[Flipside]

Just one little question, which I am certain has been asked before, is there any way the SCP can get turrets to draw a Line of Sight to targets so they don't shoot through the hull of the ship they are mounted on? Originally I thought it might be a good idea to be able to define fov more accurately (values for multiple axis to allow 'shaped' fovs) but I just realised that this would mean changing the POF file, as this is where these details are stored.

Flipside

[Killfrenzy]

I'll support this - turrets shooting through their own hull just looks very silly!

[Galemp]

I think it's just some creative work on the part of the modeler, to ensure he specifies a correct normal and FOV. Blame them, not the coders.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
I think it's just some creative work on the part of the modeler, to ensure he specifies a correct normal and FOV. Blame them, not the coders.

Obviously the modder is to blame if a turret shoots through the side of the ship. However it would be nice if the modder could just specify 180 as the field of view and the game would take care of deciding what can be hit.

The problem is that suppose I have a ship with something directly above and below the turret but nothing to the sides. At the moment I'm forced to limit the field of view so the ship doesn't shoot through itself but that also means that the turret sometimes can't hit things that are at the side that it should be able too.

That said we can't get rid of fov completely or weapons like the mjolnir would cease to work properly.

[KARMA]

not to mention the total conversions, where you are forced to put turretts in specific points where they will have fov partially occluded by the hull. Fov occluded by the hull could have also a sense in other situations, for example if you want to create a blind spot in a capship defenses (thought you can do it working with the fov)

[Fry_Day]

Hmm, I might look into this. We're having a holiday thingy today and tomorrow, but I will prolly have time on Sunday. I don't think it should be too hard, actually.

[IPAndrews]

Sounds like a frame rate massacre to me.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Fry_Day
Hmm, I might look into this. We're having a holiday thingy today and tomorrow, but I will prolly have time on Sunday. I don't think it should be too hard, actually.

Shana Tovah, achi!

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
I think it's just some creative work on the part of the modeler, to ensure he specifies a correct normal and FOV. Blame them, not the coders.

No it's ****ing well not our fault. You seen my carrier? Probably not, no-one gives a flying giraffe's testicle about my TC, but the bridge superstructre has a two-part turret behind it. Unless I give it a FOV of about 10 degrees around the vertical normal, it can and will shoot right through the superstructure hull. And this is just one example.

Sorry for shouting, but you touched a nerve on that one.

[Nico]

for now, I don't care much if a turret shoots through the hull, for now, I care about the fact that, what, 5 years after FS1 has been released? we still can't put barelled turrets on the sides of a ship? when WC3 could? yeah, great, that's some serious design limt, if you ask me.

[diamondgeezer]

Well that may be the other end of the same problem - if could have multi-part turrets with a normal off the vertical without any screw-ups we could go at least part way to avoiding the situation I described in my previous post.

[Flipside]

Also, not all ships provide exactly equal clearance in every direction. It's not really fair ro blame the modders, since if they made it so every single turret had the same clearance on every plane, it would very severaly limit the available shapes for ships.

Flipside

And as far as I can tell, it won't touch the frame rate, since it has to plot a straight line as an equation to draw the laser anyway, and has to do collision detection olong the way, so I think it would any be a variation of this?

[Nuke]

heres my turret wishlist:

1. the ability to specify the field of fire on both the x and y axes seporately.

2. the ability to select a default turret position.

3. make the turrets scan the sky when there is nothing to shoot at.

4. make them less jumpy.

5. mouse control mode! as well as turret control for observers in multiplayer.

6. single object pivoting turrets.

7. two part turrets that may be placed on any plane (not just on the xz plane), possibly on angled planes.

8. revolving barrel turrets (gatling guns!) and recoiling turrets (flak and other high caliber ballistic guns)

9. more gunpoints!

10. cycle and swarm launch modes (specified in weapons.tbl).

i can only think of 10 right now. i might think of more later.

[terren]

allright I'll get right on it, just give me 3 years to learn C, another year to become familiar with FS2 SCP, then 6 months to get the coding done.  If anyone think's they can do it faster be my guest
but i'm not going to bother with mouse controled turrets, will you settle for improved fighter turret AI.  like having it auto target the weakest attacker, weakest near ship, strongest attacker, bombs.

[LtNarol]

Question: how does the engine check for weapons impacts?  Couldn't the engine be made to check for a projected weapon impact against the firing ship using existing impact check code?  That wouldn't butcher framerates, would it?

[Bobboau]

every frame it might, the ***** is figuring out were to put it

[LtNarol]

how bout check whenever it'd otherwise fire?

[Kazan]

yes - only check when it wants to fire - that should not kill framerate too much because we're just checking line-intersection

there is one problem though - the firepoint is almost never physically outside of the ship, and even then almost never outside the polygon BBoxes - so you'd probably end up making it so turrets _never_ _fire_  - a possible solution to this is not counting it's parent sobj as something it can collide with - it can still collide with the rest of the ship though - but it requires a small modification of the collision detection code

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Kazan
yes - only check when it wants to fire - that should not kill framerate too much because we're just checking line-intersection

there is one problem though - the firepoint is almost never physically outside of the ship, and even then almost never outside the polygon BBoxes - so you'd probably end up making it so turrets _never_ _fire_  - a possible solution to this is not counting it's parent sobj as something it can collide with - it can still collide with the rest of the ship though - but it requires a small modification of the collision detection code

But couldn't you work around that limitation by only checking for colision with polygons/BBoxes who have normals facing the turret?

[Kazan]

BBoxes don't have normals.. if you checked polycollision you could have that - but if the fire point is physically inside the main hull almost all of the ship will have polygons/BBoxes facing away