[Trivial Psychic]

I've asked about model pathing before, but that was for attack paths (got no reply though).  I'm currently pathing the Ja'Dul Narn space station for TBP, and I'm setting up the docking points and paths for that model.  It's got 3 dockpoints that are designed for cap-ship docking, but depending on which type of ship is docking to it, it needs to use a different docking approach path (so that different parts of different ships, won't ram into the side of the station during the approach).  I noticed that you can have more than one spline path for a dockpoint, so I was hoping to use this to assign the different paths that are needed for each type.  Now, there are a few problems to begin with.  The first and not least of which, is that you cannot give a cap-ship AI a dock order (either by the player, or in FRED).  Fortunately, when custom classes are implimented, this problem can be overcome.  Next, there's no way to assign a docking ship to use a specific path, so when multiple paths are available to the AI, will it simply chose the one that starts the closest to it?  And now we come, of course, to the obligatory feature request.  Could the ai-dock command be altered to allow the FREDder to designate a specific spline path?  It would be an optional, additional data entry.

when
-true
-add-goal
-NRS G'Tok
-ai-dock
--Quadrant 14 Station
--capship dock
--Big Dock 01
--89
--1 (optional, numeric sequence of paths, possibly starting with "0")

Later!

[Spicious]

I would also like to see this sort of thing added, so that paths could be specifically designed for docking or undocking and also for the flexibility of dockpoint paths from different directions.

[Trivial Psychic]

Well, it seems that FSO handles multiple docking paths, the same way it handles multiple bay paths.  Unless there are 2 ships trying to dock to the same dockpoint at the same time (not gonna happen obviously), then the docking ship will chose the first numberical path associated with that dockpoint.

[StratComm]

I'd actually suspect an even less flexable approach if you haven't actually tried docking multiple things at once.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it's hard-coded to only look at that first path, regardless of what may be in the POF itself.

That said, there's no reason you couldn't put multiple dockpoints in the same physical location with different paths associated with them.  Then you could match the docking ship to the appropriate dock, rather than trying to remember which path index you should be using.

[Trivial Psychic]

Now THERE's an Idea!