[Hippo]

Whats the current subobject limit? And are there any other limits that would affect the number of turrets a ship could have?

[StratComm]

There's a max-rotating-subobject limit, which includes turrets.  I can't remember if it's 12 objects or 12 turrets (counting the barrels seperately vs with the turret) but otherwise that's the only limit I'm aware of.  Other than the ~100 subobject limit per ship, that is.

[Starman01]

You sure about that ? We had a running model on pre 3.6 which
had 34 rotating multipart-turrets and was working fine.

It's now not working anymore, because it has too many textures
and is no longer HT&L-compatibel, but I can't imagine that you guys
reduced the subobject-limit .

[StratComm]

They'll still fire, but won't rotate.  There have been a couple of builds with the limit removed, but I'm not sure if it's made it into the main tree.

[Hippo]

I'll post a simple example to the dilemma:

a Super Star Destroyer has over a thousand turrets. To be limited to a number of even 100, makes them all too spread out to do just about anything...

[StratComm]

There's where Freespace and Star Wars inherently conflict.  In star wars each of those turrets shoots a laser, which by itself isn't very powerful.  It's the fact that there are thousands of them flying around at any given time that makes them dangerous.  The problem with the freespace engine is that it renders each subobject as its own model, and nothing can real-time render 1000+ objects and hope to maintain decent framerates, especially not with all of the render passes the SCP goes through.  Freespace also tracks a lot more info on turrets than you'd want with a thousand of them on a ship, again with an overhead issue.  What you'd need is something that could act like a turret but without either geometry or system strength, like a gunpoint but independently firing and tracking.

[Hippo]

true, but even a few turbolasers are enough to take down a fighter, and in this case, there won't be enough turrets to track a fighter as it moves...

[magatsu1]

would adding turret shaped obj. to the main Lod, then adding firing points not do the trick (sort of pesudo turrets) ?

[Hippo]

apparently not, since gunpoints have to be looking strait forward, and any turret has to be a subobject, no matter how big or small...

[KARMA]

he's saying to add multiple firing points to the turrett, so there will be a FOV, and the turrett subobject will be more like a turrett control rather than a turrett itself.
Problem is that IIRC the firing points can't fire simultaneously, there's a limit of firing points (which I don't remember) and they will all fire against one target at anytime.
BTW we have a ~100 turrett limit, guess we'll have to live with that, unless some coders will find a solution, but we all know that they don't like to put their hands on the turrett code...