[Thaeris]

The Stellar Assault team has encountered a new set of problems...

...For one of our weapons, we need to disable auto-aim. Preferably, what would happen would be this:

When the given weapon is armed, that weapon would have an auto-aim/convergence over-ride value found in the weapons table itself, not the ships table. This would enable any weapon with a specified over-ride value to automatically set to that desired cone of fire independent of the auto-aim/convergence value set in the main ships table.

As I see it, there are two ways of doing this:

(a.) Set a multiplier value attached to the enabling flag which would change the given ship's auto-aim FOV for the given weapon only. For instance, if a ship has a default auto-aim FOV in the ships table of 15 degrees, and a given weapon is supposed to only have half of any ship's auto-aim as specified in the ships table, the tabler would enter a value of 0.5 for that weapon in that weapon's table. To disable auto-aim, a value of zero could be entered.

(b.) Set a general over-ride value for the weapon. Again, this is only for the given weapon. To illustrate, an over-ride value of 60 is entered, and thus that weapon has an auto-aim field of view of 60 degrees when the weapon is armed, thus ignoring the default value entered in the ships table.

[Thaeris]

*Double-post for great justice...

I'd like to at least get some discussion for this to start moving along - are there any other mods out there that might make use of this feature? I'm sure FotG could use this utility for some weapons...

[Dragon]

It could be usefull for atmospheric flight mods.

[chief1983]

Actually I tend to consider auto-aim to be more of a ship property.  Weapons themselves are stupid and going to shoot wherever you point them, it's up to the ship to aim them accordingly.  So I don't even see the correctness in overriding auto-aim at a weapon level.

[headdie]

Actually I tend to consider auto-aim to be more of a ship property.  Weapons themselves are stupid and going to shoot wherever you point them, it's up to the ship to aim them accordingly.  So I don't even see the correctness in overriding auto-aim at a weapon level.

while I can see your point for the majority of scenarios I can also imagine scenarios where a modder wants certain weapons to be effective at different ranges e.g. plasma weapons for close range and lasers for long range.  if your craft has widely spaced firing points you have the problem that if you set a mid range convergence cone on the fighter you can have the problem that 1 or more of the laser blasts could miss because they have separated out by the time the weapon meets the target and the plasma will have the same miss issue because the shots haven't converged properly, if you set the cone to one extreme or the other then yes the weapons working at that range will work as desired but the remaining weapons could easily be rendered nearly useless, it would certainly reduce their effectiveness.  yes you can use auto convergence but if the modder has decided the weapon convergence can't be adjusted mid mission then that's out and by the looks of it from thaeris's post in the universe they are converting from it is a limitation imposed on them by the universe as set up by the original creators so disregarding this would change the feel of the mod away from what they are emulating.

[chief1983]

So use converging auto-aim, it will adjust the convergence no matter the range of the target.  Use weapon ranges to define how effective a weapon is at different ranges when it does hit.  I would like to have selectable convergences, but that's still more of a ship thing.

I have wanted to have a way to allow the user to toggle the auto-aiming, allowing them to fallback on static convergence or no convergence at all.  But that would be up to the user, not the weapon.  Might still help you though.

[headdie]

Actually I tend to consider auto-aim to be more of a ship property.  Weapons themselves are stupid and going to shoot wherever you point them, it's up to the ship to aim them accordingly.  So I don't even see the correctness in overriding auto-aim at a weapon level.

while I can see your point for the majority of scenarios I can also imagine scenarios where a modder wants certain weapons to be effective at different ranges e.g. plasma weapons for close range and lasers for long range.  if your craft has widely spaced firing points you have the problem that if you set a mid range convergence cone on the fighter you can have the problem that 1 or more of the laser blasts could miss because they have separated out by the time the weapon meets the target and the plasma will have the same miss issue because the shots haven't converged properly, if you set the cone to one extreme or the other then yes the weapons working at that range will work as desired but the remaining weapons could easily be rendered nearly useless, it would certainly reduce their effectiveness.  yes you can use auto convergence but if the modder has decided the weapon convergence can't be adjusted mid mission then that's out and by the looks of it from thaeris's post in the universe they are converting from it is a limitation imposed on them by the universe as set up by the original creators so disregarding this would change the feel of the mod away from what they are emulating.

apologies about the lack of punctuation there 

[chief1983]

It still sounds like you're wanting more ways to set up a ship's convergences, which I'm fine with, but it just seems semantically incorrect to want them to be set at a weapon level.

[Nuke]

i think he wants to set it up at either the ship or the weapon level. if a weapon auto aims by default then it should ignore the ship's autoaim settings, however if the hardpoints are ginballed then any weapon you stick there will autoaim. of course you might not want autoaim to effect heavier weapons for banece reasons, so you might also want to be able to exclude autoaim for certain weapons, even if the ship's hardpoints would otherwise autoaim. confusing but it makes sense to me.

if i were to do anything with autoaim id make the guns not instantly snap to their target, but gradually lock on like it did in starlancer. the way starlancer did it was totally awesome. it would display a crosshair on the hud indicating the current target vector. 

[chief1983]

I understand what _he_ wants to do, I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to me to do it that way.  Weapons that don't shoot where they're pointed?  That's just strange.  What weapon itself has inherent autoaim?  I'm not aware of a primary that doesn't shoot in a straight line.

[headdie]

at the same time how do you do it from the ship table point of view without adding to the table some means of adding individual convergence values to each possible compatible weapon that needs it on each ship?

where as in the weapons table you add the range or modifier value once to each weapon which makes consistency easier across the many ship classes that could use the weapon and it dont matter if the ship if fredded with a weapon not in its allowd list because the information is already there in the weapons table to make it work

yes I know the convergence is set by the ship in "the real world" but I think for sanity's sake this is one of those times when separating "physical reality" from the game engine is the better option.

[Thaeris]

Perhaps this is a better position, then:

Would it be possible to adjust the convergence/auto-aim on a per-bank basis?

Such an option wouldn't touch the weapons table, though it might seemingly require a reconfiguration of the present ships table. Thus, a certain bank might have an FOV of 30 degrees and a given set of auto-convergence parameters, while another has an FOV of 10 degrees and a different set of convergence parameters.

Otherwise, you might consider a system where a flag is added to a primary weapons bank which would provide an auto-aim/convergence override (with respect to the standard ship auto-aim and convergence), where the bank-specific values could be added afterwards for FOV and convergence. This option would probably be the least invasive chage to make, though if your ship has only two primary banks, one would hope the tabler would have enough common sense to apply the override flag to only one bank, not both.

[Quanto]

The issue is this guys.
Stellar Assault has VERY specific type of weapon.
Its called the Atomic Blast, and when it hits a capital ship, it does MASSIVE DAMAGE (Giant Crab Style). Only one fighter carries this weapon, the Feather 2.
At first we had it set up as a Missile with only 4 units of ammo. But in the game's Fluff/Pseudo-Engineering, its not actually a Missile, more like a highly concentrated/charged up version of the default PBW. When fired, it should drain the Primary energy bank completely.

In the 32x Game, this weapon would fire in a straight line and never deviate, and it never had any aim assistance. If you missfired, your loss. And that is how we would like to have it set up in FSO.

Unfortunately, because Auto-aim is universal for ALL  primaries, we had to make it a missile, which doesn't drain any energy at all.
Very lame imo.
That is the reason for this feature request. Whether you see a reason for it or not, we do have a reason for it. And we could really use some support on the issue.

[General Battuta]

Use scripting or put an event in every mission where the missile is available that sets ship weapon energy to 0 every time it's fired.

Problem solved.

edit: except totally not

[chief1983]

I'm supporting you coming up with a means for the request that could make more sense and benefit more than one mod.  It sounds like having the ability to control auto-aim per bank would also work.  I'm assuming this ship has other primaries that do have autoaim ability?

[The E]

I can see the feature appeal.

Quanto, what you are looking for looks to me like a new flag in weapons.tbl that basically says "Disable weapon convergence/autoaim for this weapon only". Would that be a correct description?

[Quanto]

Yes! Yes exactly! Thank you, E.

[Kusanagi]

I personally like the idea of being able to set autoaim/converge on a per bank basis. That would be quite incredible and I can think of a lot of uses for it!