[LtNarol]

Reviving my old habit:

1. Pathing, is there a tutorial out there; a comprehensive one?

2. Also pathing, in PCS, the field labled 'Parent' under the paths section, does that refer to the submodel name for which the path is used, or the subsystem name?  If the later, does it refer to the name defined in the pof or in ships.tbl?

3. Are turret paths necessary in order for ais to attack a capitalship?

Before anyone starts screaming at me, yes I did do a search and came up with a few helpful posts, but many of my questions remained unanswered and here they are.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

In true Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently style, the answers are:

Yes, no and maybe.



Hope this helped.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by LtNarol
 3. Are turret paths necessary in order for ais to attack a capitalship?

AFAIK pathing is necessary to get AI ships to attack a cap. However if you want them to disarm or disable that ship you will need to have the pathing data done.
 AI ships can attack a subsystem without pathing data but without it they can attack the subsystem from an angle they can`t actually hit the ship from.

I doubt anyone can complain at you for asking pathing questions since I very rarely see them on this board.

[EdrickV]

You don't need paths for AI ships to try and attack/disable/disarm a ship. However, you may need them for the AI ships to actually manage to disable/disarm a ship. The AI is stupid and doesn't check to see if it can actually hit it's targeted subsystem/turret from where it currently is. That means it may try to fire through the hull to hit a subsystem/turret. The paths just tell the AI how it should approach the subsystem/turret it wants to attack. (I've tried it. Target target's target is a nice thing for seeing what an AI is trying to do if it's not obvious from just watching.)

On the other hand, paths are essential for repair ships to dock with fighters. I'm not sure if they're actually needed for regular docking, but either way they're a good thing to have.

[vadar_1]

No, you do need paths. I just found it out recently. Basically if the ship dosn't have a path, and you give an order to your wingmates to disarm/disable/destroy subsystem on that ship... *Crash*

[EdrickV]

I have tried all three tonight on a model I had built myself (for testing multi-part turrets) that has no path info at all. It did not crash when giving orders to my wingmate. The AI took out both turrets by disarm, sensors by destroy subsystem, and engines by disable. (I did have to guide it into a position where it could hit the subsystem though since I'd set the target to play dead that time so the AI fighter would just sit there and fire away, even if it was on the wrong side of the ship to hit the turret/subsystem. That did not cause any crashes. And I was using the original exe and made the mission with the original FRED2.) This was the third time I tested it, and the first time it was able to destroy them. (The other times it either destroyed the ship first because it had a low hull value and was trying to fire through the hull or it got destroyed.)

[Sesquipedalian]

No no, I think vadar meant the fighter would crash into the captial ship, not that FS2 would crash.

[EdrickV]

That wouldn't mean you had to have paths, it would mean that you have to have paths for it to work well with some models. :)Whether it would run into the ship or not depends on the ship's model, where the fighter is attacking from, and other things like that. For small, relatively simple models, crashing into the model isn't a big problem. (Only time I saw it have trouble running into the model was when I'd told it to form on my wing and flew from one side of the model to the other. And this is including my other attempts, though I didn't watch the fighter the whole time. I did watch it looping around to avoid fire and trying to attack a turret that was on the other side of the ship. Of course, said turret could attack the fighter because I'd given them 360 degree turning while I was testing it, to make sure range/line of site wasn't preventing it from firing.) If the fighter isn't under attack, it will just sit still and fire away at the ship it's attacking. Though it may move in closer to attack a subsystem then it would a turret.

[vadar_1]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
No no, I think vadar meant the fighter would crash into the captial ship, not that FS2 would crash.

no thats not what i meant, i meant it would CTD. and it did in numerous trials involving modded ships without paths.

[karajorma]

Maybe it depends on the mod?

Anyway I have used mods with no paths and they do work but they work so badly that unless you are using them ONLY as friendly ships that no one tries to disable or disarm you really should put a path on the ship.

[EdrickV]

I assume CTD means crash to desktop. I haven't experienced any crashes from giving orders to a ship (first as Pi wing then as Alpha 2, so I could edit it's loadout) to disarm/disable/destroy subsystem on a pathless ship. All three ships were modded. 2 VF's from the Robotech MOD (A VF-1J and the VF-1S Super Veritech) and my 2 turret test model. Neither the VF-1S or my model have any paths. (The VF-1S doesn't even have a docking port yet, but it's going to be replaced with a better one eventually.) Now, if you called in a support ship for the VF-1S then the game would crash. That I've seen. Other crashes could be caused by other things. If it's a crash where the program suddenly vanishes, that could be a Direct X thing. (I know I've seen that enough on my old computer, due to low HD free space.) I did have one crash, on the last attempt. That was long after the VF-1S was gone though. (I turned traitor and killed it after it had disabled the test ship. All it had, that time, were disruptors so I wanted to see if it would try and use them against me. Was playing around a bit later and hit Alt+T to disable targeting and the game crashed. Could have been low HD space (comp was giving me warnings about that earlier) and I wasn't running a "clean" test environment, so I had other stuff running that might have contributed. Again, this was after the ship had already been disabled and nearly destroyed. I also vaguely remeber testing this same thing with an old Raynor model a while ago and it didn't crash.

All this aside, for a big ship that might be attacked, you ought to make paths for stuff anyways.

[LAW ENFORCER]

And there is my main problem I have come across! The time it takes to fully path an entire ship (I made a Tactical battleship once and had it fully pathed... took about 4 hours...!!!! !!! What? For me this is really slow!)(on another note, I was going to release that ship to everyone but a couple or erros slowed me down ad I forgot about it... )

[LtNarol]

more stupid questions:

4. should turret paths end at the turret's surface or should they be a bit away?

5. how do you do paths for hangars

6. can a turret/subsystem have more than one path?

[karajorma]

I don`t think anyone has answered questions 1 or 2 yet and I would like to know the answer to them as well. So here the are again

Originally posted by LtNarol
Reviving my old habit:

1. Pathing, is there a tutorial out there; a comprehensive one?

2. Also pathing, in PCS, the field labled 'Parent' under the paths section, does that refer to the submodel name for which the path is used, or the subsystem name?  If the later, does it refer to the name defined in the pof or in ships.tbl?

For question 2. AFAIK you use the name in the pof. Since it seems unlikely that PCS would load in the ships.tbl to look at subsystems (also unless it looked at the registry how would it even know where to find your ships.tbl?)
 Furthermore the only path I`ve done so far is for a docking point and since that doesn`t have a ships.tbl entry it seems likely that all of the names are the ones in the .pof

[Sesquipedalian]

Originally posted by LtNarol
more stupid questions:

4. should turret paths end at the turret's surface or should they be a bit away?

5. how do you do paths for hangars

6. can a turret/subsystem have more than one path?

4. Away, or else the fighter will smash right into the turret while trying to complete the path.  Make sure point 00 is the farthest one away.

5. Same way, but there should be 6 paths per docking bay (there are a maximum of 6 ships per wing).

6. In theory, I guess.  I wouldn't advise it, though.

Btw, if anyone wants to correct some gross error in this post, feel free.

[TrashMan]

Pathing turrets is a "pain in the ass" job. It takes a very long time to do (and it's boring). It would be far better to change the AI. Turret and subsys. paths would then become unnecessary.

I have several models I work on, and only fighter/bombers have paths. I made a Starbase with 60 turrets and 6 hangars - now I wish I hadn't! And I allso have a battleship(89 turrets), frigate(50), and battlecruiser(60) models!!!!!

When I put the starbase for download it will be a Beta version (without paths). If anyone out there is willing to path it, let me know.

[LtNarol]

changing the AI requires source code changes, as of this point, the 158th is still using the standard FS2 v1.2 engine, and I don't intend on changing that unless the source mods prove to be reasonably stable and compatible with mods.  From what I've heard the current build is neither, and thus we chose 1.2 for now.

The 158th _IS_ looking for additional people to do paths, even though we recently recruited Spicious but we can use as many as we can get.  If 20 pathers/converters wanna sign up, I'll take 20 pathers/converters.  

EDIT: in case some of you are looking at me funny, we're planning on doing some serious model output soon and need as many texturers and pathers as we can get; mikhael is doing some excellent work.