Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: Trivial Psychic on January 20, 2005, 06:56:40 pm
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I guess this would work for a Star Trek Mod, but I'll just talk of B5 here. I was tying to think of how to simulate a tractor beam effect, seen on Centauri, Minbari, and ships from a few other more advanced races. At first I was thinking of a beam weapon with no dammage, but that wouldn't allow one ship to be tugged by another. Also the beam would terminate after its duration runs out. It then occured to me that the duration problem could be sorted out by a beam-fire-continuous sexp, which would need to be toggleable so it can be disabled later. This still leaves the problem of how to tug a ship, so then I thought of using dockpoints. Basically, any ship with tractor-beam capabilities, would have another dockpoint some distance out from its hull. When it needs to graple a ship, it would be given a docking order to align its tractor beam dockpoint up with any regular dockpoint on the target ship. The FREDer would then make use of the proposed beam-fire-continuous sexp to simulate the visual effect, and likey give a do-nothing, play dead, or lay still order to the target ship. Problems would include needing additional turrets on all vessels mounting tractor beams, possibly embeding them within the hull so they won't get dammaged. This could be improved even more by a once-proposed change-turret-weapon sexp, so said turrets would have no weapon loaded at the beginning of the mission, so then AI wouldn't try to fire at them. Then the change-turret-weapon sexp would load tractor-beams to the ship just as its ligning up for tractor docking. So, what do ya think?
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Doable with high negative mass value, no need for dockpoints.
It's been thought of before. :)
Nobody has yet made it practical, maybe those new SCP sexps will.
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And it will be good for the Star Wars TC ^^
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Originally posted by Mr. Fury
Doable with high negative mass value, no need for dockpoints.
It's been thought of before. :)
Nobody has yet made it practical, maybe those new SCP sexps will.
Yes, but that only pulls an object towards the source ship. An object once grapled onto, should maintain the same distance between itself and the source ship, and not be pulled into it. One could use an actual "tractor beam" with the negative mass value as the dockpoints align, but once the grapled object is in position, the distance between the two should remain constant. Using a dockpoint further out, combined with a visual-only continuously firing tractor beam would accomplish this.
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If your tractor beam is invisible you can possibly accomplish this using sexps. If ship A is tractoring ship B, use the every-time conditional to slightly modify ship B's position every time, dragging it towrds the co-ords infront of ship A (using get-relative-x,Y & z).
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Originally posted by IPAndrews
If your tractor beam is invisible you can possibly accomplish this using sexps.
But they're supposed to be visible. We've seen tractor beams in "Ship of Tears", "In the Beginning", "All Alone in the Night", and IIRC "The Wheel of Fire". The use of dockpoints would make this so much easier... in my opinion.
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i tried making tractor beams by giving beams negative mass. they never worked.
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Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
But they're supposed to be visible.
Well you could create a new beam which doesn't do any damage. Fire that at the ship, and do the actual pulling using sexps as I described earlier. You could maybe have your new tractor beam tag the ship it hits and only have the tractor beam sexps effect a ship that's been tagged. You're just going to have to experiment with what's available and use your imagination.
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I wouldnt worry about the AI targetting the tractor beams. After all, tractor beams are a valid target. If possible a new subsystem might be in order. It would make for a good mission..... potentially.
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It depends, my Nexus fanfic (which I plan on recreating in the FS2 engine) Involves a plot device (mech monster) that is able to dart in and around the edge of a black hole and drag ships into the gavity well's range. This is doable in FRED since it is all no dam , cont fire beam plus waypoints.
I haven't gotten that far yet so I haven't experimented but if I made Khyron ram SDF-1 in tme with the voice cues (and have them both detonate) just like in the show, I am confident a SPECIAL Fredded EVENT can occur as long as this is not a player or AI combat option. It would be a story event with very restricted Fredding. In other words you just don't have this go off on a whim, and Alpha1 will NEVER have control over this (but maybe destroying the enemy's emitter might be possible to keep otehr vessels from being affected?).
Just some thoughts and my outlook/plans.