Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Titan on October 22, 2007, 04:22:13 pm
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i know alot of people have tried it, i just wanted to show you my attempt, with screens taken during a test mission. Expect to see something along these lines in the FRED for Thesizzlers mod.
(yes, i know in the first screen its listed as a bomber)
[attachment deleted by ninja]
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Do you have gunnery control? Or is it the space-bar-to-allow-beams setup?
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uhh......... right now, its just steering. you know, give the right guns pointed at the enemy
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this could actually get interesting. i've always wanted to see a capship with a modeled Bridge (cockpit) and some interesting gunnery perks. as it stands you can haul that cruiser into PCS and set it up with some primary and secondary weapon points...give it some forward beams and torpedos.
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Not this again...
For the love of god, I wish people would stop trying to put this in FS2 and just mod Bridge Commander - that game was built for exactly this.
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just an idea...
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nevertheless, BC is also a cool game.
BUT: It's placed in the Star Trek Universe and ST warfare doesn't really rely on fighters.
(yes I know, there are fighters but those are more like angry bees)
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im just trying to have some fun. how do i make it so the forward turret (turret02) is player controlled?
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I don't know much about controlling turrets but I think you could make it a fire point for a primary somehow...
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Use PCS or Modelview to remove the firing point on turret02, then create a primary firepoint and place it in a suitable position. Edit the table, then test it.
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one of theese days im gonna have to finish my scripted turret system. i had it working on an aeolas once but it was sorta freelancery. it would be cool to have defined batteries which may be operated individually, aimed by mouse and possibly have some firing pattern options, such as chain fire or alpha strike style modes. you might want your blob guns to fire one at a time if youre trying to knock down bombs, or all at once in one salvo for capships, or you might want one third of the battery to fire at a time.
your weapons would need to be devided up by type and by position. for position id devide the guns up into 6 hextants (like quadrants but with 6). these would be user defined via a table (script parsed) as would probibly the tupes of guns that make up each type, more or less defined by damage rather than type such as flack or beam, probibly cutting up into 3-5 damage classes with blobs at 1 and bf beams being up at 5.
you get to set the rules for each battery, its fire pattern, and its perfered target, and wether or not its slaved to the mouse for control, or set up to operate on ai, as well as arming and disarming options. for an interface id probibly use the eye cam or bridge view, with custom displays such as engagement map which is like a big radar where you can adjust the perspective depending upon which hextant youre using for targeting. also youd have a point and click gui interface to control battery settings. you would also want to have graphical damage readouts for various subsystems and probibly a threat anaylasis screen perhaps as part of the tactical map.
scripted turrets do have some limits, such as probibly not being able to deal with beam weapons. an alternative aproach is to use combined fred and script system where fake targets ships, which are invisible, immortal, uncollideable, and generally do nothing but indicate a position. theese can be put into the level from either fred or script. then an event can be called to fire at one of theese ships which would be placed it the vacinity of the planned target. then the command to fire could be passed through script.
it just takes bringing all the pieces together. and can be done now. if i had the time to do it along with my other hundred or so hobbies+work then id probibly do it for fun. but as it stands im getting too old for this stuff (of course that dont mean im gonna stop) :D just expect it a little slower.
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nuke, that post made my head spin. i saw Aelous, then i didn't understand a thing after that. it sounds cool though..... i think ;)
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Maybe you could do like Nuke said, but command turrets through a special comm menu. To get this to work though, you would have to be really familiar with the ship you were flying.
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not really, you just pick in which of the 6 directions to fire, what damage class you want, and the number you want to fire at a time. the way i see the interface. another idea whichwould be cool is to be able to drag targets off your tac map to your target queue for a particular battery.
anyway point is, it can be done now, with current features which are in head, but it would be a monumental undertaking and would take about as much time as it woulr to make 3 or 4 ships.
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ya, but once you do it it can possibly be retrofitted to other ships. but i think this requires a series of test ships cultimating in a type that can be used AND looks good. wow nuke, you should thank me for unwittingly giving you a chance to express your ideas. :D i cant help right now, previously engaged, but lemme know if you ever start lemme know, ill see what i can do.
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You know what you should really do, is make a system where you can target many enemies at one times. Normally capships in game are attacking multiple targets at once. This is because they have to, they are designed to, and they have multiple turrets on many sides of the ship.
Just sort of like fly an aeolus, target 4 fighters in the same wing, and let your flak take care of them plus your laser turrets. As opposed to targetting one enemy at a time. You could take out anything with the bomb tag too (you'd probably want to do that more with your lasers). Got a whole bunch of bombs coming your way? Well, you could treat it the same way as targetting all the fighters in an enemy wing at once, and take out all the bombs at once. You could even be assaulting an enemy and target a bomb in hopes of taking it out while your bashing your enemy. Hell you could even target multiple foes on multiple sides of your ship and let the turret ai do it's thing. Doing this kind of targetting you'd really want to pay attention to many red and yellow blips on your 3d radar. Fs2 already has the ability to switch your pov to the left and right sides of your craft, idk so much about looking up and down though. But this is definitely a must.
After this, then flying capships would be a much better choose your vector and slaughter on your way, choose a new vector and slaughter on your way, or hold your position and slaughter (you have to fly like this in capships because they're no where near as maneuverable as fighters).
Of course i'd really want to fly a leviathen, then you get your AAA beams, lasers, missile launcher, and idk if the leviathen has flak, i'd probably rather fly an aeolus. Mod the game to play with capships, it's possible why not do it. The one thing i remember is that when you're damaged turret list fills up the screen it will cause fs2 to crash, someone should implement a better handling of the damaged turret reporting, like causing it not to fill up the whole screen. Anyway, SWEET :yes:
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lol, i had only took 2 damage over the course of those screens. no subsytem, acutally, radr dish got dmgd/rprd
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the idea of capship command has been around for years. only sence the implementation of the scripting system has it become feasable though.
most of the battle for caps is shooting things, maneuvering comes second. after that comes wing management, but we already have that. hierarchy and division of objectives to groups are key to military organization though. so you can control things at the individual level of the turret, which means you can only use one at a time. you can assign objectives on a turret by turret basis but its kinda slow. even with a good interface. this is for taking precision manual shots for heavy guns at big targets.
next level up is the battery. assuming all the weapons in the battery points in a general direction. this would work sorta like battletech or freelancer all your weapons lign up with the target and/or crosshair. the weapons aim themselves but the focus is provided by you. you still cannot control all the batteries but you control more firepower. this is the highest level your weapons can be controlled at. if batteries are selectable by direction and/or amount of firepower, then you can bring more firepower to bear on a single target. this would probibly be the most used level because it not only provides the most control but it makes things easyer to manage cause you have less batteries than individual turrets. also batteries need not be fixed to a specific pack of guns. for example an upper or lower multiparts may be able to hit targets in 5 of the 6 directions, so it would be present in all of those batteries. also batteries may have sub batteries which represent the different levels of firepower available too.
next level up is the full arsonal. theres too much to control manually and not all the weapons can get to the same targets. heres where you set the general targeting rules, what targets to prioritize and which to deal with later or leave to the fighters. you also set the general mood of the guns. if you want aggressive salvos where the guns are ripple fired as fast as they can, which is good for close in and dirty combat, where youre more in dangered by your target than other vessels in the area. on the other hand a defensive posture you want to save your shots for when you need them. like when you get bombed you need to have as many turrets set to ready to fire as possible so that when the bomb does come, you have a turret ready to shoot it down, rather than waiting for the reload cycle.
above that you have the vessel level. which is where you deal with the ship itself. energy management, manuvering. setting waypoints. you can also control the launch of fighter wings. and coordinate with other caps in the area. you also have more access to sensor data from here.
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:jaw: Ouch! :jaw: Seems like you already put a lot more thought into this than I, Nuke. Congrats... :) (and hope you get it done sometime - good luck)
Anyway, whoever wants might take a look at my try (see sig), or at least the discussion - as I'll propably have to re-upload it (well, free filehosts and 30 days... :sigh: ) and won't yet get to that.
I tried some stuff, sadly didn't yet get very well into scripting (and also Nuke's time-and-many-hobbies argument is more or less valid to me too).
Well - I had added some primary beams (to give players something to toy around with),
used fake missiles + ship-create for fighter launching (grouping into wings didn't seem possible though),
started with the "allow-beams"-stuff Bob-san mentioned (though also for normal turrets and the primary beams; yet it didn't work very well for me somehow :nervous: )
and, finally, also added in a "captain's fighter"-feature (so you could switch over to dogfighting should you think it necessary, or if you got bored steering that huge lump of metal or whatever it is)
as well as trying some other goodies (which don't yet work, though).
Next thing would have been scripting, but dunno when I might get the time for it :nervous:
Thanks for the warning about the turrets-crash, S-99. I didn't have it happen yet (mostly thanks to too high shield values :rolleyes: ), but it's good to know.
Anyway - did someone else notice the little directives window not being displayed for capships, or did I mess something up there? :confused:
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I don't know if someone already said this, but:
Problem: most people use the bomber tag on their capships that they command, but enemy beams can't target a bomber.
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that was only an old retail restriction. theese days you can fly anything, though you have to edit the mission in notepad to add caps to the loadout.
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ah well thats good to know.
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i know! instead of having turrets, have batteries, which LOOK like turrets but are actually one "turret" with multiple firepoints. wait- but you still wouldn't be able to control them. you'd have to have them like permanently docked, but still be able to fire
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Why does everyone want to control the turrets individually?
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I think it's best to have a few frontal turrets in player control, and have the rest 'automatic'.
(A game that does something like this is (Please don't kill me for mentioning this game!) Battlecruiser Millennium.)
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well my system concept is multilayered. you can control turrets by setting their objectives, targets, and behavior. you can go to the battery level where you control a bunch of turrets manually. then to the individual turret level mostly useful for surgical strikes knocking out a ships engine with a bfgreen for example. most of the weapons you will want to be left on automatic. you can step up or down to the level needed.
a good gui is important here. the way i see it at the top level you should be able to drag ships off the tac map (really an oversized radar with icons (possibly 3d) to represent ships) and onto the target lists for individual turrets or batteries. the turrets would grouped by their general direction, you pick port, starbord, fore, aft, dorsal, or ventral. theese options form a pane. selecting one puts the targeting map into that frame of referance. all the batteries for that direction will be listed in a row next to it, each in its own little pane with its options. you can select a battery and its individual guns would be displayed as a second row under it. so you can quickly get to any battery, any gun, in any direction with no more than 3 clicks. each object has its own target list, which comes up when an object is selected. i figure the whole interface would take up the top 20% of the hud. possibly with side panels and the tac map taking up the rest of the screen for the high level mode. when you put a turret or battery into manual the tac map is minimized and the view changes to the proper frame of referance.
turrets/batteries could be set to agressive, defensive, or disarmed. when you drop to turret or battery mode (by selecting the turret or battery from a list), turrets can only be fired by direct command and aimed by mouse, the agressive/defensive/disarmed option is replaced with ripple fire options. you only can manually fire turrets in battery (or the selected turret), all other turrets use ai behavior depending on the high level settings.