[Anaz]

weapon flag is goooood. A no-pierce flag would solve all of the problems very quickly, with default piercing beams.

[Fry_Day]

Table-mods aren't flexible enough. I believe it should be a mission-tag, with no tag defaulting to beams piercing, so as to keep backwards compatability

[redmenace]

or you could readjust the weapons beams to have higher shield piercing power. It is a little work but is worth it believe me. I love the new sheild effects. Also maybe a emp effect in beams would be kinda interesting. such as when you approach a ship and get hit by a beam your weapons system goes whack:losing its target lock.

[CP5670]

ALL MODIFICATION THAT WOULD CHANGE THE GAMEPLAY BALANCE IN ANY WAY MUST BE DISABLED BY DEFAULT.

This pretty much sums up my take on these issues. The beams are now far, far less effective than they used to be since they do not actually do all that much damage in comparison to other things; their key strength earlier was that they could hit the hull directly. Perhaps it was a bug, but almost all of the missions out there (including those of the main FS2 campaign) have been designed with shield-piercing beams taken into account for balance, so changing this by default would create a total mess. Put in the table flag or mission flag instead.

I made a shield peirceing flag, so all one needs to do is make a small change in the tables and include it in the next relese

What is this flag? is it implemented in 3.51?

[Stunaep]

Originally posted by karajorma


Yes but the problem is that almost every other campaign isn`t. So everyone else has to tell all their users exactly how to disable shields not piercing shields for everyone who downloads their campaign.

This is why I say that we need a flag for this. You could alter the weapons table in 5 minutes to work for all people playing your campaign.

why not just have a command-line option that would make beams not pierce shields, when turned on?

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Just to make it clear to you all.

Beams Should Pierce Sheilds Unless They Really Must Not For Gameplay And Balance Reasons. It Should Be On A Per-Mission Basis, With A Flag In FRED.

[CP5670]

why not just have a command-line option that would make beams not pierce shields, when turned on?

For the same reasons stated earlier; the mission designer decides how the gameplay works, not the player, or else the balance would be completely thrown off (see what venom said earlier). Besides, if your campaign uses shield-damaging beams, it shouldn't take you more than a minute to set whatever flag they put in on the beams in weapons.tbl.

Beams Should Not Pierce Sheilds Unless They Really Must For Gameplay And Balance Reasons. It Shold Be On A Per-Mission Basis, With A Flag In FRED.

Which is the case in almost all of the missions. The issue here is whether or not they should have to punch through shields by default when no setting is specified, and this is where many of us are giving an emphatic "no," because it needs to remain compatible with the existing missions that are not going to have further revisions (e.g. the FS2 campaign).

Besides, the beams totally suck now; you have to make them like three times as powerful to be of any use.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Fry_Day
Table-mods aren't flexible enough. I believe it should be a mission-tag, with no tag defaulting to beams piercing, so as to keep backwards compatability

Have both. That give the FREDder much more control. It goes like this

Default - beams pierce shields
Table - No Pierce flag - Any beam with this flag set will not pierce shields regardless of the mission Tag (i.e it's a pretty weak beam)
Table - Pierce - Any Beam with this flag will always pierce shields.
Mission Tag - all beams (except those with the No Pierce flag) will now pierce shields.

Best of both worlds really.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Petrarch of the VBB
Just to make it clear to you all.

Beams Should Not Pierce Sheilds Unless They Really Must For Gameplay And Balance Reasons. It Shold Be On A Per-Mission Basis, With A Flag In FRED.

no, that's the exact opposite, and you can write it as big as you want I don't care. if nobody notices, that is creating a serious fuss, and most people are not happy with the change. so it has to come back the original way, PERIOD.

[Exarch]

ALL MODIFICATION THAT WOULD CHANGE THE GAMEPLAY BALANCE IN ANY WAY MUST BE DISABLED BY DEFAULT.

I very much agree with that. Especially on this issue. Though rather than  a command line option I'd prefer a little box to tick in FRED under mission properties that would then determine if beams pierce shields or not for that mission. Mission designer definitely would need some control over it in order to properly balance his mission.

[Stryke 9]

What kind of pathetic beam is it that you last long enough to notice whether it's hitting your shields or not, anyway?

[Exarch]

Anti Fighter beams (AAA). They're utterly pathetic vs shields, so unless all of them are altered they might as well not exist if they are blocked by shields. Beams are so bad vs shields, in fact, that I imagine you could even survive direct hits from heavy beams like BGreens and the like (you're actually not automatically killed if hit by one of those, they just kill you really, really fast due to insane hull damage. Even without shields blocking beams, it's actually possible, just barely, to live through a hit from an LTerSlash in an Ares, though you'll come out at 20% hull or so).

[Darkage]

Mission designers choice, i don't liek command lines i just rather tick a box in fred to enable/disable it. Allthough it should be turned off by default as i made some insane fast firing AAF beams with prety high damage ad it took ages to kill a Taurvi bomber with almost constant fire! I kill stuff faster then a beam can do:)

[TrashMan]

I think it would be best to have a flag in the .tbl file

That way all would be happy. You can have a shield piercing and a standard version of all beams.

[Bobboau]

there is a table flag,
jeese, if you can't be bothered to add it to the origonal tables, wich is the only place were this is an issue, I just spent five seconds and did it for you here
now assuming that I commited the change corectly that should solve the problem

[Nico]

Originally posted by Bobboau
there is a table flag,
jeese, if you can't be bothered to add it to the origonal tables, wich is the only place were this is an issue, I just spent five seconds and did it for you here
now assuming that I commited the change corectly that should solve the problem

"gives Bob a... hermmmm...a HLP Awards ( )!!!"

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Bobboau
there is a table flag,
jeese, if you can't be bothered to add it to the origonal tables, wich is the only place were this is an issue, I just spent five seconds and did it for you here
now assuming that I commited the change corectly that should solve the problem

What did you do?

I just ran a CVS update and didn't notice anything different.

[Bobboau]

that's becase I did it weeks ago, seeing as nobody seems to have tryed the flag I was worried that maybe they did and it didn't work becase there version of FSO was from before I commited the change or I didn't commit it like i thought I had

look in you're copy for WIF2_PIERCE it should show up in the weapons damage code the beam colision code and the weapons parseing code at the least

[Goober5000]

Hmm.

I think we should still make an optional command-line flag to override that, at the user's option, because I see it as more a difficulty thing rather than a balance thing.

Perhaps we could do it this way:
--beams ignore shields by default
--there can be a "no pierce" flag in the table
--there can also be a command-line option that makes all beams non-piercing regardless of their table entry

[Nico]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Hmm.

I think we should still make an optional command-line flag to override that, at the user's option, because I see it as more a difficulty thing rather than a balance thing.

Perhaps we could do it this way:
--beams ignore shields by default
--there can be a "no pierce" flag in the table
--there can also be a command-line option that makes all beams non-piercing regardless of their table entry

sure, all I want is the shield piercing by default, so tha's fine with me. and as there's all the options there, well, that should be fine with everybody .