Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: MetalDestroyer on September 04, 2005, 05:46:35 pm

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: MetalDestroyer on September 04, 2005, 05:46:35 pm

These days I try hard to convert several models from X Wing Alliance for my own purpose into Freespace 2 Open.
However, I got a big trouble with some fighters about their primary weapon.
If I take the Tie Fighter, the rating failure of shooting down an opponent is about 15%

But for ships like X wing, the new X Wing, Preybird, Escort Shuttle, A Wing, I miss the enemy ship with an average of 95% of failure.


I've taken some shots, looks the X Wing, he miss his target :

(http://img318.imageshack.us/img318/196/fs2openr0109200520050904234938.jpg)


Or, as well the Preybird have difficulties to shooting down opponent, like my ship.
I don't know, if It could be possible to resolve these trouble.
Is it possible to attribute to our primary weapons the firing angle like turrets in PCS ?

(http://img318.imageshack.us/img318/7328/fs2openr0109200520050904234905.jpg)

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: StratComm on September 04, 2005, 05:52:31 pm

It's hard to tell from your description of the problem and screenshots exactly what you are talking about, but I think this goes back to issues I've seen with other fighters with similar configurations.  The problem with the X-wing has nothing to do with any kind of "firing angle" for the gun points.  The trouble is, they are mounted so far out from the center of your ship that when you line something up in front of you all of the lasers miss because they go outside the bounds of your target.  In most Star Wars games, the X-wing's lasers converged at either an adaptive distance or at some set (reasonable) engagement range, but in FS2 all guns fire perfectly straight.  Unfortunately the only thing you can do is move the firepoints in towards the center of the ship some, or just make the whole thing smaller.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: MetalDestroyer on September 04, 2005, 05:57:48 pm

Aaaaarg :(
Can you think I could try to mod the weapon.tbl to resolve this ?
I mean change the firepower, the speed, and the radius ?

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: StratComm on September 04, 2005, 05:59:42 pm

Firepower and speed wouldn't do anything.  Radius will make it look silly, but may make the area that the bolts can actually hit larger and make aiming less of a pain.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: MetalDestroyer on September 04, 2005, 06:05:25 pm

In fact, when I shot during dogfight, I saw my shots are not straight in the case where I have to turn around myself, or try to lock the enemy.
I was thinking primary shots have the same behavior if it was a ballistic weapons. But I'm not sure.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: StratComm on September 04, 2005, 06:08:38 pm

Primary shots always (always always always, etc) fire directly forward in Freespace.  Any percieved difference from that is simply a result of perspective.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: Trivial Psychic on September 04, 2005, 08:35:16 pm

Actually, primary and secondary banks can have multiple normals allowing them to be converged in the pof data.  The downside is that their convergence distance is not dynamic, but there has been discussion of auto-converging normals in the past... nothing came of it.  It was the X-wing issue that brought up this idea then as well, but other ships could benefit from auto-converging normals, such as the White-Star from B5.  The outer turrets can't hit much in terms of fighters.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: StratComm on September 04, 2005, 11:52:47 pm

I was fairly certain that those normals got ignored though.  I'm still almost certain of that with respect to secondaries.  That may have changed, but as godaweful as a number of :V: models were the normals of weapons ports was never an issue.  I've never really played with it because in most of the time convergance makes the problem worse.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: WMCoolmon on September 05, 2005, 12:01:35 am

Yes, normals drool, hardcoded defaults rool.

There's been at least one mod that's asked for this.

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: Prophet on September 05, 2005, 06:45:19 am

With the auto-converging normals, could Starlancer-type blind-fire be possible? 'Cos that would be sweet!

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: Starman01 on September 05, 2005, 12:49:03 pm

Well, there are two ships in WCS (currently only one, the other is WC4, not quite the timeline we want to match) that has it's main gun on the side.

For AI-Ships I model the gunmounts more towards the center, but for player ships it really sucks. Shooting at a turret or other small targets is only possible if you aim beside the target, and then only the half of your weapons will hit.

Some sort of auto-convergance would be very helpful, also for the Starwars-Mod (thinking of XWING, Z-95 and a few other XWA-Fighters)

Title: Trouble with primary weapons targeting
Post by: MetalDestroyer on September 05, 2005, 02:49:11 pm

I try to manage with this trouble. And finally i can handle it within the Velocity, the Fire Rate, and PowerHit.
But it's not perfect as well. I'll expect a new built which could manage auto-convergence.

And, about auto-convergence, why don't you make as well some sort of firing mode like XWA (One by One, Double, Quad).