Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Fury on February 24, 2009, 08:01:34 am

Title: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Fury on February 24, 2009, 08:01:34 am
Many years ago people did try to get fighter flak working, the best result back then was that it required a direct hit before flak exploded. I haven't been following modding for many years but I did search but it turned up nothing useful regarding the topic. What kind of flak type weapons are possible on fighter primaries these days?

Just curious. :)
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Darius on February 24, 2009, 08:14:47 am
I've been using one of Steve-O's primaries which is meant to simulate a proximity grenade launcher, but is in essence fighter flak. It doesn't need a direct hit to explode like normal primaries, and as far as I can tell behaves just like normal capship flak.

The effect can be seen at :51 in this vid (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=nxhvPas5Bwk&fmt=18).
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Wanderer on February 24, 2009, 08:23:45 am
Several different kinds of 'flaks'. Perhaps the most simple one is just a fighter/bomber weapon with 'flak' flag. This causes the weapon to detonate when it reaches the distance where the target is supposed to be... though it happens regardless of current targets position. With properly set fof value it looks quite a bit like a fighter flak.

Then there is the option of using various methods for checking distance to the target or from the firing ship (detonation range/radius) though i am not 100% if these work only on missile weapons.

And of course the option of making use of lua scripting for setting the flak detonations.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Fury on February 24, 2009, 10:46:00 am
Very interesting, seems like the old problems were resolved. Thanks for your replies. One of these days I should return to FS modding., though the amount of new stuff is overwhelming.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: BengalTiger on February 24, 2009, 12:30:57 pm
One of the T-M ships in the Teeth of the Tiger uses Flak guns as primaries. They work without problems.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: ShadowGorrath on February 24, 2009, 12:47:29 pm
Same in EW. There's a flak-like weapon that uses the flak physics, and works great.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: asyikarea51 on February 24, 2009, 09:33:36 pm
One thing I don't like about flak weapons is that they don't play ball with visible primaries (blip.pof on the gun normal WTF) and the pre-launch weapon selection screen (a rotating blip.pof?!)...

But it works and some 'hacking' around can be done with regards to the above... XD :lol:
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Woolie Wool on February 24, 2009, 10:11:32 pm
That is what "crapboxthing.pof" in the OTT dump is for. It's completely invisible.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Kiloku on February 25, 2009, 06:48:21 am
That got me thinking, why not make flak shots invisible? Traditionally, in games like Combat Flight Simulator, you can only see the flak explosions. Might be really cool to do it. Maybe it's easy, but I suck at doing anything :P
If I remove the .pof from the TBL related to Flak, would it work or just crash the game?
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Nuke on February 25, 2009, 12:14:18 pm
flak really just uses particles with no other graphics. there is no way to have flak weapons use a model or a laser effect. particle spews are optional, i think. likewise there is no real way to make a weapon that doesn't have effects (aside from all black bitmaps or invisible models), which runs a lot of code which need not be run. i think these are problems which should be addressed.

ive been saying for years that weapon behavior should be separated from weapon effects. all flak should do is detonate the shot when the range is reached and not have any effect on what gets rendered. then another tag or flag should be added that allows you to make a weapon that doesnt have a model or laser parameters.

same goes for some features of beams. such as charging and discharging, should be moved out of the beam section and into the general weapon flags. then used for any weapon. ammo and energy usage should be based on what the energy and ammo settings on the weapon say, not whether the weapon is primary or secondary or if it uses a ballistics flag. i dont see why we need ballistics flag at all, just make the code say if we have x ammor and y energy and we have enough of each, fire. we use some swarm hacks to make secondary weapons ripple fire like primaries and a cycle flag to get primaries to fire like secndaries.

i see lots of redundancy which could be removed. of course that causes other problems, like hoards of modders getting pissed cause they have to edit their tables, or reverse compatibility thumpers going nuts. so make a retail patch for the root folder to fix incompatibilities and deprecated syntax.

also did we ever get a prox flag? which instead of using the targets range from the gun, uses the shots distance to the target as the trigger. i think that would be cool.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Commander Zane on February 25, 2009, 12:26:59 pm
Actually for some reason flak has the Hornet.pof, I usually see that in the F3 viewer.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Nuke on February 25, 2009, 04:54:30 pm
yes, because volition was too lazy to do it right :D
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: asyikarea51 on February 25, 2009, 11:55:44 pm
One question, does that Detonation Range thing work in current builds, or is it still a waiting game to 3.7?

(OFT: what about $Warpin type: in 3.7? There's only BTRL and default while the 3.6.9 section has more flags to it for instance...??? :doubt:)

Just asking... but yeah it's tempting enough to have all those new flags to play with in the table XD

@ WW

Didn't know about that. I just changed blip.pof's texture. That crapboxthing's filesize smaller? Thanks for telling~ XD
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: ssmit132 on February 26, 2009, 01:55:39 am
same goes for some features of beams. such as charging and discharging, should be moved out of the beam section and into the general weapon flags. then used for any weapon.
This would be a nice feature for gatling gun weapons.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Nuke on February 26, 2009, 10:33:33 am
that already works when using weapon models, and ive said time and time again thats not how gatlings work. gatlings fire once every time a barrel passes the firing position, regaurdless of how fast theyre spining. so theres a spinup / spindown time where the gun is firing but has not reached maximum firing rate.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: ssmit132 on February 27, 2009, 01:55:54 am
Okay, for some other type of weapon that warms up, then. You shouldn't need to have a model to do it.
Title: Re: Did fighter flak weapons ever became a reality?
Post by: Nuke on February 28, 2009, 12:53:16 pm
whats gonna happen is were gonna have 20 flags that do the same thing.

keep appearance and functionality separate!