[Bobboau]

does anyone know what the distance between the two points of a dock must be for a ship to properly dock with other ships,
ie what do you all use as you're distance, I think it might be a normal 1.0, but I see diferent values on ocation and I'd like to make a little thing for my editor to make dock makeing easier and I've never been 100% sure on the distance between points

[Spicious]

For fighters I use 0.1 and they don't have any problems. On capital ships I've used 1.0 and they work fine too. In answer to your question it probably doesn't make much difference.

[aldo_14]

1 use 1 for the distance, though I set the dockpoint quite far from the dock to allow the animation...

generally speaking I use something like this;

DP Norm(0,1,0) Pos(0,0,0)
Path
1 rad:1  Pos(0,10,0)
2 rad:10 Pos(0,20,-5)
3 rad:100 Pos(0,50,-25)
4 rad:250 Pos(0,100,-50)

Or thereabouts.  I tend to increase the distance disproportionally to the radius, though (so the docking ship doesn't have to move a far distance away before entering the first point of the path).  It seems to work fine IMO.

[Grunt]

0.8 - 1 works for me both on fighters and capships.

[StratComm]

tecnically, .01 would work, but that's putting a little too much faith in the FS engine I think.  The only function of that second dock point is to establish orientation between the docker and dockee, by matching the vector created by one ship's dock point pair to the vector created by the other ship's dock point pair.  The normal and location information is only relevant for the first dock point.

And for the paths, the important thing is to have vertex 3 (on a 4 vertex dock path) far enough away from the doc point to allow any docking ship a full radius of rotation.  This has been a question asked by far too many people, but I just don't have time to write my own dock point tutorial.

[Bobboau]

well, I know it was for orientation, I just wasn't sure if it needed to be normalized or not,
I'm going to make a normalizeing function and let people use it if they want

[phreak]

normalize it anyways, the 3d engines in general prefer normalized vectors when dealing with direction