Hard Light Productions Forums

General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Kiloku on September 13, 2013, 12:33:51 pm

Title: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Kiloku on September 13, 2013, 12:33:51 pm
When you fly a bomber with a turret, is there any way to choose the behavior of the turret? It seems like it will only shoot my current target, but that's not helpful if I'm trying to get a lock on an enemy capital ship while being pursued by a fighter. How would I make the turret shoot the fighter while I can keep the capship as my target?
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: The E on September 13, 2013, 12:42:37 pm
This is not possible in the vanilla game, you'd have to write a lua script to do it for you and expose that functionality.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 13, 2013, 12:42:49 pm
Improved AI profiles make bomber turrets select their target independently from pilot target. I don't remember what is the exact setting in there that triggers it though.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Kiloku on September 13, 2013, 05:04:27 pm
Ah, I wish it was an option available to the player in general. Thanks anyway.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Black Wolf on September 13, 2013, 05:45:01 pm
Isn't there an objecttypes.tbl setting that deals with this so you don't need to use scripting?
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Phantom Hoover on September 13, 2013, 08:20:12 pm
as far as scripting is concerned, the bp capship command missions demonstrate that you can exercise vastly more fine control over turrets than what you're trying to do; you could just pare that stuff down
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Kiloku on September 13, 2013, 08:25:31 pm
You guys are talking about developing missions, scripting, etc. I'm talking about the player being able to do that in the game whenever they feel like, as long as they're flying a bomber with a turret, as a game feature.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Droid803 on September 13, 2013, 10:41:54 pm
Someone could probably write a script that you could just dump into your data folder (not that that's recommended) and would let you assign targets to your turrets in general.
There's no real reason to "hardcode" it into the engine.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Quanto on September 17, 2013, 01:07:44 pm
Hardcoding it into the engine would be a much less dirty fix however. And I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be an unpopular move.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: SypheDMar on September 22, 2013, 04:19:57 pm
If it changes retail behavior by default, it would. Otherwise, I agree. I think everyone expects that to be the norm.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Macfie on September 22, 2013, 07:26:13 pm
In the files for the Fury AI there is a table that allows the turrets on a bomber to target independently.  I think it is ai-obt.tbm.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Droid803 on September 22, 2013, 09:49:41 pm
Hardcoding it into the engine would be a much less dirty fix however. And I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be an unpopular move.
If it changes retail behavior by default, it would. Otherwise, I agree. I think everyone expects that to be the norm.

Well, I don't want my targetsTURRENTS shooting at whatever they please.
If I had to choose between 'my target only' and 'acquires target automatically' (read: shoots whatever the **** it wants - be it the fragile target I'm supposed to disable and not kill or a harmless cargo container which happens to be closer than the fighter shooting me that I can't quite turn around to point my guns at), I would rather have it slaved to my targeting to prevent...frustrating mishaps.

Now, if there's some more control like with a CSC script, of course I would rather have that, but that's a rather significant departure from retail behaviour. Between slaved-to-targeting (might not be useful, but at least predictable and controllable) and automatically acquired targets (still not significantly more useful, and uncontrollable) though, I would take the former over the latter.

EDIT: this is in reference to making it a built-in feature in the game engine, rather than something customizable via tbls.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: Fury on September 22, 2013, 11:23:44 pm
As has been said before, use obt.tbm to make bomber turrets independet. You can then use target priority listing to control how the turret prioritizes targets. But if you want to specifically tell the turret what to do, then you need lua scripting.
Title: Re: Bomber Turrets
Post by: SypheDMar on September 23, 2013, 08:16:12 pm
TURRENTS
No.

I agree that retail behaviour must be enabled by default. After putting actual thought into it, tbms seem to be a much better/flexible solution than hard coding.