If you stick around long enough they'll probably slap an SCP avatar on you. You should also take a look at Kazan's Ferrium. There hasn't been much happening there in recent months, but I don't think it had even started when you were here last.
Its good about the asteroid thing, though the SCP guys may request that you make it disabled by default. After all, since Retail turrets didn't shoot at asteroids, it'd break missions like "Rebels and Renegades" where you've got to protect the Iceni from Vasudans and asteroids. The audio says that the gunners on the Iceni will help out in destroying asteroids, but they don't. Allowing them to fire on the asteroids would make the mission too easy. This fix isn't something that could be enabled by a command line, mission flag, or on an individual ship basis like as part of the initial status list is it? That way the FREDer can decide if he wants cap-ship A to fire on asteroids, but cap-ship B to focus all its fire on hostile vessels.
You may be interested to hear that Bob has develloped support for destroyable, non-targettable submodels, with additional support for sub-object animations (and we're not talking .ani here). He says that sub-object movements (ie, movement other than those based on rotation) may be somewhere on the horizon, allowing things like recoil for turret barrels. These are not yet in CVS, but they've been getting quite
of attention. We've also had quite
of hi-poly versions of cannon ships being released, and even more on the digital drawing board. There's also been Lightspeed's texture upgrades to support alpha-environment mapping and animated glowmaps for certain ships. Taylor also implimented an alternative format for .ani, in the form of .eff as a collection of pcx, jpg, or dds files strung in sequence, which has sprung some new effects in the media VPs for 3.6.5.
Here's hoping you stick around a little more this time around, and welcome back to the neighbourhood.
Later!
