[Mav]

(1)
Well, I guess this coukd be FREDed... but it'd be great if it could be included directly in the tables instead, as it then would be a persistent part of a mod, instead of having to be FREDed for every single mission.

What I'm talking about is spawning ships upon explosions of other ships, just like with misile spawnings.

There'd be quite a some uses for this - rescue pods for capships, ejection seats for fighters, ...



So, my wishlist for this would be:

*a spawn-flag for ships that works just like the one for missiles

*specifiable player-carriage; i.e. a if player commands a larger ship (be it a cruiser or a two-man-bomber), then there has to be a way to set the ship in which the player will be transferred after the original ship was destroyed... maybe make this as attribute of one of the ship-spawn-flags, like "$flags:  (... , spawn Ra 5, spawn-player Thoth 1, ...)"

* for lifesuits, maybe a auto-decreasing health-timer (->oxygen) might make sense: do you get to your baseship to enter a new fighter, or die on the way home?

* a mission-flag "use-ship-spawning", so retail missions won't get touched should this ever enter the mediaVPs, nor should dogfights...

* ship-spawnpoints/-vectors in pof-files to indicate the points where those ships get spawned, maybe also with the starting speed and orientation already noted (though the speeds might also make sense as tbl-entries)
The numbering of the spawnpoints and the sequence in which the spawned ships/spacesuits appear in the ships.tbl would then assign what spawn on which point.




(2)
On a related note, every player should be allowed to select a player model for his pilot profile, just like the current pic and squadlogo    (and this should be able to be handled in campaigns either like multi-squadlogos or like SP-squadlogos, depending on a flag in the campaign file)   .
That way, there'd be one more level of customization & identification, and people who want to model a ship with cockpit wouldn't necessarily need to model a pilot themselves, but could just add a "pilot point" to the ship's model, where player pilot models would be attached (or maybe they could just be attached to the eyepoints of the ships).
(And, of course, I could have my Shivan pilot model "sit" in every fighter I pilot, be it Shivan, GTVA or anything else... )

To be compatible with the ship-/spacesuit-spawning, there'd need to be a "PlayerSpacesuit"-variable for the spawn-entry, that would tell the game to use the player's model there (like "..., spawn Ra 5, spawn-player (spacesuit) 1, ...").

And there'd need to be a rudimentary ship.tbl-like entry for spacesuits, to set lifetime etc. .
There maybe also should be different spacesuit-entries be allowed   (in a campaign where you play different identities, maybe a Shivan or Vasudan should still be more durable as a human... dunno about ancients or others )   , but those entries should NOT be player-selectable - i.e. I might select my Shivan pilot everywhere, and also equip it with gunpoints, but if those gunpoints can actually be used has to be decided by the creator of the respective mod.



So, what do you all think of these two ideas, and would some coder want to incorporate them into the game?

[Thaeris]

Actually...

This might be pretty cool for mods like FotG, Diaspora, WCS, or headdie and I's project. If you're about to "die," you could eject from your fighter rather than stay inside and wait for death by blasting. Of course, if you don't "last" long enough while ejected (ex.: get toasted by those [insert allegiance here] toadies whilst floating about), you'll still die.

Imaginably you'd want the pilot non-targetable by hostile ships. A safe ejection would also trigger the arrival of a support ship (if available for the mission), if one's not on the field already. The support ship plucks up the downed pilot and leaves the area... If more support is needed, a fresh vessel jumps in...

Also, you'd need to make adjustments to the AI to allow it to perform ejections. Compiling an intelligible algorithm for this might actually be more challenging than just making pilots that shoot out of exploding ships. 

[Mav]

A safe ejection would also trigger the arrival of a support ship (if available for the mission), if one's not on the field already. The support ship plucks up the downed pilot and leaves the area... If more support is needed, a fresh vessel jumps in...

Well, I rather thought that the spacesuit would have a limited (=slow) flight capability, and you'd need to make your way to some friendly base or capship in the area.

But for the cases where there is none, your idea is a good addition .

[karajorma]

Me dislikes ejection.

[Thaeris]

Understandable to the utmost degree.

Frankly, I don't think any of the current major projects are even in a position to consider that function actively... there are more pressing matters to attend to.

And headdie and myself don't have much to show as of this point, either...

[chief1983]

Actually, my friend was working on porting EVE Online models to FSO, and had made some good progress.  But having pods jettison would be a must for the largers ships.  It's a key element of EVE (being pod'd that is)

[Nuke]

this would come in handy for my eventual bridge simulation mod ide awould be you command the main ship, but could walk to the fighter bay hop in a fighter and join the battle. id make it so the player could override any ai in the mission with sexp, script function or debug cheat command. in fact i think that the player should be independant of any particular ship at all. my idea for my own engine would be that the ship class contains a pointer to an ai class and that player would be a type of ai. i dont know if freespace works like that so i wouldnt really know if the idea works at all.

in the past i had suggested the idea to place a custom pilot model at the eyepoint. so that you could interchange vasudan pilots with terran pilots and also let players model their own pilot models and share them in multiplayer. but since everyone was already modeling pilots into their cockpit models it wasnt a very popular idea. another idea is to model the player body with its head as a subobject, that way the player could look like his head was moving, could be bound to the players view angle (where hes looking with his view controls) or to always face his target. but its not like something youd ever realy see.

[Mav]

in the past i had suggested the idea to place a custom pilot model at the eyepoint. so that you could interchange vasudan pilots with terran pilots and also let players model their own pilot models and share them in multiplayer. but since everyone was already modeling pilots into their cockpit models it wasnt a very popular idea. another idea is to model the player body with its head as a subobject, that way the player could look like his head was moving, could be bound to the players view angle (where hes looking with his view controls) or to always face his target. but its not like something youd ever realy see.

Well, the idea is at least popular to me, as stated above...

[Nuke]

better cockpit features is something ive been working on for a long time. but i think a lot more needs to be done at the engine level that in scripting. integrating them with the new cockpit models feature would be a good start, you need to allow for submodel animations to simulate button presses and flight controls in the cockpit models (maye even make them mouse operable). mfds would be rendered to texture, requiring some script level texture replacement for those models. then you could have highly detailed highly functional cockpits like you have in most flight sims, without slowing the game down too much.

[IronBeer]

Actually, my friend was working on porting EVE Online models to FSO, and had made some good progress.  But having pods jettison would be a must for the largers ships.  It's a key element of EVE (being pod'd that is)

I apologize in advance for the slight derail, but might I ask why your friend is porting EVE models?

[chief1983]

He wanted to make an EVE mod for FS.  Think he got stalled on that though.