[IPAndrews]

Something I just sent to Bobboau. Quite proud of it so I'm posting it here for comment .

FS2 Power System V2

Power output:

My view is that a ship's power output should be a total of a ship definable power output setting and and subsystem specific power output settings. So you can specify in the tables that a certain reactor will generate X units of power. The power output of subsystems could be linked to the damage sustained by that subsystem. More damage = less power output. You could do it in any of these ways.

a) Do periodic checks agaisnt a subsystem's damage sustained. The more damage sustained by a subsystem the more likely it is to stop producing power completely for a period of time until the next periodic check. This would result in a nice "flickering off then on" effect for ships with damaged reactors.

b) Reduce the power output of the subsystem based on damage sustained. So 50% damage 50% power output.

c) A combination of the two.

Power distribution:

There are three different power networks.

1. A power network for engines and subsystems such as sensors, navigation, communications, and actually the "weapons" subsystem which I think of as a ship's fire control computer. In fact that's how volition treat it (fire less accurate if destroyed).

2. A power network for shields.

3. A power network for primary and turret weapons.
 
Every turn a ship's power output (specified by $Power_Output for ship and specific subsystems) is shared amongst the power networks based on the ship's engines/shields/gun distribution settings, or in the case of a capship just 33%/33%/33%.

When power goes into a power network it initially goes into a battery. Specified by $Engine_Battery: $Shield_Battery: $Weapons_Battery: . Any power that can't go into a battery (maybe there isn't a battery entry in the table!) is simply made "immediately available" to systems on the network. This immediately available power will be used first by systems in preference to battery power, and is wasted at the end of every turn if not used.

Power usage:

In the tables subsystems can all be given power usage value. Although this value doesn't make sense for turrets. Since turrets only use power when they fire (or in the case of beams constantly as they are firing).

Every turn subsystems use power from the appropriate power network. Immediately available power first, then battery power. In the order that the subsystems appear in the table.

For backward compatability only subsystems that have a $Power_Usage: value will use power, and only turrets with a uses_power flag will only fire if there is enough power to cover their weapon power requirement as specified in weapons.tbl . So you need to add table entries to enable this.

Destroyed subsystems should not use energy.

Power shortage:

Power shortage for different subsystems on a ship will affect the ship differently. But generally speaking it should be the same kind of effect as if the system was destroyed (not functioning). Maybe systems with only part power should work some of the time and not others. A periodic check type thing as with a) in the power output section. Might result in all kinds of fun effects. Like engines or HUD guages flickering on and off. Would look cool :-).

[Trivial Psychic]

It might also do well to have the ship's power status tied to an actual "reactor" subsystem.  Therefore if the subsystem is knocked out, you have a no-power situation.  As a fighter you can run on internal batteries (as IPA proposed), until a support ship comes in to fix you up.  Its possible that the battery is only sufficient to maintain life support and comm systems, so its like being disabled and disarmed with no shields.  As for tables, we have seen ships in FS_retail that have a "reactor" subsystem, the Moloch, so a special subsystem flag would tell the engine to look tie the new power output to that subsystem.  The use of a subsystem flag would also allow the moder to use a different name for the reactor subsystem, like "generator" or something.  So, you have:

$Power_Output: 5.5 ;; the new one

and

$subsystem:  Reactor, 5, 0.0
$flags: ("makes power") ;; or something like that

This would also allow a ship to have more than one reactor **cough**Lucifer**cough**.  The amount of the total power that each reactor produces would be based on its subsystem strength.  For exmple, if a ship has 3 reactors, with one having a subsystem strength of 6, and the other 2 having strength of 2, that means that the stronger reactor would be producing 60% of the ship's total power, and the other 2 would be producing 20% each.  As these subsystems are dammaged or destroyed, the ship's total power available would drop.

[Bobboau]

ok, how's this,

we go with option 'b'.

$Power_Output: is the ship's base power output, and has no effect from reactors.

for each subsystem, we have a
$Power_Output:
+Shield: #.#
+Weapon: #.#
+Engine: #.#

these can have negitive values (as you would put to simulate consumption in an engine subsystem), the damage a subsystem has sustained would scale the value in the table. think of it as the net energy of this subsystem.

we add in a weapon energy tag for turrets, wich gets refilled based on how many turrets there are, and maybe a weighting value.

[IPAndrews]

It might also do well to have the ship's power status tied to an actual "reactor" subsystem. 

That's the beauty of my proposed system Triv. You simply give your ship a power output of 0 and your reactor subsystem a power output of whatever. So once the reactor is destroyed your ships's power output drops to 0.

[TrashMan]

Why complicate things?

Simply have the total power output distributed in the ETS. It makes little sense to have a specific subsystem churn out more power for shields but less for engines. Power is power - where you lead it to is another matter.

Alltough having a reduced power output when the fighter is damaged sounds good. The only thing is that fighters don't have a reactor subsystem, and adding it would require to edit each fighter in PCS.

You could tie output power with engines, since they are directly tied to the rector (FUSION drive technology). I don't recall disabled fighters shooting anyway. Thus, for fighters engines would be part of hte reacotr and thus, engines at 50% = reactor at 50%.

[IPAndrews]

Simply have the total power output distributed in the ETS. It makes little sense to have a specific subsystem churn out more power for shields but less for engines. Power is power - where you lead it to is another matter.

I agree with you TrashMan. As in my long wordy proposal. Generate a total power and share it out between the 3 power networks according to ETS.

The actual existance of the 3 power networks at all is intended to make things easier to code. I would be just as happy with one power network. That is one pool of immediately available power and battery. But to implement ETS you would have to earmark a certain percentage of that power network to each of the 3 major groups of systems. At that point it just becomes easier to treat it as three different networks.

With 3 networks you also get the added (useless?) bonus of being able to have a different battery size for each network.

Alltough having a reduced power output when the fighter is damaged sounds good. The only thing is that fighters don't have a reactor subsystem, and adding it would require to edit each fighter in PCS.

Backward compatability. You don't want to force this on people. It would actually require a reactor system and table entries to support it.

You could tie output power with engines, since they are directly tied to the rector (FUSION drive technology). I don't recall disabled fighters shooting anyway. Thus, for fighters engines would be part of hte reacotr and thus, engines at 50% = reactor at 50%.

I thought that might be quite difficult to code .

[TrashMan]

Simply have the total power output distributed in the ETS. It makes little sense to have a specific subsystem churn out more power for shields but less for engines. Power is power - where you lead it to is another matter.

I agree with you TrashMan. As in my long wordy proposal. Generate a total power and share it out between the 3 power networks according to ETS.

The actual existance of the 3 power networks at all is intended to make things easier to code. I would be just as happy with one power network. That is one pool of immediately available power and battery. But to implement ETS you would have to earmark a certain percentage of that power network to each of the 3 major groups of systems. At that point it just becomes easier to treat it as three different networks.

With 3 networks you also get the added (useless?) bonus of being able to have a different battery size for each network.

As I recall, fighters allready have weapon and afterburner power storage... shields don't have them as they can't go over their max and that extra power is transfered to re-charge rate anyway.

Alltough having a reduced power output when the fighter is damaged sounds good. The only thing is that fighters don't have a reactor subsystem, and adding it would require to edit each fighter in PCS.

Backward compatability. You don't want to force this on people. It would actually require a reactor system and table entries to support it.

Yup. That's why I said it would be a bad idea.

You could tie output power with engines, since they are directly tied to the rector (FUSION drive technology). I don't recall disabled fighters shooting anyway. Thus, for fighters engines would be part of hte reacotr and thus, engines at 50% = reactor at 50%.

I thought that might be quite difficult to code .

[/quote]

I'm no coder so I wouldn't know, but I doubt it would be really difficult.

[IPAndrews]

As I recall, fighters allready have weapon and afterburner power storage... shields don't have them as they can't go over their max and that extra power is transfered to re-charge rate anyway.

Fighters (all ships I presume in the code) have power storage for primary weapons only and afterburners only. This is very different from my weapons and engines power networks which are intended to serve multiple systems.

The implementation of both existing guages is a bit hacky as it stands but you are right, they need to be taken into account :-). I cannot think of any neat way to tie them into the existing system.

So (ship definable):

$Afterburner_Battery_Recharge: (draining from the engine network)
$Afterburner_Battery_Capacity:
$Primary_Battery_Recharge: (draining from the weapons network)
$Primary_Battery_Capacity:

 

[Bobboau]

I'd rather not deal with adding much in the way of 'bateries' it makes things a bit more like a physics simulation, wich inherently are complex, besides they already exsist for the most part, so we don't need to add another layer of power storage. I'd be willing to give turrets a local power storage, beause that would make them more like normal weapon systems.

[IPAndrews]

I just figured if you have to have the code there for one thing, make it available for everything.

[TrashMan]

I just tried the power output build..it ain't working.
The game chrashes when I commit to a mission.

Oh yeah, and I et a ton or warinings and errors about primary banks and ballistic flag.. WTF? Has anything been changed there? My entry is as it sez in the Wiki...

[redsniper]

Hmmm... Having batteries could create some nice frantic situations. Say for some reason or another your reactor gets knocked out (some new kind of missile, or maybe sabatoge) and then you've only got a couple minutes of power left to try and fight off whoever's around you. You could even have a little timer pop up to show you how much time is left until you're hosed.

[Mongoose]

Great...FS2 goes Evangelion.

[redsniper]

Yeah, I'll admit that's exactly what I was thinking of, but you can't say it wouldn't be cool.

[TrashMan]

Say, will this be in 3.7.0.  ????