[IPAndrews]

Is there some way of preventing fighter beams from vaporizing fighters and bombers?

eg:

I have some nice Vorlon Fighters armed with some pretty heavy type 4 fighter beams and they are firing at some 100m long Shadow Scout vessels which due to AI limitations have had to be given the "bomber" flag.

When a Vorlon Fighter's beam destroys a Shadow Scout it does not do the normal explosion. Instead the ship just vanishes and the game throws out a few very small pieces of generic debris. This is clearly meant for very small ships and looks rather stupid when a 100m ship is destroyed. I need to be able to turn it off for the Shadow Scout.

[DaBrain]

I'd like to disable that even in standard FS2. I don't like this 'feature' at all...

[FireCrack]

I think it makes sens for capship beams, for fighter beams it would be best just to have an instant "Normal" death without all that spinning around first.

[aldo_14]

I don't think it's really needed for either type, to be honest; it wouldn't break balance anyways.  Perhaps introducing a 'no vapourize' flag for weapons or ships, albiet i don't know if that's too trivial a change for using up another flag space.

EDIt; either type as neither needs to vapourize the ship

[IPAndrews]

Originally posted by FireCrack
I think it makes sens for capship beams, for fighter beams it would be best just to have an instant "Normal" death without all that spinning around first.

I agree to an extent. If a small fighter is whacked by a BFGreen then it probably makes sense for the thing to be wiped out with no explosion and just a few very small chunks of debris. It's not very B5 though and it doesn't look very good in the case above.

[FireCrack]

No explosion eh? Seems it's relying on the beam impact explosion, "vaporising ships" should put out an explosion graphic too.

Heck, i dont even think vaporisation should be just "beams vaporise". It should be changed to, "If a weapon does x times the amount of total HP of a fighter/bomber, then vaporise it"

[IPAndrews]

You know, that would actually work rather nicely.

[aldo_14]

Either that, or spawn off the debris in all cases, but in a vapourise the debris explodes afterwards (which would at least make a more significant - or rather group of - explosion)

[IPAndrews]

Originally posted by aldo_14
Either that, or spawn off the debris in all cases

Some people may like the original vaporize effect with just the little bits of generic debris though. So it's probably worth giving the user a choice. Incidentally I did notice a ship-no-vaporize sexp in one of the newer FRED builds. Didn't seem to make any difference when I used it on the Shadow Scouts though. Still got vaporized.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by IPAndrews


Some people may like the original vaporize effect with just the little bits of generic debris though. So it's probably worth giving the user a choice. Incidentally I did notice a ship-no-vaporize sexp in one of the newer FRED builds. Didn't seem to make any difference when I used it on the Shadow Scouts though. Still got vaporized.

Well, I was thinking that the only difference would be a slightly larger explosion, and that you saw it break up a wee bit before the debris exploded.

[Blaise Russel]

Originally posted by IPAndrews


Some people may like the original vaporize effect with just the little bits of generic debris though. So it's probably worth giving the user a choice. Incidentally I did notice a ship-no-vaporize sexp in one of the newer FRED builds. Didn't seem to make any difference when I used it on the Shadow Scouts though. Still got vaporized.

Vaporize SEXP determines whether a capship does its slow, slow, slow 'death animation' - that is, all the little explosions that culminate in a big explosion that breaks the ship into pieces - or just blow up quickly, I believe.

So, uh, yeah, I don't think those are the SEXPs you're looking for (if at all).

[Taristin]

How about we just do the inverse of this, and allow blob turrets to vaporize fighters?

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by Raa
How about we just do the inverse of this, and allow blob turrets to vaporize fighters?

TVWP?

[karajorma]

This is a little hackish and I'm not 100% certain it would work but for the time being you might want to try this

When
-<
--hits-left
---shadow scout 1
--2
-change-class
--Shadow BattleCrab
--shadow scout 1
-change-model
--Shadow Scout
--Shadow Scout 1
-Sabotage-subsystem
--Shadow Scout 1
--hull
--10

Not tried it but if I'm thinking correctly that little hack will change the scouts AI class to whatever the battlecrabs is (presumably not bomber) but yet keep the model as a scout. After doing that it inflicts an extra percentage worth of damage to the ship so that it blows up (Just give the scout a few more HP to make up for that 1%)

Preferably you want to use the class of a ship as close to the scout as possible that isn't using the bomber AI class.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by Black Wolf
TVWP?

It wasn't initially, but you gave me an idea...

[Bobboau]

is the beam 'huge' ?

[IPAndrews]

Yes the beam is huge. These little things need to be able to chop up battlecrabs. Presumably since you're mentioning it that's part of the problem.

[Bobboau]

it's suposed to be that the huge flag on the beam and the lack of any sort of big ship flag on the ship is requiered for vaporiseation.

although it is posable, it never got commited or someone removed it.