[Akalabeth Angel]

In type 3 beams (AAAf), what determines the delay between the firing of the beams?
Is it simply something like warmup, beamlife, warmup, beamlife, warmup, beamlife, cooldown. Fire Wait warmup, beamlife . etcetera?
Is it possible to make a type 3 beam, with a lifetime longer than the delay between firing such that any one weapon will have 2+ beams firing from it at any one time?

IE:

Shot 1 Fires (1 total firing)
Shot 2 Fires (2 total)
Shot 3 Fires (3 total)
Shot 1 Ends (2 total)
Shot 2 Ends (1 total)
Shot 3 Ends (none firing)

    EDIT: Nevermind all that anyway, I wanted the beam to fire at a ship and I just remembered that type 3 beams don't burst fire at ships anyway just fighters so it's fairly useless.

[Akalabeth Angel]

   Can a person make a multipart turret, and limit the rotational ability of both the turret itself and the arm??

   Or let me ask something even more specific. Can a person make a multi-part turret, where the turret body doesn't actually rotate. And the turret arm has very limited rotation??

[Akalabeth Angel]

      Grrr, is something screwy with the firing points in Freespace????
      Okay, so I made a ship:



      And yes, I know what you'll say:  "Akalabeth, that is just too damn sexy. I need it for my Campaign." or perhaps  "I like it, but you really need to tone down the greebles" or some others may say  "I am in awe with the dazzling spectacle of polygons".
      But before any of you say that, no . . I won't release it. I just made some ugly, RL-esque ship to try and test out some weapon ideas to see if they're feasible or not.
   
      All kidding aside. To give some background, in Renegade Legion the ships have so-called "Bays" of lasers which range from 10-100 weapons (usually 10, 25, 50 or 100 I think). These bays are primarily ship-to-ship, with some limited AAF ability which I didn't  bother with. So I thought I'd try to see if this sort of thing was at all feasible.

      So I made this ship, added 3 non-rotating turrets and to one of the turret I added 50 firepoints (and 50 lights).
      First thing I thought was, well . . . beams would be really cool. So I tried the AAAf and increased the number of firings to 50. Then I remembered that Class 3 beams firing as Class 0 beams against ships so that wasn't doable. I also tried to see if I could put a Swarm Flag into a "Beam" weapon, and FRED accepted it (ie didnt complain on startup). But then it totally ignored the $Swarm line (naturally). One other idea might be to give multiple fire-beam commands to one beam turret, but that's not really feasible to do for every ship and every mission. Would be rather retarded to say the least.

      So instead I tried the Lucifer solution. I simply grabbed some Swarm code from TBP, and basically plugged in a missile with a trail simulating the laser (and set the Swarm to 50). And it works . . . sort of and sort of not. The weapon will work exactly as I want it to for like the first 10 fire points, but then it like ignores the rest of the fire points and seems to fire from the ship's centre of mass???? What the heck???  (yeah, I didnt set the centre of mass to anywhere within the ship)  I did notice as maximum firepoints of like 63 according to MODView . . . but at 50 I'm well under that. Though of course it's well over any FS2-norm. ModView or PCS1 said the FS2 code does have problems with multiple firepoints . . .

      Something else was also crazy. Sometimes, the volley of fire would be fired in the opposite direction of the normal into open space (ie no targets that direction). I even made some wierd model with a multi-turret instead and it still did the same thing (my turret btw was technically "ontop" not sidemounted, despite the side location. As Karajama's tutorial indicates that side turrets dont work for some reason). And very rarely, the fire would basically go on a perpendicular direction (directly aft). I dunno what the hell's going on. But here's some screens to illustrate:





      Also note, that I put the firepoints _just_ outside the turrets. Along with the lights. I'm not sure if this was correct or not:




Data for my weapon:

$Name:                        RL_Swarm
$Model File:                  harbinger.pof
$Mass:                        2.5
$Velocity:                    650.0
$Fire Wait:                   5.0
$Damage:                      40
$Armor Factor:                1.0
$Shield Factor:               1.0
$Subsystem Factor:            0.5
$Lifetime:                    2.708
$Energy Consumed:             0.30
$Cargo Size:                  0.0
$Homing:                      NO
$Swarm:                       50
+SwarmWait:                   0.1
$LaunchSnd:                   162
$ImpactSnd:                   85
+Weapon Range:                1600
$Flags:                       ("Big Ship" "Huge" "cycle")
$Trail:                                                                             
   +Start Width:            0.25                                           
   +End Width:            0.75                                           
   +Start Alpha:      1.0
   +End Alpha:      0.0
   +Max Life:                          3.5                                             
   +Bitmap:                                MissileTrail01                 
$Icon:                                  iconmissile08
$Anim:                                  LoadMissile06
$Impact Explosion:              exp20
$Impact Explosion Radius:       10.0

[Vasudan Admiral]

Errm, well when trying to do something crazy like that, you should probably expect things to not work very well.

Your problem however looks like it's that FS has a maximum turret firepoint limit of 3 per turret (4 for missile turrets). As such....50 won't work.

By the looks of it though the game was actually using well over 4 firing points given that only one turret had that many points, so I presume the SCP has bumped that limit somwhere along the line. Not sure really.

Run a debug build and see if it reports any particular limit breaches, but I think it's most likely you'll just have to get around it by making more turret subobjects each with the maximum effective FP count.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Errm, well when trying to do something crazy like that, you should probably expect things to not work very well.

Your problem however looks like it's that FS has a maximum turret firepoint limit of 3 per turret (4 for missile turrets). As such....50 won't work.

By the looks of it though the game was actually using well over 4 firing points given that only one turret had that many points, so I presume the SCP has bumped that limit somwhere along the line. Not sure really.

Run a debug build and see if it reports any particular limit breaches, but I think it's most likely you'll just have to get around it by making more turret subobjects each with the maximum effective FP count.

     Okay yeah I ran the debug and it complained about too many firing points. Boo.
     Oh well, hope for the best, expect the worst.
     It seems that the game can handle 10 firing points. So maybe the so-called bays could be split into groups of 10 or less. I might try another model with like . . . 5-6 turrets with 10 each and see if that works.

     Still don't know why it was firing in the opposite direction . .. maybe a side effect of being screwed up to begin with.

[Wanderer]

#define MAX_TFP 10 // maximum number of turret firing points

[Akalabeth Angel]

      One thing I dont understand . . . even though I've made a few turrets, they don't register as turrets when you try to target them. Like, if I shoot at a turret . . .it doesn't explode. Instead, all of the "turrets" persay are located at one point underside the hull. And if I shoot that one point I'll eventually kill all the turrets. I don't understand it.

      To reiterate: So like there's a box, on the side of my ship with a legal number of firepoints. And it shoots crap out of those firepoints. But in order to damage it, I have to shoot a totally unrelated point in space on the ship. Which coincidentally is the same point in space where everything else is on the ship (weapon subsystem and 8 turrets).


      I thought it was related to the eye points, but the [V] Fenris has the eyepoints everywhere (whereas the TBP Hyperion had them on each turret itself). So I don't really understand what's going on. Am I doing something wrong? Or is modelview?

     EDIT: Partial Success, as you can see I split the 50 FP turret into 6x 10 FP turrets. And they more/less do what I want them to. Except that only 4 turrets fire at any one time. I think it's because of the aforementioned problem with all my turrets occupy the same space for damage-taking purposes. I'm guessing this because the 4 turrets that fire aren't always the same ones, and sometimes will alternate during the course of a test mission. . . . but yeah, starting off modding is a pain in the butt until you know what the engine/programs can and can't do.