[Bobboau]

ok last night I fixed the bug were if you nock out a subsystem that a thruster is atached to it would not nock out the thruster glows, but now there is the problem of a ship haveing full power even when just one itty bitty engine is still working, or worse when all the glows are atached to the smallest engine subsystem(s) on the ship, so I've been thinking it might be a good idea to have engine capabilities degraded as engine subsystems are taken out, the percentages could be determined by either the hit point percentage or by the radius of the glows atached to it, 'main' engines can be given more priority and/or small engines (like the ones on the arms of the sathanus) can be made so that the ship can't move if these are the only ones left.

discuss

[Flipside]

Sounds like a good idea to me Bobb, the only thing that occurs to me is that while it would be good if the Sathanas was unable to move by taking out it's main engines, but could still turn on the spot using those rotational thrusters to fire at the enemy? Would that be feasible?

[ShadowDrakken]

Bobb: sounds good, except ANY engine power is enough to move in space. It takes longer to accelerate, but acceleration is still possible.

[Bobboau]

movement may be posable but navagation might not be, you'll be able to generate thrust but you won't realy be able to controle what your doing if all you have is som odd manuvering thruster on the end of a long stick, pointing in an odd direction

[Jetmech Jr.]

Okay, so when that happens, make it so that they fly in a neverending circle      

[redsniper]

heh, that happened to the main character in the X-wing books.  He got half of his engines disabled and started spinning uncontrollably.

[Jetmech Jr.]

hmm, never read those books. they any good?

[redsniper]

very... but let's not derail bob's thread, okay?

[karajorma]

It's a good idea Bob. What you could do is assign each engine a percentage of the maximum thrust on the ships.tbl.

That way old campaigns wouldn't have this effect and wouldn't get broken by this (Cause as a FREDder I can see exactly how big a nightmare this could become )

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by ShadowDrakken
Bobb: sounds good, except ANY engine power is enough to move in space. It takes longer to accelerate, but acceleration is still possible.

When has FS been realistic? You can put more power to your engines and go faster so...

@bob: making them smaller in size is a good idea, but I would combine it with some size flickering. The engine should look like its gonna die, i.e. flicker around wildly.

[WMCoolmon]

I like the idea, but it'll need a checkbox in FRED to disable/enable the feature.

*ahem* feature? I meant bug...

[Trivial Psychic]

I agree with WM, since enabling this by default would alter existing missions, and thus break backward compatability.  Other possible ways to selectively enable this feature would be with command line flags, or a new flag and entry in the ships table file, as Kara suggested.

Later!

[Lightspeed]

Command Line arg is your friend.

[KARMA]

I like a lot the idea of a screwed navigation, it also sound realistic, and I like too the idea of using hitpoints/thrusters size (mmm luke and wedge in the trench...)

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
Command Line arg is your friend.

Bad idea to do it as a command line arg.

1) Suppose I've made a mission where the player has to save a ship that is badly damaged and limping to a jump node. If the player hasn't set command line arg up then the ship gets to the node 2 or 3 times as quickly and jumps out before the enemy ships start arriving in force.

2) Suppose you're playing a mission which wasn't set up to work this way. The ship would take twice as long to reach the node again screwing over the mission.


This is something that absolutely has to stay under the control of the FREDder. Doing it as a table would be a bit of a pain so either that or a tickbox in FRED will make me happy but there is no way this should be a command line arg.

[Lightspeed]

But then again it would not work with any mission we already have.

Hmm... maybe make it FRED control along with a command line to force it to "on" for all ships?

[karajorma]

It would in general be a bad idea to use it with missions that were written without this in mind.

It would break a lot of missions.  But a command line to force it is reasonable as long as people are willing to take the risk

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
But then again it would not work with any mission we already have.

Hmm... maybe make it FRED control along with a command line to force it to "on" for all ships?

What's wrong with FRED's checkboxes?

It's really not all that hard to add a FRED control or two...

[karajorma]

Lightspeed wants to use this feature with existing mission where individually opening the missions and adding the flag would be a pain.

I keep telling him there's a good chance that will break the mission but if he still wants to try it I say it's his funeral, let him try

[Goober5000]

There's already a function in FS2 that decreases ship speed based on engine strength.  I'd rather not change it.