[Kiloku]

When you fly a bomber with a turret, is there any way to choose the behavior of the turret? It seems like it will only shoot my current target, but that's not helpful if I'm trying to get a lock on an enemy capital ship while being pursued by a fighter. How would I make the turret shoot the fighter while I can keep the capship as my target?

[The E]

This is not possible in the vanilla game, you'd have to write a lua script to do it for you and expose that functionality.

[MatthTheGeek]

Improved AI profiles make bomber turrets select their target independently from pilot target. I don't remember what is the exact setting in there that triggers it though.

[Kiloku]

Ah, I wish it was an option available to the player in general. Thanks anyway.

[Black Wolf]

Isn't there an objecttypes.tbl setting that deals with this so you don't need to use scripting?

[Phantom Hoover]

as far as scripting is concerned, the bp capship command missions demonstrate that you can exercise vastly more fine control over turrets than what you're trying to do; you could just pare that stuff down

[Kiloku]

You guys are talking about developing missions, scripting, etc. I'm talking about the player being able to do that in the game whenever they feel like, as long as they're flying a bomber with a turret, as a game feature.

[Droid803]

Someone could probably write a script that you could just dump into your data folder (not that that's recommended) and would let you assign targets to your turrets in general.
There's no real reason to "hardcode" it into the engine.

[Quanto]

Hardcoding it into the engine would be a much less dirty fix however. And I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be an unpopular move.

[SypheDMar]

If it changes retail behavior by default, it would. Otherwise, I agree. I think everyone expects that to be the norm.

[Macfie]

In the files for the Fury AI there is a table that allows the turrets on a bomber to target independently.  I think it is ai-obt.tbm.

[Droid803]

Hardcoding it into the engine would be a much less dirty fix however. And I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be an unpopular move.

If it changes retail behavior by default, it would. Otherwise, I agree. I think everyone expects that to be the norm.

Well, I don't want my targetsTURRENTS shooting at whatever they please.
If I had to choose between 'my target only' and 'acquires target automatically' (read: shoots whatever the **** it wants - be it the fragile target I'm supposed to disable and not kill or a harmless cargo container which happens to be closer than the fighter shooting me that I can't quite turn around to point my guns at), I would rather have it slaved to my targeting to prevent...frustrating mishaps.

Now, if there's some more control like with a CSC script, of course I would rather have that, but that's a rather significant departure from retail behaviour. Between slaved-to-targeting (might not be useful, but at least predictable and controllable) and automatically acquired targets (still not significantly more useful, and uncontrollable) though, I would take the former over the latter.

EDIT: this is in reference to making it a built-in feature in the game engine, rather than something customizable via tbls.

[Fury]

As has been said before, use obt.tbm to make bomber turrets independet. You can then use target priority listing to control how the turret prioritizes targets. But if you want to specifically tell the turret what to do, then you need lua scripting.

[SypheDMar]

TURRENTS

No.

I agree that retail behaviour must be enabled by default. After putting actual thought into it, tbms seem to be a much better/flexible solution than hard coding.