[diamondgeezer]

Question the first:

Each pilot has three .anis for messages - 'calm', 'animated' and dying. Supposedly, when a message plays the game selects either calm or animated to go with the message. However, occasionally, it'll play the dying one. Is this cos the transmitting pilot is taking damage? I noticed one time that it happened when a pilot was fine except she was just quite near the engine of a Charybdis, and may well have been experiencing engine wash. On the off chance that it is a purely random choice fomr the three, how would one stop the dying ani playing when the pilot blatantly isn't under attack?


Question the second:

Dynamic music, then. In theory, ambient music plays when there are no enemies present, battle music plays when enemies are present, and victory music plays when all objectives are completed. So, if I have a situation where there are no enemies around but I want the battle music to kick in as mood music, can I, say, have a stealth enemy arrive and sit quietly somewhere, thus triggering the battle music?


[EDIT] Happy birthday the man below. Only another year to go, mate

[vyper]

#1 - er........

#2 - Yes. Yes you can.

[EdrickV]

I can't find anything in the code that would play the scream ani unless the ship is actually dying. Are you sure the ship you saw near the ship wasn't a replacement that warped in between when the scream shoulda gone off and when you looked at the screamer's ship?

[diamondgeezer]

Er... what?

Ah, no, I think perhaps you have the wrong end of the stick... the pilot was sending a message anyway, that was supposed to happen - it didn't just play the scream ani without a message, as I think you're implying. The point is, instead of sending the usual head-nodding ani you get with a message, she gave the screaming, dying one. I suspect that this was because she was just clipping the Charybdis' engine wash, thus causing the game engine to think she was taking damage and under attack... what I'm asking is, is there anyway to guard aganst such daft behaviour?

[EdrickV]

I specifically looked at the code that seems to choose what head to play for builtin messages.

Code: [Select]


if ( Personas[persona_index].flags & (PERSONA_FLAG_WINGMAN | PERSONA_FLAG_SUPPORT) ) {
// get a random head -- it's one of two.
if ( q->builtin_type == MESSAGE_WINGMAN_SCREAM ) {
rand_index=2; // 3rd version is always death animation
is_death_scream=1;
} else {
rand_index = (Missiontime % MAX_WINGMAN_HEADS);
}



[diamondgeezer]

So... it has a choice of two heads to play for a message. OK, so just to be 100% sure on this, what triggers the scream ani, cos I've seen it more than once before when the pilot concerned is doing fine...

[EdrickV]

Ultimately, as far as I've been able to tell, the SF_DYING flag and ship_maybe_scream() trigger it. As far as I can tell, ship_maybe_scream(), which checks for things like what team a ship is on and whether the max scream count for a mission has been reached, is only called from ship_hit_kill().

[diamondgeezer]

Er... well, I don't do code, so does what you just said mean that a scream ani could go off randomly? I mean, this particular case I quoted was right near the start of a mission, there weren't even any baddies in the game yet...

[Goober5000]

Pilot Animations

Yeah, I've seen that problem every once in a while too.  Don't know what causes it - it's quite weird.  A bug?  Maybe it's checking damage, like you said.

Anyway, yes, there is a way.  Instead of selecting Head-TP1 in FRED, be specific and say e.g. Head-TP1a.ani.  This forces the "calm" animation to always play.  (To play the "active" animation, type Head-TP1b.ani.)  You won't have the randomness between calm and active, but you also won't risk accidentally getting the "dying" animation.


Music

Yup, I had this problem too in Deus Ex Machina ( ) - the game doesn't recognize hostile cargo containers as valid music triggers.  So what I did is have a sensor-blocked hostile Cain warp in about a million kilometers away, then leave when the container was destroyed.  This triggered the music very nicely.

[EdrickV]

As far as I can tell, the only thing that should be setting the flags needed for the scream ani should be the function that actually starts the ship dying. As far as the code I quoted above, the:
MissionTime % MAX_WINGMAN_HEADS
basically translates to:
x % (modulus)  2 = 0 or 1.

[diamondgeezer]

I... vaguely remember a mission I made where specifying which head to use screwed up the whole thing, and no heads would play at all no matter what I did. That said, I might just be paranoid...

[EDIT] Question the third:

If I have a hostile fighter turn up, all stealth like, in order to trigger the battle music, what's the preferred method of it not showing up as a red flashing dot on the radar? Make it a Pegasus?

[Goober5000]

It has worked fine for me.  But I used FRED1, and maybe FRED2 is different.  Try editing it in Notepad.

3. I'm not sure you can completely take a ship off radar, unless it's out of range in a nebula.  I think in Proving Grounds you can still see the flickering blips, but I could be wrong.

[diamondgeezer]

Mebbe I can just hide it behind a geen blip. The player won't notice

[Goober5000]

Huh.  Pegasus doesn't show up at all.  Interesting.

[diamondgeezer]

A-ha! There is something special about the 'proper' stealth ships! People keep telling me they're just ticked 'hidden from sensors', but I always suspected there was more to it...

[EdrickV]

You put $Stealth: in the ship's table entry after $Score: and before Trail:

$Score:                  10
$Stealth:
$Trail:

[Joey_21]

A bit of old news, but at least you guys are finding out.

What I like to do is give the knossos the stealth tag so it won't be targetable at all (because, after all, what's the point in targeting something if you can't attack it?)

[EdrickV]

Originally posted by Joey_21
A bit of old news, but at least you guys are finding out.

What I like to do is give the knossos the stealth tag so it won't be targetable at all (because, after all, what's the point in targeting something if you can't attack it?)

So you know where to look if something is comming through it? (After all, using your logic, what's the point of targeting friendly ships? )

[Sesquipedalian]

The usefulness of hostile Pegasus fighters sitting far away from the field of action cannot be overestimated, in my opinion.  

For example, say you want to assign the directive that a dozen ships depart (maybe they're stealing cargo or something).  There is no counter for has-departed-delay, so the player has no convenient way of knowing how many ships have departed -- he knows only that not all of them have departed.  If, however, each time one of them departs, an inert hostile pegasus has its hull strength set to zero, then one can set the objective to say on the player's HUD "Ensure twelve cargo containers are stolen" but have the actual event be a has-been-destroyed-delay (which does give the counter in the directives).

A really useful trick to go in conjunction with hostile Pegasus fighters is naming them using high ASCII characters.  That way they don't show up in the F4 ships list either.  The player has no way at all of knowing they are there.

[Joey_21]

Originally posted by EdrickV


So you know where to look if something is comming through it?

Yes. All you do is look at your radar and you'll see a blue blip.
Just maneuver your craft to point at it.

Originally posted by EdrickV


(After all, using your logic, what's the point of targeting friendly ships? )

What's the point of even targeting a ship (or device) that will get you nothing accomplished? And to answer your question, on escort missions, I like to match my escort target's exact speed so the only way to do that is to target it.