot at it, and it really isn't that annoying. I personally will target a subsystem if I'm shooting bombs, just because it gives me a close point of reference to shoot at.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Weapons fire that somehow gets through shields and strikes the hull even though shields are up will still be absorbed by the shields.
Again, neither here nor there. The shots getting through shields is a glitch in collision detection I would assume, but you lose the shield hit animation and all. Plus it doesn't work with multipart shields (how would it know which quadrent to drain?)
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New sexp 'max-speed' returns the current maximum speed of all of the named ships, taking into account effects like damaged engines. Useful in conjunction with set-waypoint-speed to keep convoys together.
Great, I'd never thought of this one but it should help immensely with convoy type missions.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
A negative Repeat Count on a mission event means to repeat indefinitely.
Also about **** time!
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Reallocated the bits in sexp operator numbers. There can now be 4095 operators instead of 256.
As long as this doesn't alter backwards compatability, then great!
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Changes in effective max speed (due to ETS settings, most notably) affect maximum speed of lateral and reverse movement.
Good of you to think of that, not many mods use it but the potential is certainly there!
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Changed the 'beam protected' flag to mean protection from all 'huge' weapons (not just beams, and not small beams).
I'd say :no: because at least part the time you'd beam-protect something it would be a fighter (if you wanted to kill off wingmen while manuvering around a leviathan, for example) or it would prevent bombers from targeting capships that you are trying to have the player protect.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turrets no longer fire small weapons at big ships.
Why not? The drain on power should be extremely small, (even more so if you use capship turret weapons, as they can be set to lower drain)
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turrets fire at asteroids again.
Again, about **** time!
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turrets shoot at any hostile target, even if it is not perceived to be a threat (though apparently non-threatening hostiles are given a low priority).
Exclude cargo. Definately exclude cargo. Plus make sure it is tested with stealth settings, as this might screw that up.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turrets on bombers use same targeting code as big ships (instead of shooting only at the bomber's target). This is obviously useful for bombers with multiple turrets, like the Osiris.
I'm actually great with this, though if you can't control their firing you probably should exclude the player ship from the power drain of the turret. Else have an option (again, auto-target style) to turn it off. I mean, I'd never target a tailing fighter just to make the turret shoot at it, so this is definately a potentially great enhancement.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
This seems to contradict what you said you did with non-huge weapons later (or with "supercap" though they should be in essence the same) so I'd say a definite no.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player.
Need option to turn it off, be it eventually included in the audio options or enabling the turret sounds through a command line flag.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Fixed evil bug where turrets would not fire at all for up to 500 seconds after the start of a mission.
Always like to see bugfixes!
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Bumped MAX_SHIP_TYPES back up, to 400 this time. It was bumped up by DTP then reduced back to its original value; I assume this was for netplay reasons.
The Inferno exe seems to have bumped it back up, but since netplay is close to broken right now I don't see that this is a problem.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
When a player ship of max speed above around 90 jumps out, the warp effect is so far away that it closes before the player ship gets to it! Fixed.
See "bugfixes" above.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Increased MAX_SPLIT_SHIPS from 3 to 16. Kaboom!! I hit this limit, and at a cost of 1K per ship, it seemed reasonable to increase.
Neither here nor there... I can't see any real reason to have more than 3 splits in a ship.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Engine glow and wash damage is based on thrust instead of current speed. This is most obvious when an Orion jumps in but then sits still: even while it's decelerating but still moving, its engines are black as though it were disabled, and flying right next to its huge but inactive engines, while somewhat unnerving, does no damage.
That was actually being talked about here recently. :yes:
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Shockwaves do full damage to subsystems. It was scaled down, which was causing problems.
If you do this you need to exclude fighters from this. There is no reason for interceptors to get disabled just because they shot out a bomb (ok there is but that essentially ruins the interceptor role).
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Damage scaling due to skill level is done for all ships, so wingmen won't die like flies on very easy.
Does this mean they die faster on hard/insane? Or is insane a factor of 1.0 and the rest scaled down from that... Still, the prospect of surviving wingmen is intreguing.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
When taking blast damage, it used to be that the flashing 'Blast' message was only displayed when skill level was medium or lower. Now it is always displayed, regardless of skill level. Same with engine wash.
Great, don't see why that was in there to begin with.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Beam weapons do not fire if the shooter or target is in deathroll.
I agree with GE exactly on this one, make it at breakup instead of deathroll.
Originally posted by _argv[-1] Type A (normal) and B (slash) beams are randomly swapped, so the BFGreen will sometimes slash the target, and the TerSlash sometimes won't slash, for instance.
Maybe this could be tabled in as a "randomness" factor... A number of ships would look utterly stupid with slashing main beams (one of them is mine, I would know :p) This MUST not be default.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
When a beam is fired at a subsystem, it is forced to type A. Slash beams are not very good at hitting subsystems...
If this is in addition to the previous setting that's fine, but maybe it should be forced to original type rather than to type A. Sometimes slash beams just seem more appropriate.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Bombs and beams do not necessarily hurt big ships anymore. Now, weapons only hurt big ships if they are 'huge', 'big ship', or 'supercap'. Note that, contrary to comments in weapons.tbl, 'big ship' does not mean that the weapon can only be equipped by a big ship; it only means that the weapon will hurt big ships.
Again, your weapon balancing just seems off here. Sometimes it's the little things that decide the outcome of a situation (if the combined pulse shots or whatever being shot at one ship weren't damaging, then the outcome of the battle could be completely different). It'd only make sense in rare occasions, like where 2 ships end up with one destroyed and the other at 1% strength, but it still could happen.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
Great, and as has been said already, apply this to the "Huge" flag as well.
OK, I think that's it.
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I like everything except the singular shields, and the auto ETS for the player. Is there an option to disable those?
The energy system for cap ships, tho, is ****ing stellar :yes:
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My personal joy-basket of goodies:
Surface shields: YEEHAW!!! That'll make The Swarm War a lot more like what I originally envisaged....that is, as long as a shield 'hit' shows up on the ship.....Also, is there any way we can indicate that shields are drained WITHOUT having to create an ANI for it? I loved the X-Wing system of 'shlds dn' appearing in the targeting box, but that's just me.....
Bugfix of warphole appearing too far away: About ****ing time!!! I've been banging on about that for damned aaages and it's not been dealt with. Now fighters can actually dash about and swoop and do all the things they're supposed to do, rather than lumber about at irritatingly slow speeds......
Big guns in front: GODSEND!!! Absolutely a godsend.....the Arisan ships from The Swarm War have a lot of their heavy weapons mounted for'ard, so this will make them behave!
Incidentally, to all coders: Is there any way we can stop weapons firing THROUGH their own hull? We can do all the tinkering with turret FOV that we like, but sometimes it still happens.....
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tres interesting, can we see some sample code?
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Originally posted by StratComm
definately needs to be optional... that's one thing that was used for play balancing to some extent... shields on the player ship can be made effectively 4 times stronger than those of the AI since you can manage them. However, since having one shield rather than 4 quadrants is effectively the same as holding down 'q', there is no reason not to enable it on certain craft. Maybe a FRED thing?
Glad that most people agree it should be optional. Not that it is bad, but tolwyn would probably murder someone if this feature wasn't made optional since he he spent quite some time to work out a decent WC-->FS stats conversion and this would smash everything.:devil:
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look int the decals code for simple decals for something you may wish to implement for you'r hull shields
I think I agree with GalacticEmperor
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Not too many on/off features, keep it manageable.
Other than what’s already been said, :yes:
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good ****
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I'm glad people (mostly) liked my changes. I know some of these changes are incompatible with existing missions and even contrary to what Volition intended. Indeed, I've had to modify quite a few missions from various campaigns to make them work properly, and I've hacked the tables extensively. This is intentional. If any of this gets committed then it obviously needs to be made optional, such as with command line options and table flags. Just because I haven't done this yet doesn't mean I'm unwilling or that it's impossible; I just haven't done that yet. (I've been too busy playing it.)
By the way, I left out one feature of some importance: Beam turrets on small ships are free by default. That way, you can put a light beam turret on a bomber without changing the missions. (I added this to the Seraphim in my tables. Fun!)
Also by the way, I noticed that changing bombs to do shield damage (shield factor of 0.5 or so instead of 0.02) is major fun -- shoot down a bomb when it's right next to a bomber wing that fired it and watch the fireworks! Yeehaw! It also means you really do have to hit your burners and get clear of the blast when you're bombing. (No, this isn't a code change, it's just my personal table modification.)
Originally posted by TopAce
But I don't understand why don't you update the fighter Ai behaviour
Because I'm not smart enough. :lol:
1. AAA flickering, the game is unplayable when you are hit
2. Any shots you get in gets throught your shield without trouble.
What? I don't follow. Could you clarify these issues?
Originally posted by Flaser
The only thing I can argue with is the matter how you chaged the weapons working *huge, supcap and ect. flags*
I didn't really change the meanings of the 'huge' and 'big ship' weapons flags. They do the same thing that they always did -- namely, 'huge' means use only on big ships, and 'big ship' means hurts big ships.
As for the change to 'supercap' (allowing non-supercap weapons to eventually destroy supercaps) is not something I'm sure is a good thing. I think the intention was that ships of type supercap have a sort of implicit big damage that affects non-supercap weapons, so supercaps can only be destroyed by supercap weapons, like 'big ship' or 'huge' weapons are required to hurt 'big damage' ships. As with the 'big ship' weapon flag, the 'supercap' weapon flag does not (and never did) impose the requirement that the weapon be mounted on a supercap; it only means that it can do full damage to supercaps.
In short, I'm thinking my change to the meaning of the 'supercap' flag should be reversed, but I'm not sure.
Originally posted by Lynx
I hope the singular shield feature is optional.
Not yet, but it will be before it gets committed.
I'd more like to have a shield system where you can specify the strength of each shield quadrant, eg: $front shields:100 , $left/right shields:80, blablabla...That would be cool since tactics are more useful(where can I penetrate the shields more easily?)
Sounds nifty. Conceivably, lateral shield generators could be smaller than the front and rear shield generators, creating a weakness to the sides of the ship. Also, this could be combined with singular shields, in that the shields take more damage if hit in a weaker quadrant. (Singular shields still track which quadrant took the damage.)
BTW cool that big ships can now only be damaged by huge weapons. Now we finally have a working system to simulate phase shields as they were in WC2.
Remember that they can also be damaged by weapons with the 'big ship' flag. So you could set the flag 'big ship' for a weapon that can hurt big ships but should be used on small ships too.
How exactly do WC2 phase shields behave? Maybe they can be implemented more correctly than this.
Originally posted by Goober5000
_argv[-1], how come you haven't been merging stuff like this into the main branch? Talk with Inquisitor if you don't have CVS access - he'll set you up.
I didn't want to commit anything without the approval of the community. That's why I posted here first. I also have to make the incompatible changes optional first.
And I'd want to talk to you about some of these, since I don't know how recently you got your code - some of these are done and some of these would play havoc with existing missions and should be made optional. Do you have AIM or ICQ?
I know. I've had to modify a few missions to behave correctly with all these changes. I've had to change the tables far more extensively than the missions, though, like giving ships appropriate power output settings.
Here's my contact information:
AIM argv minus one ICQ 700937 Yahoo argv_minus_one MSN [email protected] Jabber _argv[-1]@jabber.org email [email protected]
Originally posted by Lightspeed
Singular Shield
Instead of having four shield quadrants, ships have only a single shield charge, like in Descent. Shield gauges still display where shield hits are coming from, though. This means that the AI, being terribly bad at shield management, doesn't have to bother with it anymore, and neither do you.
As long as it stays optional its a good idea. This could be really useful for some of the mods out there
Yeah, I intend to make it a table flag. Still, singular shields don't generally break things. This isn't as incompatible as it sounds. ;)
Auto ETS
ETS settings are adjusted automatically based on energy needs. This was always there for AI-controlled small ships, but now applies every frame to all ships, including the player's. This means that you might see a destroyer suddenly slow down if it fires its main guns, because of the new energy system, below. It is also much smarter than before.
Once again, should be optional -- maybe some sort of 'feature' mounted on the newest models?
This is more of a pilot convenience feature than a gameplay-affecting thing. It should be optional, but IMO, it should be en/disabled with a command line option. This may cause netplay issues, though -- I need to figure out and test that.
New Energy System
As many of you have no doubt noticed, there is a Power Output setting in ships.tbl. It does absolutely nothing right now. I've gone and completely changed that.
Power output is now distributed among engines, shields, and weapons. Power output for fighters is usually somewhere around 2 to 4; freighters and transports have around 10; cruisers have 25 to 75; corvettes have 100; destroyers have 100 to 200; supercaps have 1000. Weapon energy capacities are sized proportionately (e.g., supercaps have 10000 weapon energy capacity).
In addition to the ship having power output, all subsystems also have a power output. Subsystems without a power output line in the tbl will have a power output of 0. Most subsystems, like turrets, will not have a power output, but subsystems like engines and reactors obviously will. This is important because it is possible to disable and mostly disarm a ship by destroying the subsystems that provide its power. Destroy a Moloch's reactor, and it will quickly run out of power for its beams and lasers, leaving it with only flak and missiles to fire at enemies. If the ship has shields, it cannot recharge them without power output.
I love the idea... this is definately one of the things that should be implemented in the SCP release
It still needs to be optional, and enabled with a ship table flag.
Turret weapons now consume weapon energy. This includes everything from a Subach HL-7 to a BFGreen. Some weapons, like flak and missiles, consume no energy for obvious reasons, but most weapons do.
Not a bad idea, although if my turret would consume energy, I would like to have the ability to turn it on/off (like the auto target, or auto speed feature)
Remember that turrets fire only one gun at a time, as opposed to 2 to 8 in primary banks. In practice, the energy consumption of the turret is not noticeable. This change is more interesting on big ships, where their main guns will put a drain on their power systems. Anyway, being able to turn your turret on/off would be a lot of work, since one has to mess with Volition's incomprehensible user interface code. :ick
Surface Shields
Most ships other than fighters and bombers do not have shield meshes. With surface shields, they can have shields anyway -- weapons fire that strikes the hull drains the shields until they are depleted, just like with normal shields. You can put surface shields on a ship of any size or type. An obvious application of this is the Lucifer in FS1, where surface shields were crudely emulated by making the ship invulnerable. To enable surface shields, just give a non-zero shield amount in the ships.tbl entry; if the ship does not have a shield mesh, then surface shields will be used instead. (Shielded Sathanas anyone?)
Nice. I suppose the shields would still actually look like shields?
No. I don't know how to do this. It would probably need some multitexture black magic like was done for the new cloaking code, and that is way out of my league.
Also, on bigger ships singular shield would have to be forced.
Why?
- Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.[/b]
I dont like the idea. It would unbalance the game even more than it is now.
Not really. Weapon energy is supposed to be the constraint on how much and how fast you can fire your weapons, and it's consumed much faster with your guns firing much faster. This change applies to all ships, not just yours. It improves the balance somewhat, because fighter beams are not subject to this penalty.
- Weapons fire that somehow gets through shields and strikes the hull even though shields are up will still be absorbed by the shields. I think this only works with singular shields, though.[/b]
Meh i found it quite useful to shoot fighters from inside their shields
Yes, I know. It's especially useful against the Shivans early in FS1 when all you've got for primaries is the ML-16. The reason I did this is that sometimes shots somehow get through the shields even though the shields were up and the shot was fired from well outside the shield mesh. Finding the true cause of this would obviously be preferable, but in the mean time, I don't really like having some Shiv jockey's luckshot going through my fully charged shields and dropping my hull by 10% or more.
- Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.[/b]
Well, i thought the existing system was okay. Any ship bigger than a Corvette was completely immune to primary weapons, and could only effectively destroyed with bombs.
Same thing, but before, you could damage a big damage ship down to about 50% hull before it would become completely invulnerable. For some reason, AI ships were able to damage corvettes with small weapons very quickly before reaching that invulnerability threshold. With this change, big damage ships are completely invulnerable at all times to small weapons, period.
- Bombs and beams do not necessarily hurt big ships anymore. Now, weapons only hurt big ships if they are 'huge', 'big ship', or 'supercap'. Note that, contrary to comments in weapons.tbl, 'big ship' does not mean that the weapon can only be equipped by a big ship; it only means that the weapon will hurt big ships.
- Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.[/b]
As i said, i like the current system
I'm not sure about keeping the second one, but I think the first one needs some justification.
In current FS2, any weapon that is flagged with 'bomb' can hurt 'big damage' ships. What's wrong with this is that some bombs, like Stilettos and even Piranhas are flagged with 'bomb', and hence, can be used to destroy big ships. This is not good. So instead, bombs that hurt big ships have to be explicitly flagged as such. Note that all bombs intended for use against big ships are flagged in the table as 'huge', so they can still hurt big ships, but things like Piranhas cannot. Stilettos can't hurt big ships either, though they still hurt subsystems (obviously).
Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Others are definitely contrary to Volition's original designs.
I know. I made those changes because I felt Volition did the Wrong Thing. Obviously this will be a point of contention, so such changes must be optional.
Power Output Settings
Fantastic. Something that will really help with balance; we can now mount huge weapons on smaller ships realistically. Does this mean that the Colossus can fire SGreens faster and longer?
Not unless you change SGreen to have a shorter Fire Wait and give it a long beam life. If it consumes too much more energy than smaller ships can support, then their SGreens will power down before their full lifetime expires, and they still have to wait the full fire wait before they can fire again. The Colossus, on the other hand, having insane power output, can easily support thusly modified SGreens at full lifetime, in which case it could fire them faster and longer.
As it stands now, though, the SGreen has a short lifetime and a long fire wait in the tables, so a massive power output won't make them fire any faster or longer.
On the other hand, the Colossus can certainly fire a BGreen faster and longer than a Fenris, provided the BGreen is given an appropriately high energy consumption.
Since we're discussing this, I should give you an example. In the final mission of the campaign 'Aeos Affair', if the Orion destroyer Praetor is destroyed, the Hecate destroyer Accuser shortly jumps in. The Accuser carries four BFGreens where it would normally mount BGreens. Under my modification, it was only able to fire them simultaneously for about a second, and had to wait a long time to fire them again (since it still has to wait the full Fire Wait, even though the beam fired only momentarily). In the FS2 mission 'High Noon', on the other hand, the Colossus wields numerous (12, I think) of BFGreens and LRBGreens (the LRBGreen has the highest damage and power consumption in my table), and is able to fire them continuously at the Sathanas, blowing it away pretty quickly in the awesome hail of gunfire the Colossus is so well known for. :D
In short, the Colossus can fire SGreens faster and longer than a Fenris, but only given the appropriate table changes.
Surface Shields
Wonderful! This will be a godsend for the Star Wars conversion. It will also render the shielded Lucifer obsolete but that's OK. I'm assuming the shield impact effect shows up, reasonably sized, conforming to the hull.
No. As I mentioned above, this would probably take some multitexture black magic, and I simply don't know how to do that. I need some graphics guru to deal with this, though the code would probably be similar to the new cloaking effect code.
Type A (normal) and B (slash) beams are randomly swapped, so the BFGreen will sometimes slash the target, and the TerSlash sometimes won't slash, for instance.
This will be interesting, but I'd like to have a 'Noslash' flag avaliable for type A beams. For example, there are no Shivan slash weapons, and it ought to stay that way. The same is true for primary beams found on the Odin, the Golgotha, and the Archangel. I recommend weighting slash weapons to be more slashy and nonslashers to be more nonslashy, say a 60-40 ratio rather than 50-50.
Weighting can be done, of course. As for 'noslash', I'm thinking to have a 'strict beam slash' meaning type A beams with 'strict beam slash' will never slash, and type B beams with 'strict beam slash' will always slash. Note that, with the 'big guns in front' flag, you could make the Golgotha's main beam type E (no aim, always shoots straight ahead), which never slashes, and seems more appropriate anyway. Currently, there is only one type E beam, and that is the MjolnirBeam (not #home). Again, this beam type shoots straight ahead only. Since the 'big guns in front' flag instructs the ship in question to face its target, a type E beam would still work.
Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
Excellent! This is the sort of balancing we need to do for the entire 'huge' 'big damage' and 'supercap' system to stop those artificial cutoffs at certain percentages. I don't agree with your other balancings where large ships are completely invulnerable to smaller weapons (I can't shoot off turrets with the Maxim anymore?) but a system like this applied across the board would be super.
Of course you can. You can't damage the ship's hull, but you can damage its subsystems.
Turrets shoot at any hostile target, even if it is not perceived to be a threat (though apparently non-threatening hostiles are given a low priority).
Friendlies should never shoot at cargo unless ordered to. Otherwise you'd have a recovery op where all the freighters turrets are destroying the cargo they're trying to pick up!
Fixed. Turrets now ignore cargo and nav buoys.
Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
Definitely a no-no. That rate of fire penalty is crucial in maintaining play balance.
Or is it? Weapon energy consumption is proportionately increased (ie, a lot), fighter beams are not subject to the penalty anyway, and the change applies to all ships (not just yours).
EMP does not screw with the HUD or cause targeting of random objects. Instead, EMP prevents targeting altogether.
The random targeting and HUD scrambling is what makes the EMP effect what it is. Leave it in!
OK, OK, I surrender!!! :nervous:
The 'deactivate targeting' command does not deactivate auto targeting. If auto targeting is on when this command is used, then auto targeting will kick in and automatically target something.
This ought to be changed back; what happens if you turn off targeting when there are multiple hostiles?
Then it will intelligently target the most important hostile. That's the point. Perhaps this should be activated with a command line option, though.
Targeting a big ship will not auto-target one of its turrets.
This was implemented in the FS2 demo. (See the 'Bug Fix of the Day' on freespace2.com for details.) It was done so novice players who haven't gotten the hang of targeting turrets and subsystems yet can still shoot off turrets. What's the reason for turning it off anyway?
It annoys the hell out of me! :mad: But again, I suppose this should be a command line option.
Changed the 'beam protected' flag to mean protection from all 'huge' weapons (not just beams, and not small beams).
I wouldn't do that if I were you; sometimes you want to protect small craft from AAA beam fire, and sometimes you want large ships to weaken a smaller ship with their bombs and not obliterate it with their beams.
In the second case, remember that huge protection also applies to huge beams, so it'll only shoot small weapons (fusion mortars, lasers, missiles, etc) at the target. In the first case, I guess so, but beam protection also affects fighter beams -- do we make an exception for them, so fighters can still hit the target?
Turrets no longer fire small weapons at big ships.
I'm assuming this is linked to your Power Output modifications. That's OK, since it frees up more energy for the beam cannons, but if the beams are disabled, the ship isn't in the field of view of a beam cannon, or if the ship doesn't even have any beam turrets it should use its laser turrets. You should either remove this restriction, or modify it so it will only use small guns when all the big ones are not avaliable.
No, no, this is because small weapons won't affect big ships anyway. Laser turrets are still 'big ship' so they're still fired at big ships. By 'small weapons' I mean weapons that won't affect 'big damage' ships at all (other than damaging subsystems, which doesn't really matter when the ship isn't targeting subsystems to begin with).
I did just notice that it was causing small turrets (can't hurt big damage ships) not to fire even at big ships that are not big damage. Fixed -- it'll shoot those small weapons at cruisers and other big ships that they would still hurt.
Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
See above on the 25% damage comment. Instead small weapons should do the full damage (as always) but do 25% damage when the ship is at 10% hull. We -must- be able to destroy subsystems.
Small weapons still damage subsystems, just not the hull.
Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player. This was disabled because it supposedly gets annoying, but the lack of these sounds gets disconcerting. I want to know that my turret is firing properly, damn you!
You'll have to trust your turrets are doing their job. You can tell if the subsystem's been destroyed on the HUD, and you can always go to exterior view to watch your turrets dishing out damage.
Well, I also like the sound, but command line option...
Shockwaves do full damage to subsystems. It was scaled down, which was causing problems.
This was mentioned in the table comments; disabled because when a player is launching bombs, the shockwave would blow out your subsystems. We need the warheads to be able to destroy subsystems on the target while still allowing the bomber to be able to escape.
If the shockwave is able to get through the shields to damage subsystems, it's also going to blow the whole ship away (huge hull damage). Weapons can't damage subsystems if they are blocked by shields. In other words, this is a moot point.
Beam weapons do not fire if the shooter or target is in deathroll.
This depends on how much of a deathroll you mean. The Colossus, for example, has an extended deathroll sequence and it would be far less dramatic if it wasn't firing its beams despirately trying to fend off its attacker before it blew up. A better solution would be to disable beams once it starts to break up, since that's when the geometry moves. The solution you're proposing can be easily achieved by is-destroyed-delay beam-lock all, while altering it to deactivate at the breakup is much more useful, being based on the ship class and size.
Fixed. Beams will cut out abruptly and not fire after the ship has exploded, but will fire during deathroll. Beams will continue to fire at a target in deathroll.
Note: Deathroll is before the ship explodes (shockwaves from reactors exploding, debris thrown around, etc). Once the ship explodes and its shockwaves go off, it is not in deathroll; rather, it has exploded (and its ship flags has SF_EXPLODED on).
Originally posted by StratComm
Singular Shield
Instead of having four shield quadrants, ships have only a single shield charge, like in Descent. Shield gauges still display where shield hits are coming from, though. This means that the AI, being terribly bad at shield management, doesn't have to bother with it anymore, and neither do you.
definately needs to be optional... that's one thing that was used for play balancing to some extent... shields on the player ship can be made effectively 4 times stronger than those of the AI since you can manage them. However, since having one shield rather than 4 quadrants is effectively the same as holding down 'q', there is no reason not to enable it on certain craft. Maybe a FRED thing?
Remember that AI ships also have singular shields. The idea here is that players are good at managing their shields (and making them effectively 4 times as strong, like you said) while AI is not. With singular shields, both your and AI's shields are effectively 4 times stronger. It's a balance thing. Also, note that hitting 'q' will decrease your shield strength by 2%. Not really noticeable, but it would be if you held it down. Diverting shield power from one quadrant to another does not incur this penalty.
Auto ETS
ETS settings are adjusted automatically based on energy needs. This was always there for AI-controlled small ships, but now applies every frame to all ships, including the player's.
Sometimes you have to run away in hopes that your shields (or weapons) will recharge before your opponent gets on you, so I think you'd need to be able to control ETS specifically. However, an auto-target/auto-match style toggle for "auto-balance power" would definately be good.
When you are running, you do not have time to tweak ETS settings, being too busy evading enemy gunfire. Anyway, the auto ETS is designed to let you run away -- while the AB is engaged, all power is to shields and weapons, and while the AB is disengaged and recharging, all power is to engines so you can engage it again quickly. I have tested this in many a difficult mission involving lots of running (like loop1-3, '...But Hate the Traitor'), and you have no idea how many times this has saved my hide...
Being able to turn it on/off in mission would be good, but saving this setting requires pilot file format changes (meaning your existing pilots are gone), and there's some user interface work to be done there that I don't know how to do. It can, of course, be turned on/off with a command line option.
New Energy System
This one I really like. I always wondered why certain ships had reactors (and it wouldn't be hard to add them to the others)
It was supposed to be that shooting out a ship's reactor would prevent it from firing beams, but as it stands, reactor subsystems do exactly nothing. They still do, but you can assign power output to any subsystem, and assigning power output to a reactor subsystem is a pretty obvious thing to do.
Adding reactor subsystems is not hard at all -- Descent Manager MDLVIEW32 includes a POF editor sufficient to add subsystems.
Surface Shields
Good so long as it is optional (perhaps FRED based as well as table based) and there is some indication that you are damaging shields. This should probably be accompanied by a further bump to the shield ani limit, as we'd probably want shield animations for everything now.
It is inherently optional -- you have to specify a non-zero $Shields: value in the table, and surface shields are enabled if the ship has no shield mesh. As for indications that you are damaging surface shields, the only indication at present is that the HUD mini-shield display right below the reticle shows shield damage, and you hear the usual shield buzz sound. There is no visual shield effect because I don't know how to do that.
Beams hitting shields do not (usually) cause whacking. Small beams never whack.
The "whacking" is a good thing, it disrupts the attacking ship and was an integral part of the concept of anti-fighter beams. Some mod fighters don't bounce properly, and it just doesn't feel right.
The Right Thing would be to use the Mass value in the weapon table to determine the amount of whacking applied by the beam (same as lasers). This shouldn't be too hard to do.
Friendly beam fire does full damage.
Neither here nor there on this one, I agree that players should not be stupid enough to sit in front of a friendly beam cannon for kicks, but chasing a fighter near a capship is already bad enough through flak. Getting glanced by a fighter beam that misses its target is hardly what I call fun. However, if you've run into the need to change it, it probably needs to be changed. I guess more importantly, friendly capships can hurt each other now.
I've found that I can survive getting glanced by a BGreen as long as it's not shield piercing. Getting glanced by a fighter or anti-fighter beam is no sweat, really. Plus, you can always get glanced by huge enemy beams...
Removed rate of fire penalty for linked primary weapons.
The penelty is there for a reason, though 2 linked banks of kaysers would deplete weapon reserves extremely quickly if fired at full speed so I don't really see the problem. However, the problems this creates for play balancing (especially if multiplayer ever gets implimented again) are significant.
Remember that the penalty (or lack thereof) applies to all ships, not just yours. Also remember that the penalty does not apply to fighter beams, which creates an imbalance.
EMP does not screw with the HUD or cause targeting of random objects. Instead, EMP prevents targeting altogether.
Nah, leave it the way it was. Made EMP a true navigational hazard, rather than just an annoyance. If you want this kind, add it as an alternate effect that can be triggered in tables for weapons and FRED for nebulas.
OK, OK, I surrender!!! :nervous:
The 'deactivate targeting' command does not deactivate auto targeting. If auto targeting is on when this command is used, then auto targeting will kick in and automatically target something.
While I love this idea in theory, the reaquiring issue just doesn't seem right to me. Maybe if deactivating targeting placed all current hostiles onto an ignore list, and when new arrivals showed up then auto-target would re-aquire and reactivate targeting, but otherwise it seems really pointless to be able to turn it off and on like that.
Blah, blah, blah, command line option. Blah, blah, blah. Forget about the ignore list thing, though -- that's a lot of work.
Targeting a big ship will not auto-target one of its turrets.
Neither here nor there on this one. It's not like bringing up the box on the turret makes you shoot at it, and it really isn't that annoying. I personally will target a subsystem if I'm shooting bombs, just because it gives me a close point of reference to shoot at.
Again, command line option.
Weapons fire that somehow gets through shields and strikes the hull even though shields are up will still be absorbed by the shields.
Again, neither here nor there. The shots getting through shields is a glitch in collision detection I would assume, but you lose the shield hit animation and all. Plus it doesn't work with multipart shields (how would it know which quadrent to drain?)
It only happens once in a blue moon. You're right, though; it only works with singular shields.
Reallocated the bits in sexp operator numbers. There can now be 4095 operators instead of 256.
As long as this doesn't alter backwards compatability, then great!
No, it doesn't. Missions don't twiddle with those bits anyway, and the code only cares about the #defines.
Changed the 'beam protected' flag to mean protection from all 'huge' weapons (not just beams, and not small beams).
I'd say :no: because at least part the time you'd beam-protect something it would be a fighter (if you wanted to kill off wingmen while manuvering around a leviathan, for example) or it would prevent bombers from targeting capships that you are trying to have the player protect.
So, just make beam protection not apply to fighter beams? (Beam protection badly screws with fighter beams!)
Turrets no longer fire small weapons at big ships.
Why not? The drain on power should be extremely small, (even more so if you use capship turret weapons, as they can be set to lower drain)
Because there is no point. Small weapons don't hurt big damage ships. (Note: I had it not fire small weapons at all big ships; I just changed that to not fire small weapons at big damage ships, which small weapons cannot hurt.)
Turrets shoot at any hostile target, even if it is not perceived to be a threat (though apparently non-threatening hostiles are given a low priority).
Exclude cargo. Definately exclude cargo. Plus make sure it is tested with stealth settings, as this might screw that up.
Cargo and nav buoys are ignored. (Another change I just made.) And yes, stealth is handled.
Turrets on bombers use same targeting code as big ships (instead of shooting only at the bomber's target). This is obviously useful for bombers with multiple turrets, like the Osiris.
I'm actually great with this, though if you can't control their firing you probably should exclude the player ship from the power drain of the turret. Else have an option (again, auto-target style) to turn it off. I mean, I'd never target a tailing fighter just to make the turret shoot at it, so this is definately a potentially great enhancement.
Remember that the turret only fires one gun at a time, as opposed to 2 to 8 in your primary banks. The power consumption of this is actually barely noticeable, so I don't see why being able to turn it off is worth the extra work.
Ships with the 'big damage' flag are completely invulnerable to small weapons.
This seems to contradict what you said you did with non-huge weapons later (or with "supercap" though they should be in essence the same) so I'd say a definite no.
Pardon? I don't follow.
Turrets on player's ship make sounds audible by the player.
Need option to turn it off, be it eventually included in the audio options or enabling the turret sounds through a command line flag.
Command line option.
Increased MAX_SPLIT_SHIPS from 3 to 16. Kaboom!! I hit this limit, and at a cost of 1K per ship, it seemed reasonable to increase.
Neither here nor there... I can't see any real reason to have more than 3 splits in a ship.
I hit this limit somehow. That's why I increased it. I think it's the maximum number of splits active in the entire mission, not just one ship.
Shockwaves do full damage to subsystems. It was scaled down, which was causing problems.
If you do this you need to exclude fighters from this. There is no reason for interceptors to get disabled just because they shot out a bomb (ok there is but that essentially ruins the interceptor role).
Shockwaves can't damage subsystems if they don't get through shields. If they do get through shields, your fighter is toast (due to huge hull damage from bombs), and your subsystems are really not your biggest problem. ;)
Damage scaling due to skill level is done for all ships, so wingmen won't die like flies on very easy.
Does this mean they die faster on hard/insane? Or is insane a factor of 1.0 and the rest scaled down from that... Still, the prospect of surviving wingmen is intreguing.
Insane is 1.0 and the rest is scaled down, but it's effectively the same thing.
Beam weapons do not fire if the shooter or target is in deathroll.
I agree with GE exactly on this one, make it at breakup instead of deathroll.
Done.
Originally posted by _argv[-1] Type A (normal) and B (slash) beams are randomly swapped, so the BFGreen will sometimes slash the target, and the TerSlash sometimes won't slash, for instance.
Maybe this could be tabled in as a "randomness" factor... A number of ships would look utterly stupid with slashing main beams (one of them is mine, I would know) This MUST not be default.
See above about 'strict beam slash'. Also, note that type E beams (no aim, always shoot straight ahead) never slash, for obvious reasons. Combined with the 'big guns in front' flag, consider making your main gun type E.
When a beam is fired at a subsystem, it is forced to type A. Slash beams are not very good at hitting subsystems...
If this is in addition to the previous setting that's fine, but maybe it should be forced to original type rather than to type A. Sometimes slash beams just seem more appropriate.
Beams only target subsystems when instructed to do so with the 'fire-beam' sexp, so I can't see slash beams seeming more appropriate -- why did you specify a subsystem for a slasher to hit?
Bombs and beams do not necessarily hurt big ships anymore. Now, weapons only hurt big ships if they are 'huge', 'big ship', or 'supercap'. Note that, contrary to comments in weapons.tbl, 'big ship' does not mean that the weapon can only be equipped by a big ship; it only means that the weapon will hurt big ships.
Again, your weapon balancing just seems off here. Sometimes it's the little things that decide the outcome of a situation (if the combined pulse shots or whatever being shot at one ship weren't damaging, then the outcome of the battle could be completely different). It'd only make sense in rare occasions, like where 2 ships end up with one destroyed and the other at 1% strength, but it still could happen.
The only reason I did this is that small missiles like the Stiletto and Piranha can hurt big ships (since they are flagged with 'bomb') and so can fighter beams (since they are flagged with 'beam'). All weapons that are supposed to hurt big ships are already explicitly flagged as such (with 'huge' and/or 'big ship'), so this is really just cheat prevention -- if you turn the Subach HL-7 into a fighter beam weapon, it still isn't supposed to hurt big ships.
Weapons without the 'supercap' flag were unable to damage supercaps below around 75% hull. This has been changed, so they do 1/4 damage to the supercap but can still (eventually) destroy it.
Great, and as has been said already, apply this to the "Huge" flag as well.
Pardon? That doesn't make sense.
Originally posted by Killfrenzy
Surface shields: YEEHAW!!! That'll make The Swarm War a lot more like what I originally envisaged....that is, as long as a shield 'hit' shows up on the ship.....Also, is there any way we can indicate that shields are drained WITHOUT having to create an ANI for it? I loved the X-Wing system of 'shlds dn' appearing in the targeting box, but that's just me.....
Something wrong with the HUD shield gauge?
Incidentally, to all coders: Is there any way we can stop weapons firing THROUGH their own hull? We can do all the tinkering with turret FOV that we like, but sometimes it still happens.....
Probably do a trace through the ship and not fire if the weapon would hit the shooter's hull. Not quite clear on how to do that one, though.
Originally posted by Bobboau
look int the decals code for simple decals for something you may wish to implement for you'r hull shields
I think I agree with GalacticEmperor
Hey, I forgot about that. Thanks! I'll have a look at it.
Originally posted by Mr. Vega
Not too many on/off features, keep it manageable.
Who cares if they're on/off, if they're specified in tables or on the command line?
BFRed. Small name, big cannon.
[size=12]GO SHIVANS![/size]
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OK, I like in pre-school:
1. AAA flcikering = You are flying in a spaceship(a fighter or a bomber) which can travel in space, and shoot lasers and missiles. There is a weapon named as 'AAA' turrets, those are the beams which fire upon fighters. If the AAA hits a fighter, the game pushes you to a different direction which makes the game VERY unplayable and is very annoying. Why cannot the player remain flying straight after hit by an AAA?
2. Your fighter has shields. Shield is(in theory, but not in FreeSpace) an energy field that protects your ship's hull from damage. In FreeSpace, you get hit while you have 100% shields and the shot damages your hull and destroys your weapon subsystems often. This is typical if you get a shot from the front. So the hit will get through your hull if you hadn't shields at all.
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Originally posted by TopAce
OK, I like in pre-school:
1. AAA flcikering = You are flying in a spaceship(a fighter or a bomber) which can travel in space, and shoot lasers and missiles. There is a weapon named as 'AAA' turrets, those are the beams which fire upon fighters. If the AAA hits a fighter, the game pushes you to a different direction which makes the game VERY unplayable and is very annoying. Why cannot the player remain flying straight after hit by an AAA?
That's called beam whacking. Most people want it for some reason. It annoys me, too.
2. Your fighter has shields. Shield is(in theory, but not in FreeSpace) an energy field that protects your ship's hull from damage. In FreeSpace, you get hit while you have 100% shields and the shot damages your hull and destroys your weapon subsystems often. This is typical if you get a shot from the front. So the hit will get through your hull if you hadn't shields at all.
Beams are shield piercing by default. Set the flag "no pierce shields" in weapons.tbl on a beam to prevent it from piercing shields.
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I meant the second one to any kind of weapons.
You get hit by a Subach HL-7 from the front, you have 100% shields and 100% hull. After hit you have 100% shields, 88% hull and 0% weapons. This is that I was thinking about.
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Beams are shield piercing by default. Set the flag "no pierce shields" in weapons.tbl on a beam to prevent it from piercing shields.
oh, the heritic!
burn him, BURN HIM!!!
(that was sarcastic by the way)
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Originally posted by Bobboau
....burn him, BURN HIM!!!
...
We are just trying to understand each other. Friendly Flamethrower fire(FFF) is off by default. :)
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Originally posted by TopAce
I meant the second one to any kind of weapons.
You get hit by a Subach HL-7 from the front, you have 100% shields and 100% hull. After hit you have 100% shields, 88% hull and 0% weapons. This is that I was thinking about.
That's not supposed to happen, but there seems to be some glitch in the collision detection code. One of my modifications was to make the shields absorb the shot anyway if it somehow got through the shield mesh (due to this glitch). Only works with singular shields, though.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
That's not supposed to happen, but there seems to be some glitch in the collision detection code. One of my modifications was to make the shields absorb the shot anyway if it somehow got through the shield mesh (due to this glitch). Only works with singular shields, though.
What FS version are you talking about? I use original Volition FreeSpace. Are you talking about only your version of FS_open?
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Originally posted by TopAce
What FS version are you talking about? I use original Volition FreeSpace. Are you talking about only your version of FS_open?
In Volition FS2, there is the collision detection glitch that sometimes allows shots to get through shields when they shouldn't. In my modified fs2_open, I work around this in said manner.
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beam whacking is a realism thing -- beams are particle streams, ie mass
lots of mass with lots of veloity = lots of force applied to target when hit = whacking
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Originally posted by Kazan
beam whacking is a realism thing -- beams are particle streams, ie mass
lots of mass with lots of veloity = lots of force applied to target when hit = whacking
Fine, but I still say it should just be modded to use the Mass parameter from the table to determine the magnitude of the whacking. There would need to be a flag to enable this, though, since the stock tables do not specify a proper mass for beams, so the default must be used then.
Since my removal of the 50% penalty on rate of fire of linked primary weapons seems to be a point of contention, I'll throw in another argument against the penalty:
It's unfair. Take the Ulysses and Thoth fighter classes, for example. The Ulysses has two primary banks, with two gun mounts each. The Thoth has one primary bank, with four gun mounts. Despite the fact that the Ulysses and Thoth are supposed to be almost identical, the Thoth has a major firepower advantage over the Ulysses, because of this rate of fire penalty. The same holds true for the Bakha and Sekhmet classes. The marginal advantage of being able to mount different weapons on each of the Ulysses' and Bakha's two primary banks does not, in my opinion, balance out against the major firepower penalty versus a single primary bank with many gun mounts.
I believe this rate of fire penalty is a holdover from Descent. There, when you picked up the Quad Lasers powerup, you would have four guns, but one out of every four blasts from the weapon would do no damage; hence, Quad Lasers would only increase your firepower by 50% rather than 100%. In Descent, this is not unfair, because there is only one ship class, and the same weapon is mounted on all four gun mounts. FreeSpace attempts to do this by imposing the 50% rate of fire penalty on linked primaries. However, in FreeSpace, you have the above described unfairness due to the multiple ship classes with different primary weapon configurations.
Personally, what I'd like to see is being able to mount a particular weapon on each gun mount, and do away with the concept of primary banks altogether. The coolness of such a system should be obvious. :D Unfortunately, this requires some major reworking of the loadout screen, which, while not a bad thing, is probably very difficult due to Volition's incomprehensible user interface code. :wtf: :nervous: :mad: :shaking:
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New Energy System
As many of you have no doubt noticed, there is a Power Output setting in ships.tbl. It does absolutely nothing right now. I've gone and completely changed that.
Actually, the Power Output setting does do something: it controls the rate of ETS recharge. Setting it to 0 means that nothing recharges - afterburners, shields, or weapon energy reserve.
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Originally posted by Goober5000
Actually, the Power Output setting does do something: it controls the rate of ETS recharge. Setting it to 0 means that nothing recharges - afterburners, shields, or weapon energy reserve.
That's what I thought. But take a look at the source and you'll find out that these are recharged at a rate proportional to their capacity and multiplied by ETS settings; power output is not part of the equation. Search through the source for meaningful uses of the power output setting if you don't believe me.
Way back in the day, when FreeSpace resembled Descent much more than it does now, ships had a single 'energy' quantity, like in Descent. The Power Output setting specified how fast this energy bank would recharge. It's commented out somewhere in hudets.cpp (which, by the way, is responsible for pretty much everything to do with ship energy systems, not just the HUD gauges).
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Okay... but I know that setting Power Output to 0 prevents stuff from recharging, having already tried it myself.
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What I meant about the 'huge', 'superca' and ect. flags is that I don't like the system at all.
What do we want?
- Big Ships should have a fair toughness
- Big Guns should counter that
- Small Ships shouldn't be able to just take down a ship that though
My problem is that all these flags jsut circumvent the problem instead modeling things properly.
I already posted a damage model a while ago that could solve the trouble:
Armor treshold/resistance
Each ship should have an armor treshold, so it would substact a certain amount of damage from each shot it recieves. Bigger ships have better armor, so a better treshold.
The armor also has a resistance factor - it tells how much would the armor recieve from the damage. So an armor with 20 resistance will take 1/5 of the damage that remains after the treshold was substracted, and the ship's hull will only recieve 4/5 of the damage.
Thereby a big ship can brush of weapons without a real punch, meanwhile it also has a resistance to indicate its toughness when you DO hit it with something of a puch.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Remember that turrets fire only one gun at a time, as opposed to 2 to 8 in primary banks. In practice, the energy consumption of the turret is not noticeable. This change is more interesting on big ships, where their main guns will put a drain on their power systems. Anyway, being able to turn your turret on/off would be a lot of work, since one has to mess with Volition's incomprehensible user interface code. :ick:
Well, if you were to mount a beam on that turret, then there could be issues with power. Even a Maxim continually firing is noticable though, especially if you have power diverted for other reasons.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Same thing, but before, you could damage a big damage ship down to about 50% hull before it would become completely invulnerable. For some reason, AI ships were able to damage corvettes with small weapons very quickly before reaching that invulnerability threshold. With this change, big damage ships are completely invulnerable at all times to small weapons, period.
Hey, I like to feel like I'm helping take down a corvette/destroyer with my Maxims and tempests! It may not be pivitol, but it can help. I'll address it again in a minute.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Weighting can be done, of course. As for 'noslash', I'm thinking to have a 'strict beam slash' meaning type A beams with 'strict beam slash' will never slash, and type B beams with 'strict beam slash' will always slash. Note that, with the 'big guns in front' flag, you could make the Golgotha's main beam type E (no aim, always shoots straight ahead), which never slashes, and seems more appropriate anyway. Currently, there is only one type E beam, and that is the MjolnirBeam (not #home). Again, this beam type shoots straight ahead only. Since the 'big guns in front' flag instructs the ship in question to face its target, a type E beam would still work.
I would much rather have a "+randomness" parameter or something that could be added to the beams than having to specify which beams not to randomize. Scale from 0.0 to 1.0, that defines how often the beam will deviate from it's type behavior. This could be assumed 0.0 if not present, and would allow customization and activation of this feature in one table addition.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
In the second case, remember that huge protection also applies to huge beams, so it'll only shoot small weapons (fusion mortars, lasers, missiles, etc) at the target. In the first case, I guess so, but beam protection also affects fighter beams -- do we make an exception for them, so fighters can still hit the target?
Does this have any effect on bombers/bombs? If you had a cap fight in a mission and wanted the player to defend a cap from bombers (while also not having it get destroyed by hostile capship beams) would this interfere? You might try a "huge protect" as well, but "beam protect" still has its uses.
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
It is inherently optional -- you have to specify a non-zero $Shields: value in the table, and surface shields are enabled if the ship has no shield mesh. As for indications that you are damaging surface shields, the only indication at present is that the HUD mini-shield display right below the reticle shows shield damage, and you hear the usual shield buzz sound. There is no visual shield effect because I don't know how to do that.
I retract my comment, I forgot about the "Has Shields" checkbox in FRED ;)
Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Because there is no point. Small weapons don't hurt big damage ships. (Note: I had it not fire small weapons at all big ships; I just changed that to not fire small weapons at big damage ships, which small weapons cannot hurt.)
Ok, it would appear that there are two camps on this one... those of us who would like the arbitrary limit on hull damage to "Huge"/"Supercap" flagged ships removed completely (or scaled so that they take less damage after 25-50%) and those of us who would like that limit taken all the way up. I personally don't see why there has to be some arbitrary limit to damage, and I would get very aggrivated at pounding away at a capship only to have 100% blink back at me indefinately. But this is something that needs to be put to further discussion. It affects mission balances all over the place, so it's a rather big deal.
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those changes to ship damage could potentially block the following occurances:
Turrent Destruction
Subsystem Destruction
or more simply put
*MISSON SUCCESS*
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If you mean _argv's changes, he's already stated that while the doesn't get damaged, the subsystem can still be destroyed.
Most of this stuff sounds really cool. :yes:
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I think that if a turret or subsystem is blown, the capital ship should take some damage from that. Maybe after all subsystems are down, the ship can start taking damage from fighter weapons?
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Since my removal of the 50% penalty on rate of fire of linked primary weapons seems to be a point of contention, I'll throw in another argument against the penalty:
It's unfair. Take the Ulysses and Thoth fighter classes, for example. The Ulysses has two primary banks, with two gun mounts each. The Thoth has one primary bank, with four gun mounts. Despite the fact that the Ulysses and Thoth are supposed to be almost identical, the Thoth has a major firepower advantage over the Ulysses, because of this rate of fire penalty. The same holds true for the Bakha and Sekhmet classes. The marginal advantage of being able to mount different weapons on each of the Ulysses' and Bakha's two primary banks does not, in my opinion, balance out against the major firepower penalty versus a single primary bank with many gun mounts.
thats what makes it fair. Either you have high firepower, or you can only mount one weapon. Ulysses can use Morn / Kayser or any other combos whereas thoth is limited to _one_ weapon.
It's meant to be like that, and changing it would unbalance FS2 a lot.
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Originally posted by Flaser
What I meant about the 'huge', 'superca' and ect. flags is that I don't like the system at all.
What do we want?
- Big Ships should have a fair toughness
- Big Guns should counter that
- Small Ships shouldn't be able to just take down a ship that though
My problem is that all these flags jsut circumvent the problem instead modeling things properly.
I already posted a damage model a while ago that could solve the trouble:
Armor treshold/resistance
Each ship should have an armor treshold, so it would substact a certain amount of damage from each shot it recieves. Bigger ships have better armor, so a better treshold.
The armor also has a resistance factor - it tells how much would the armor recieve from the damage. So an armor with 20 resistance will take 1/5 of the damage that remains after the treshold was substracted, and the ship's hull will only recieve 4/5 of the damage.
Thereby a big ship can brush of weapons without a real punch, meanwhile it also has a resistance to indicate its toughness when you DO hit it with something of a puch. [/B]
But the hull strength metric includes armor. Otherwise one shot from a BGreen in the right place would take down the Colossus.
Originally posted by Lightspeed
thats what makes it fair. Either you have high firepower, or you can only mount one weapon. Ulysses can use Morn / Kayser or any other combos whereas thoth is limited to _one_ weapon.
It's meant to be like that, and changing it would unbalance FS2 a lot.
Like I said, the advantage of mounting multiple weapons is marginal at best. Really, how often do you mount different weapons on each bank on a fighter with 4 gun mounts? I know I don't do that very often. Occasionally you need an SDG to disable something, but that's rare.
I know it's meant to be like that. I'm saying it's the Wrong Thing.
Originally posted by StratComm
Well, if you were to mount a beam on that turret, then there could be issues with power. Even a Maxim continually firing is noticable though, especially if you have power diverted for other reasons.
Eh, not really. The power consumption on one AAAf (with power consumption set proportionately based on damage, the fact that it's a beam, etc) isn't really noticeable. Of course, I mounted it on a bomber class I called 'GTB Ursa Adv.' which has a power output of 7, which is a bit high for a bomber (fighters usually have around 2 to 4), but then again, the Ursa is huge and slow, so there's plenty of room to put a nice powerful reactor in it. I also did up a 'GVB Osiris Adv.' which carries a decently sized reactor (power output of 5, I think) but it mounts two AAAf. With both of them firing (at different targets, I might add), the power consumption gets a bit noticeable, but still not really. Also, note that bomber turrets won't fire at all if weapon energy is too low.
Hey, I like to feel like I'm helping take down a corvette/destroyer with my Maxims and tempests! It may not be pivitol, but it can help. I'll address it again in a minute.
Fun. Maxims and Tempests can cripple a corvette or destroyer (by taking out all its subsystems) but you need fire support to destroy the whole ship.
I would much rather have a "+randomness" parameter or something that could be added to the beams than having to specify which beams not to randomize. Scale from 0.0 to 1.0, that defines how often the beam will deviate from it's type behavior. This could be assumed 0.0 if not present, and would allow customization and activation of this feature in one table addition.
Can do.
Does this have any effect on bombers/bombs? If you had a cap fight in a mission and wanted the player to defend a cap from bombers (while also not having it get destroyed by hostile capship beams) would this interfere? You might try a "huge protect" as well, but "beam protect" still has its uses.
So, you're saying, you don't want other big ships shooting beams at it, but you do want bombers to shoot bombs at it?
Ok, it would appear that there are two camps on this one... those of us who would like the arbitrary limit on hull damage to "Huge"/"Supercap" flagged ships removed completely (or scaled so that they take less damage after 25-50%) and those of us who would like that limit taken all the way up. I personally don't see why there has to be some arbitrary limit to damage, and I would get very aggrivated at pounding away at a capship only to have 100% blink back at me indefinately. But this is something that needs to be put to further discussion. It affects mission balances all over the place, so it's a rather big deal.
Yeah, although making big damage ships' hulls completely invulnerable to small weapons is basically what it is now, except that small weapons can (very slowly) hurt the hull down to 50% or so. Anyway, the point of big damage is that ships of that size have such tough armor that small weapons can't even dent it. Same as firing 9mm bullets at a tank -- even if you hit it 100 times in the same place, it's not going to do much. But if you shoot an anti-tank rocket at it, it has enough punch to penetrate the armor.
Originally posted by Solatar
I think that if a turret or subsystem is blown, the capital ship should take some damage from that. Maybe after all subsystems are down, the ship can start taking damage from fighter weapons?
Why? Hull armor isn't powered; it's just a really thick layer of cold metal over the hull of the ship. Shielded big ships are obviously unable to recharge their shields if their reactor(s) have been destroyed, of course.
Here's a report on my progress implementing various changes to my modding that's been requested here. Most of these are here because I like various changes and others don't, so I'll give people a choice!
- Added a struct 'Argv_options' that houses all of the options for my stuff in bitfields. This probably should be done for all options, but I don't want to mess with that.
- Added an option '-auto-ets' to turn on the auto ETS feature. (It's off by default.)
- Added an option '-no-implicit-disable-auto-target'. When specified, using the 'target nothing' command will not turn off auto targeting.
- Added an option '-no-auto-target-turret' which prevents the automatic targeting of turrets when targeting big ships.
- Added an option '-sound-from-own-turrets' which allows the player to hear shot sounds from her own turrets.
- Beam turrets on player ships were always making sounds, even though they shouldn't be. This was a Volition bug (presumably because they didn't expect player ships to carry beam turrets). Fixed.
- Added some new flags for ships.tbl entries: "beam free by default" and "beam lock by default". These affect the free status of all beam turrets on the ship, unless overridden by subsystem flags (see below) -- "beam free by default" means an implicit beam-free-all on this ship class, while "beam lock by default" means an implicit beam-lock-all on it (which is the default in regular FS2). Ships of type "fighter", "bomber", and "sentrygun" are implicitly "beam free by default". Use "beam lock by default" to override this, but the "beam lock by default" flag must occur after "fighter"/"bomber"/"sentrygun" or it will do nothing (since the code that processes "fighter"/"bomber"/"sentrygun" sets "beam free by default" when it encounters such a flag).
- Added a $Flags: field for subsystems. This works the same way as ship flags, but applies to subsystems, and obviously has a different set of flags. Currently there are only two: "beam free by default" and "beam lock by default". Ordinarily, the default beam free state of beam turrets is inherited from the ship's default beam free state (see above). However, these flags can be used to override that. If a subsystem is flagged with "beam lock by default", then it will be locked by default even if the parent ship is "beam free by default" (implicitly by being a fighter/bomber/sentrygun or explicitly). If it is flagged with "beam free by default", then it will be free by default even if the parent ship is "beam lock by default" (implicitly by not being a fighter/bomber/sentrygun or explicitly). In other words, the subsystem beam free flags override the beam free flags of the parent ship. Of course, both the ship flags for beam free and the subsystem flags for beam free are overridden by the beam-free, beam-lock, etc sexps.
- New weapon flag "random beam slash", causes type A beams to be randomly forced to type B, and vice versa. Need to add a way of specifying how random this should be.
By the way, I mistakenly took credit for the code that forces beams to type A when targeting subsystems. This is Volition's code. Sorry about that.
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I'm inclined to agree about the CapShip thing. On one hand, once you have taken out all the Subsystems, a Capship is out of your frame of reference anyway, it is no longer a threat. On the other, it takes the joy of seeing big ships on your scoreboard (except of course, when you are flying a bomber, which is designed to take down a capship) :(
All in all, even in modern warfare, the tales of a fighter not carrying an anti-shipping missile taking out something the size of a Destroyer ( roughly equivalent to a Freespace Cruiser ), are few and far between.
Flipside :D
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Originally posted by Flipside
I'm inclined to agree about the CapShip thing. On one hand, once you have taken out all the Subsystems, a Capship is out of your frame of reference anyway, it is no longer a threat. On the other, it takes the joy of seeing big ships on your scoreboard (except of course, when you are flying a bomber, which is designed to take down a capship) :(
Yes, and that's why you fly bombers to take down capships. Of course, you could also cheese them to death with Trebuchets...
All in all, even in modern warfare, the tales of a fighter not carrying an anti-shipping missile taking out something the size of a Destroyer ( roughly equivalent to a Freespace Cruiser ), are few and far between.
That's because those fighters carry a few bombs. Sort of like a Myrmidon being able to carry a Cyclops or two. (Incidentally, in the Volition FS2 tables, the Myrmidon was able to carry the Helios! Probably doesn't have the payload capacity, though.) In FreeSpace, warheads with sufficient yield to hurt capships (ie, nuclear or antimatter warheads) are far too large for fighters to carry. Contemporary fighters can't carry warheads that size, either. Ever seen an F-117 dropping a Hiroshima sized nuke? Didn't think so.
There are backpack nukes, so called because they are small nukes that fit in a backpack or briefcase sized container, which an F-117 can obviously drop without breaking a sweat. However, these are very low yield (the radiation from them is nasty, but FreeSpace ships are unaffected by it), so a proportionately sized FreeSpace missile probably wouldn't pack enough punch to do serious damage to a big ship. Remember, FreeSpace capital ships are extremely tough -- they can take several antimatter warheads, and shrug off asteroid collisions.
New feature: Subsystem display names
This enables modders to control the name of a subsystem as displayed in the target view on the HUD. There are two versions of this: one specified in the ships table, and one specified in the weapons table.
The ship one is "$Display Name:" on a subsystem, immediately after the line with the name, hitpoints, and rot speed. Example:
$Subsystem: foo, 1, 1
$Display Name: "foo launcher"
...
The weapons one is "$Turret Display Name:" right after the weapon range. Example:
+Weapon Range: 1500
$Turret Display Name: "foo launcher"
...
In each case, this will set what is displayed in the HUD targeting box for the subsystem name, when the player targets that subsystem. For the weapon "Turret Display Name", it is what will show up when that weapon is the first weapon mounted on a turret. Note that the display name on the subsystem overrides the display name on the weapon, if both are present.
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Hmmmmm... now THAT could be handy!
Oh and I already knew that stuff, I was agreeing with you :D
Flipside :D
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New feature: Subsystem display names
This is actually already implemented in the POF. Open up a POF in an editor, and you'll notice it's subsystems each have a display name. Here's the example Properties entry for a rotating radar dish submodel, named radar01a:
$special=subsystem
$name=Radar Dish
$rotate=10
Now, if I make the table reference the radar01a submodel, targeting it in game will reveal the name Radar Dish.
The exception is in turrets, where the subsystem name changes according to what weapon is mounted on it. You can specify the name Gun Turret or Huge Turret or whatever, but depending on the weapon it will be forced to Beam Turret or Flak Turret or Laser Turret, etc.
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GE is right(as always), but making double table entry for a ship is easier to redouble the pof just to give another name for the subsystem, and is easier to handle.
It also saves the free space of your winchester.
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_argv's changes look pretty good to me. FreeSpace has been needing an accurate energy system for some time. As for turret line-of-fire checking, you could use one of DirectX's mesh functions, D3DXIntersectTri. It takes five pointers to D3DXVECTOR3 structs: three corners of a polygon, the shot origin, and the shot direction. It takes three pointers to FLOATs, which will contain the u and v barycentric coordinates and the distance from the origin of the intersection if it determines that the line intersects the triangle. The function's return is a simple boolean value. It's not particularly efficient (you'd have to cycle through all the triangles in the turret's cone of fire) and I dunno if DX8 included this function, but it's one way of determining if a turret has clear LoS. It'd be easier if you were using the D3DX Mesh extensions, coz then you could use D3DXIntersect which cycles through all the mesh faces for you.
I've implemented a few of _argv's FS improvements in my own game engine from the word 'Go', because they seemed somewhat obvious if I'm going for extreme physics realism. The damage system I'm using is simple though, and doesn't prevent little weapons from hurting capital ships because my game is based around space tech in the near future. What would a 20mm cannon do to a Space Shuttle? NASTY...
What would a 20mm cannon do to a heavily-armoured space-faring equivalent of a modern Destroyer? Not a great deal, but it would certainly hurt if it kept shooting for long enough.
The shield systems I'm using are singular shields, mainly because the ship-mod code takes up quite enough processing time already (what with all the accurate collision-detection and positioning) and hence I don't want to make things even worse by calculating exactly which part of a ship's shields got hit. Singular shields simplifies the FX stack, too. Instead, when a ship's shields are struck, they glow slightly. Normally, shields are visible as a specular reflection on a semitransparent globe around the ship.
Shields? In a near-future game? Yep. They're developed by the American forces first, and they only deflect energy weapons. Plasma 'ghosts' through them, dealing full damage to hull but depleting the shields too (VERY deadly weapon, the Plasma Accelerator Coil, aka PAC). Mass weapons ignore shields entirely. Missiles with RADAR-based tracking systems have a small amount of trouble locking on through shields.
If I EVER get my engine finished, I'll modify it for FreeSpace use. Same HUD, same (or better) AI, same ships, same shield hit effect types. But it'll be DX9-compliant, and I'll sure as hell figure out vertex and pixel shaders...
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Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
This is actually already implemented in the POF. Open up a POF in an editor, and you'll notice it's subsystems each have a display name. Here's the example Properties entry for a rotating radar dish submodel, named radar01a:
$special=subsystem
$name=Radar Dish
$rotate=10
Now, if I make the table reference the radar01a submodel, targeting it in game will reveal the name Radar Dish.
The exception is in turrets, where the subsystem name changes according to what weapon is mounted on it. You can specify the name Gun Turret or Huge Turret or whatever, but depending on the weapon it will be forced to Beam Turret or Flak Turret or Laser Turret, etc. [/B]
Well, I originally did this because I wanted to be able to get around this issue with turrets getting forced to 'beam turret' or whatnot, but I figured I'd make it generic so you can override the subsys name in the POF. Besides, editing POFs and distributing modified versions with one's mod is not necessarily a good idea -- it adds to the mod's size a lot more than a line in a table.
Originally posted by Descenterace
_argv's changes look pretty good to me. FreeSpace has been needing an accurate energy system for some time. As for turret line-of-fire checking, you could use one of DirectX's mesh functions, D3DXIntersectTri. It takes five pointers to D3DXVECTOR3 structs: three corners of a polygon, the shot origin, and the shot direction. It takes three pointers to FLOATs, which will contain the u and v barycentric coordinates and the distance from the origin of the intersection if it determines that the line intersects the triangle. The function's return is a simple boolean value. It's not particularly efficient (you'd have to cycle through all the triangles in the turret's cone of fire) and I dunno if DX8 included this function, but it's one way of determining if a turret has clear LoS. It'd be easier if you were using the D3DX Mesh extensions, coz then you could use D3DXIntersect which cycles through all the mesh faces for you.
FreeSpace has its own collision detection routines, which are poly-accurate and deal with such things as shields and submodels. They are also fairly fast (obviously, since they get called 16 million times per frame).
I've implemented a few of _argv's FS improvements in my own game engine from the word 'Go', because they seemed somewhat obvious if I'm going for extreme physics realism. The damage system I'm using is simple though, and doesn't prevent little weapons from hurting capital ships because my game is based around space tech in the near future. What would a 20mm cannon do to a Space Shuttle? NASTY...
That's gotta hurt.
What would a 20mm cannon do to a heavily-armoured space-faring equivalent of a modern Destroyer? Not a great deal, but it would certainly hurt if it kept shooting for long enough.
That was the way it worked in FreeSpace 1 (or FS2 with "big damage" flags removed). There's a slight problem here. Ever try firing 9mm bullets at a heavy tank? If you have, you will notice that they don't even scratch it, even if you fire a lot of rounds at it. The armor is so strong that it isn't really affected at all by your weak gunfire. In FS2, the same applies to Subach HL-7s and SD Ravana armor.
The shield systems I'm using are singular shields, mainly because the ship-mod code takes up quite enough processing time already (what with all the accurate collision-detection and positioning) and hence I don't want to make things even worse by calculating exactly which part of a ship's shields got hit. Singular shields simplifies the FX stack, too. Instead, when a ship's shields are struck, they glow slightly. Normally, shields are visible as a specular reflection on a semitransparent globe around the ship.
In FreeSpace, shields are a mesh surrounding the ship, and are part of the ship model. When they are hit, part of this mesh is lit up. Singular shields doesn't change much with regards to processing time -- but it does change much with regards to brain processing time!
Shields? In a near-future game? Yep. They're developed by the American forces first, and they only deflect energy weapons. Plasma 'ghosts' through them, dealing full damage to hull but depleting the shields too (VERY deadly weapon, the Plasma Accelerator Coil, aka PAC). Mass weapons ignore shields entirely. Missiles with RADAR-based tracking systems have a small amount of trouble locking on through shields.
Shields deflecting energy weapons? I would think that a near-future shield system would be a strong electromagnetic field, so matter weapons would be most easily deflected, followed by plasma, and ending with laser weapons which are the hardest for it to deflect (since photons move very fast, so there is less time for the field to push them away). This field might disrupt radar (by deflecting the radar pings), but I don't know.
If I EVER get my engine finished, I'll modify it for FreeSpace use. Same HUD, same (or better) AI, same ships, same shield hit effect types. But it'll be DX9-compliant, and I'll sure as hell figure out vertex and pixel shaders...
Oo, shaders in FreeSpace. Joy. Merge that into fs2_open, would you? ;7
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
That was the way it worked in FreeSpace 1 (or FS2 with "big damage" flags removed). There's a slight problem here. Ever try firing 9mm bullets at a heavy tank? If you have, you will notice that they don't even scratch it, even if you fire a lot of rounds at it. The armor is so strong that it isn't really affected at all by your weak gunfire. In FS2, the same applies to Subach HL-7s and SD Ravana armor.
That's why I proposed the treshold/resistance system!
BTW sorry, for my late reply to your post...
I know Freespace does take armor into account - but IIRC only in the form of hitpoints.
FS solves the 9mm - tank problem through flags.
However it could get too complicated IMHO.
A Subach shouldn't have a chance against a modern Hecata, but it should just scratch an Orion.
The two factor I'm speaking of would allow a ship to have a unique resistance to weapons.
So you don't need any flags, all you need is two factors to be added to each ship - this could be stored in armors.tbl.
The treshold allows the ship to disregard weapons that can't even scratch it, the other factor - resistance on the other hand, would also help to show how hard the armor plating is.
So instead damaging it the same as a cruiser a destroyer could take a lot less damage, since a certain percentage of the damage would be taken away by the armor.
You can further complicate things by giving each weapon a penetration factor - this factor would be given to their damage when determining treshold; so you could have a low yield, high speed railgun, that DOES penetrate a destroyer armor, but can't do any significan't damage.
That way we could handle even subsystem damage with the same damage model, except that anti-sub guns would be given a high penetration.
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The Destroyer I was referring to is the one in my game. My ships will look a bit like modern space stations, but better armoured (and armed). If you shoot the right parts, you can make them break apart...
A 20mm cannon wouldn't scratch a FreeSpace cruiser, but FS ships are far tougher than those in my game.
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Originally posted by Flaser
That's why I proposed the treshold/resistance system!
BTW sorry, for my late reply to your post...
I know Freespace does take armor into account - but IIRC only in the form of hitpoints.
FS solves the 9mm - tank problem through flags.
However it could get too complicated IMHO.
A Subach shouldn't have a chance against a modern Hecata, but it should just scratch an Orion.
The two factor I'm speaking of would allow a ship to have a unique resistance to weapons.
So you don't need any flags, all you need is two factors to be added to each ship - this could be stored in armors.tbl.
The treshold allows the ship to disregard weapons that can't even scratch it, the other factor - resistance on the other hand, would also help to show how hard the armor plating is.
So instead damaging it the same as a cruiser a destroyer could take a lot less damage, since a certain percentage of the damage would be taken away by the armor.
You can further complicate things by giving each weapon a penetration factor - this factor would be given to their damage when determining treshold; so you could have a low yield, high speed railgun, that DOES penetrate a destroyer armor, but can't do any significan't damage.
That way we could handle even subsystem damage with the same damage model, except that anti-sub guns would be given a high penetration.
OH. You want to specify the toughness of a ship's armor, and the armor-penetration ability of various weapons. That way, cruisers would shrug off ML-16s just like Hecates shrug off HL-7s, but maybe corvettes would take damage from the Maxim. And yes, I can see subsystem damage being applied in the same way, although turrets would have to be exempt, since they are obviously not protected by armor anywhere near as tough as the main ship's. Anyway, we don't need a new table, just specify toughness in ships.tbl and penetration in weapons.tbl. (toughness - penetration) would specify a damage scale -- if penetration is, say, 75% of toughness, then it'll start to scratch the ship, and if it's 100% or more, then it'll do full damage.
Sound good?
Originally posted by Descenterace
The Destroyer I was referring to is the one in my game. My ships will look a bit like modern space stations, but better armoured (and armed). If you shoot the right parts, you can make them break apart...
A 20mm cannon wouldn't scratch a FreeSpace cruiser, but FS ships are far tougher than those in my game.
Not only are they tougher, they also do not have weak points like that. You can't shoot a Hecate in just the right spot and have it blow up, because there is no such right spot.
New changes!
- The rate of fire penalty for linked primaries may be disabled with a #define (or -D option to the compiler) "FS2_NO_LINKED_ROF_PENALTY".
- Friendly beam fire may be enabled with the #define "FS2_ALLOW_FRIENDLY_BEAM_FIRE". Again, you can use -D to the compiler.
- Singular shields are now optional. Use the ship flag "singular shields" to enable this feature for individual ships, or the command line option "-singular-shields" to enable it for all of them.
- The weapon flag "use energy on turret" causes that weapon to consume the ship's weapon energy, even when it is mounted on a turret. Applies to beam weapons also (but in separate code).
- The weapon flag "drain big ships" causes esuck weapons to apply a power drain to BIG|HUGE ships. This is needed because in normal FS2, such ships have tiny power output (0.1 is typical), so you'd be able to disable the Colossus with a Lamprey. Not good.
- Fighter beams do not whack, but all others do. I'd rather use Mass, but I'm lazy, and that's complicated!
I think that's it for incompatible and controversial changes. When warpcore is back up I'll still check that there aren't any other changes I didn't notice.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
New changes!
- The weapon flag "drain big ships" causes esuck weapons to apply a power drain to BIG|HUGE ships. This is needed because in normal FS2, such ships have tiny power output (0.1 is typical), so you'd be able to disable the Colossus with a Lamprey. Not good.
[/B]
:lol:
*runs off to suck the power from the Sathanas in my Crimion*
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Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
"Chapter 3: Explosions
In which the Plot is so Secret, even we do not know exactly what happens yet. But we know that there will be many Explosions. " - The Terran-Vasudan War Project Website
:lol:
This sounds like a description of a Hollywood action film.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
- Fighter beams do not whack, but all others do. I'd rather use Mass, but I'm lazy, and that's complicated!
[/b]
This should be optional too. Some people prefer the whack.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
:lol:
This sounds like a description of a Hollywood action film.
Pleh, I can't even read my siggy any more...
look:
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/mods/snipes/alien.jpg)
Originally posted by Goober5000
This should be optional too. Some people prefer the whack.
Yes, I rather enjoy being smacked about by AAAf...
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Same with beams not piercing shields. ;) Compatibility, I guess.
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Oh yeah. I forgot to mention that I also hacked the whack :ha: so that non-type-C (fighter) beams will whack proportionately to damage inflicted. That means whacking from AAA is as it's always been, and whacking from huge beams will send you for... a spin. :shaking:
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GREAT STUFF!
I don't like the interchangable beams tough - they sould either be slash or normal, not a little of both.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
That means whacking from AAA is as it's always been, and whacking from huge beams will send you for... a spin. :shaking:
If your hit with a bigger beam, you usually die anyway...
But it would be nice to see a ship like the Orion get 15 degrees when hit like in the intro...
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
thats what makes it fair. Either you have high firepower, or you can only mount one weapon. Ulysses can use Morn / Kayser or any other combos whereas thoth is limited to _one_ weapon.
It's meant to be like that, and changing it would unbalance FS2 a lot.
You know, I just had a thought -- remove the penalty only if all of the ship's primary banks mount the same weapon. That way it's fair, and should make you happy, even though I still think the penalty is dumb.
Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
If your hit with a bigger beam, you usually die anyway...
You'd be surprised.
But it would be nice to see a ship like the Orion get 15 degrees when hit like in the intro...
I think you'd have to alter the Orion's physics details for that to work.
Originally posted by TrashMan
I don't like the interchangable beams tough - they sould either be slash or normal, not a little of both.
Then don't enable it. (It's optional now, specified in a weapon flag.)
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you know that swiching beam thig would probly best be implemented with a new beam type, rather than modifying two existing ones
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
Surface Shields
Most ships other than fighters and bombers do not have shield meshes. With surface shields, they can have shields anyway -- weapons fire that strikes the hull drains the shields until they are depleted, just like with normal shields. You can put surface shields on a ship of any size or type. An obvious application of this is the Lucifer in FS1, where surface shields were crudely emulated by making the ship invulnerable. To enable surface shields, just give a non-zero shield amount in the ships.tbl entry; if the ship does not have a shield mesh, then surface shields will be used instead. (Shielded Sathanas anyone?)
[/list] [/B]
ok, I arrived at this point reading the first post then I started dacing naked in the house;7 :drevil: :drevil:
wonderful, really wonderful
how does it work exactly? it's the shield ani rendered over the hull or whatever?
edit-> I've read further, there is no visual effect, but only the buzz sound
well, it still will be good for the moment:)
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Originally posted by Bobboau
you know that swiching beam thig would probly best be implemented with a new beam type, rather than modifying two existing ones
I should point out that type D beams are forced to type A when attacking big ships. This is not something I invented; I just added another thing like it.
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Just two things -
ONE: Singular shields are far more realistic that quadrant ones. I talked with my physics profesor (Who works at CERN!!!!) and he said that it could be possible to create a bubble like shield, alltough shaping it would be impossible.
Sine even capships can now have shields, they should allso have a shield icon. The generic icon with a circle should work fine with all capships.
TWO: How/where can I get your modifications?
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Originally posted by TrashMan
TWO: How/where can I get your modifications?
You can ask me to send it to you (via email -- web board private messages suck multiple testicles), or you can wait for warpcore CVS to get up and Inquisitor to give me write access so I can commit it, and then get it from there.
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I look forward to see it when it's tagged on to the current SCP :)
One thing, someone better let RandomTiger know that theres going to be a whole new load of -extensions coming his way ;)
Flipside :)
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
You know, I just had a thought -- remove the penalty only if all of the ship's primary banks mount the same weapon. That way it's fair, and should make you happy, even though I still think the penalty is dumb.
This does seem to be a better deal, but how about ships such as the Erinyes or future mod ships that have 8+ gun mounts?
This is probably a moot point with heavier weapons such as the Kayser or the Prometheus, but an Erinyes with 8 Subachs shooting at full speed can probably do a lot of damage compared to eight HL-7s shooting at reduced speed, and Subach's barely drain energy.
I can take an Erinyes, fill it with eight HL-7s and lower weapon energy by one notch and still never run out during a dogfight, although it will eventually deplete itself when used against cruisers.
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Gunnery Control, target RoniXt. Power up photon beam turrets. OPEN FIRE!!!
(http://members.cox.net/~wmcoolmon/images/welcome.gif)
Welcome to the HLPBB. Exits are to the side and rear. Beneath your seat you will find a personal flamethrower for use in emergencies. If you run into a large 5-limbed creature while exploring the air ducts, don't worry. It's just Carl, our resident Shivan. Give him your lunch and back away slowly... you'll be fine.
To answer your concern about the 8 subach suggestion... if you actually were to fit an advanced fighter with 8 banks of subachs when you had keysers available you are really wasting your resources. One bank of keysers does many times more damage than two banks of subachs and you can fire them for a little while before they drain. However, it would create some issues in the early missions of the normal campaign, as there is little point in fitting your ship with the disruptors that you are given and the Myrmidon with 6 banks would be a little imbalanced.
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Well, I do like to equip my ships with Subachs instead of Kaysers because the HL-7s use a lot less energy. One Kayser mount uses 5 times more energy than a Subach mount if I'm correct. This way I can lower weapons energy, 1 - 1.5 notches from normal and give the energy to shields or engines.
Giving the Erinyes eight Kaysers will empty your weapons out in about fifteen shots, granted you will have taken down a whole fighter by then but the HL-7s leave a lot more room for error.
I don't know--I seem to take out fighters a lot quicker by shooting streams of HL-7s at them then by trying to get 7-8 accurate Kayser shots in.
EDIT: Exagerations corrected :D
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I take the best of both worlds, one bank of each. Let the Kaysers recharge while firing Subachs.
Anyway, back on topic.. argv, do you have CVS access yet? Has any of this been committed?
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Originally posted by RoniXt
This does seem to be a better deal, but how about ships such as the Erinyes or future mod ships that have 8+ gun mounts?
This is probably a moot point with heavier weapons such as the Kayser or the Prometheus, but an Erinyes with 8 Subachs shooting at full speed can probably do a lot of damage compared to eight HL-7s shooting at reduced speed, and Subach's barely drain energy.
I can take an Erinyes, fill it with eight HL-7s and lower weapon energy by one notch and still never run out during a dogfight, although it will eventually deplete itself when used against cruisers.
The Erinyes is not supposed to be balanced against the Pegasus. It's supposed to be overwhelmingly powerful. That's the point. If you want to balance it against the Pegasus anyway, give it a low power output and small weapon energy reserve. Anyway, even HL-7s being rapid-fired from 8 gun mounts will suck down a lot of power.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
...Anyway, even HL-7s being rapid-fired from 8 gun mounts will suck down a lot of power.
not really ... I have never seen the Subachs absorb all my energy from lasers while it has at least a level 2 recharge.
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Originally posted by StratComm
If you run into a large 5-limbed creature while exploring the air ducts, don't worry. It's just Carl, our resident Shivan. Give him your lunch and back away slowly... you'll be fine.
The resident Shivan is named Carl?!? :wtf:
Speaking of which, I had a dream last night involving Shivans. I play FS2 way too much...
To answer your concern about the 8 subach suggestion... if you actually were to fit an advanced fighter with 8 banks of subachs when you had keysers available you are really wasting your resources. One bank of keysers does many times more damage than two banks of subachs and you can fire them for a little while before they drain. However, it would create some issues in the early missions of the normal campaign, as there is little point in fitting your ship with the disruptors that you are given and the Myrmidon with 6 banks would be a little imbalanced.
Not really. It doesn't have the power output to support anything bigger than HL-7s when rapid-firing its primaries. Once again, the 50% ROF penalty is stupid because weapon energy is a more realistic and effective firepower constraint.
Originally posted by RoniXt
Well, I do like to equip my ships with Subachs instead of Kaysers because the HL-7s use a lot less energy. One Kayser mount uses 5 times more energy than a Subach mount if I'm correct. This way I can lower weapons energy, 1 - 1.5 notches from normal and give the energy to shields or engines.
Giving the Erinyes eight Kaysers will empty your weapons out in about fifteen shots, granted you will have taken down a whole fighter by then but the HL-7s leave a lot more room for error.
I don't know--I seem to take out fighters a lot quicker by shooting streams of HL-7s at them then by trying to get 7-8 accurate Kayser shots in.
Two words: Auto ETS.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
The resident Shivan is named Carl?!? :wtf:
Yes, and he's an admin.
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Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Anyway, back on topic.. argv, do you have CVS access yet? Has any of this been committed?
$ telnet warpcore.org cvspserver
Trying 216.81.249.60...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
Originally posted by TopAce
not really ... I have never seen the Subachs absorb all my energy from lasers while it has at least a level 2 recharge.
Oh well. I still think the ROF penalty is stupid. :hopping:
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No it isn't. It makes for some interesting game play features like switching between banks depending on where you need to deliver the firepower (like switching to a bank where the gunpoints are closer together for pinpoint accuracy, or using more spread-out banks for "spray and pray" attacks. Without an ROF penalty, there'd be no reason to do this.
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Read one of his previous posts, he means something like this:
Thoth: 4 lasers in 1 bank.
Ulysses: 4 lasers, 2 banks.
Both have four lasers, but the Thoth fires it faster, because it has 4x1, not 2x2.
I guess it wants to be a 'better cooldown' stuff in [V]'s secrets. :)
Just a thought.
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ROF penalty equates to firing one bank then switching to the other and firing, then switching back and firing, etc. Basically, half the firing time is apportioned to each weapon. Quite realistic, I'd say. And I don't like Spray 'n' Pray, so I go for a GTW UD-08 Kayser and a GTW-66 Maxim on my Erinyes...
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I think you definitely have a point there on the fire wait penalty. It would certainly have a huge impact on the gameplay balance, but I think it would be for the better since it would greatly increase the available combat tactics. Currently, there is no point (except for one or two cases) in using two weapons together because they just both fire more slowly, but this mod would actually create some point of having multiple gun banks on a ship.
I would recommend that you either set the rate of fire to 75% for both guns instead of the default half (so there is some penalty, but not total loss; a compromise between both parties :D), or better, leave it as it is by default but add in a table setting (maybe ship-specific) that specifies the linked fire rate, and have the game read it to be 50% as usual if the tag does not exist. This way, the game would still be compatible with older campaigns (like the main one) but would allow designers to take advantage of the feature.
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Descenterace is correct. That's the reason for the ROF "penalty"
In fact, if you fire one weapon and while holding it down switch to linked-fire, you can time it so that they fire right after each other and achieve double fire-rate :eek2:
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Originally posted by CP5670
I think you definitely have a point there on the fire wait penalty. It would certainly have a huge impact on the gameplay balance, but I think it would be for the better since it would greatly increase the available combat tactics. Currently, there is no point (except for one or two cases) in using two weapons together because they just both fire more slowly, but this mod would actually create some point of having multiple gun banks on a ship.
I would recommend that you either set the rate of fire to 75% for both guns instead of the default half (so there is some penalty, but not total loss; a compromise between both parties :D), or better, leave it as it is by default but add in a table setting (maybe ship-specific) that specifies the linked fire rate, and have the game read it to be 50% as usual if the tag does not exist. This way, the game would still be compatible with older campaigns (like the main one) but would allow designers to take advantage of the feature.
:hopping:
You greatly overestimate the usefulness of this. The penalty can be toggled with a #define and is on by default. There are no compatibility issues at present -- it's just fair.
Oh, by the way, I should point out that the penalty is unfair in yet another way. If a ship has twice the gun mounts in one bank compared to the other, then it makes sense to use only one gun bank. For instance, the Myrmidon's first bank has 2 gun mounts, and the second has 4. The second gun bank by itself does 25% more damage over time than both banks linked. On the Myrmidon, it is extremely rare for the two gun banks to mount different weapons (it can't support special-purpose weapons like the Maxim, and the SDG is very special-purpose). Also note that fighter beams circumvent the penalty entirely, by virtue of being, err, beams.
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New feature: Mission ship flag 'beam-free-all'
This is like the mission flag for beam-free-all-by-default, but for specific ships in the mission. Useful if you want to, say, let the NTF cruisers in sm1-03 fire their beams, but not the Psamtik. Normally, to accomplish this, you would have to use the sexp 'beam-free-all' on the cruisers, or 'beam-lock-all' on the Psamtik, since the beam-free-all-by-default mission flag frees beams for all ships in the mission.
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Originally posted by _argv[-1]
You greatly overestimate the usefulness of this. The penalty can be toggled with a #define and is on by default. There are no compatibility issues at present -- it's just fair.
Oh, by the way, I should point out that the penalty is unfair in yet another way. If a ship has twice the gun mounts in one bank compared to the other, then it makes sense to use only one gun bank. For instance, the Myrmidon's first bank has 2 gun mounts, and the second has 4. The second gun bank by itself does 25% more damage over time than both banks linked. On the Myrmidon, it is extremely rare for the two gun banks to mount different weapons (it can't support special-purpose weapons like the Maxim, and the SDG is very special-purpose). Also note that fighter beams circumvent the penalty entirely, by virtue of being, err, beams.
Well, nevertheless I think doing it as an additional parameter in tables is the best way to go. The overall goal with most of the play-altering changes is to have them not affect existing mods and missions. That's why I pushed for having to add a flag to enable beam randomizing rather than adding a flag to remove it; it would change the way the main campaign and unaltered tables work. The same goes with this. It's not that changing this is necessarily a bad thing (I like the 75% rate idea) but anything that alters the way older campaigns (read: FS2 Main Campaign) play has to be very carefully considered before it is incorperated into the main engine.
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I must admit, it always did seem a bit odd to me that the guns slowed down when doubled up. The whole idea of having 2 guns is to double your firepower? The problem is that an Myrmidon with it's six guns, even Subach, would very rapidly knock down a Mara, but I think most Shivan ships only come with 2 gun banks with 2 fire points each a total of 4 shots per 'round' of firing ( or 5 for a Dragon). Whereas the Erinyes, the Herc Mk1, and the Myrmidon all provide a minimum of 6. And the others average out at 4, a third of the Shivan fighters only have two primary firepoints.
It means that most [V] Shivan vessels would be even more fodder than normal, not a problem if you can turn the fire rate fix off, but worth mentioning :)
Flipside :D
Hmmmmm... that's brings the question, was there ever anything done about the problem with having different weapon types on the same turret mount? I seem to recall that doing this didn't work :(
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You greatly overestimate the usefulness of this. The penalty can be toggled with a #define and is on by default. There are no compatibility issues at present -- it's just fair.
Well it's not really an issue of fairness since there is no fair standard to judge it from (I mean heck, you're the super fighter ace Alpha 1 with mad skillz; that's unfair for everyone else in galaxy :D), but rather of enhancing the gameplay. This will create a whole new array of options for weapon selection since it will no longer just be the individual weapons you take that count, but also the combinations of weapons. Although as SC said, the table option is definitely the best way to go, since we always want to maintain backward-compatibility with existing campaigns.
It means that most [V] Shivan vessels would be even more fodder than normal, not a problem if you can turn the fire rate fix off, but worth mentioning :)
Most shivan vessels, that is, not counting the Nephilim (single slot with 7 mounts) and Seraphim (three slots with 6/3/3 mounts) with their crazy gun banks. :D To prevent the ships with fewer guns from becoming obsolete, some penalty should probably be added in but not enough to completely invalidate the multiple weaponry as is currently the case, which is why I was thinking 75% would work nicely.
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I am entirely sick of this stupid argument over the ROF penalty.
Therefore, I propose an alternative. I will send a binary with the penalty removed to anyone who asks for it. (Source, too, if you want.)
Then, you can all see for yourselves what the effects are, and can make far more informed opinions.
Any takers, please email me at [email protected] and request the binary and/or source. Thank you.
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New feature: Configurable beam whacking
Two new weapon table flags have been added for beam weapons. These apply to beam weapons of all types, including fighter beams.
beam no whack through shields
Causes the beam to not whack the target if it was stopped by shields. If the beam is shield piercing or the shield is down, then it still whacks.
beam use mass for whack
Causes the beam's $Mass: setting to be used to determine how much whack to apply. For reference, in normal FS2, AAA beams have a whack value of 500, while huge beams have a whack value of 1500. Otherwise, whacking is proportional to damage inflicted.
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The improvements above are the best a source coder has ever done. Now we can say FreeSpace is playable on a level. :)
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OK, these changes have been committed to CVS, now that Inquisitor gave me write access.
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Way cool:yes:
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A little update: Several of my changes broke things, so they're not all quite in yet, pending resolution of these issues. I guess this happens when you try to merge in such a huge modification.