[Fury]

OK, so we have a fair few fighters in The Babylon Project which uses beams as their primary weapon, particularly Minbari Nial which fires three beams in succession.

The problem is sound which is just terrible. It would be fine with normal beams but with three beams firing in succession it becomes awful.
Nial has only single primary weapon but three firing points.

Is there a fix for this?

An example of Nial weapon is here:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/fury/misc/NeutronGunB.txt

Bobboau, Kazan and Eternal One has access to TBP stuff if needed.

[Bobboau]

just to make sure, you are useing 3.6, I made some enormus changes to fighter beams  in 3.6.

so what exacltly is the problem?
what would be a good fix?

[Fury]

I used this:
http://fs2source.warpcore.org/exes/latest/C06172004.zip
Shouldn't it be slightly newer than 3.6?

Bobboau, its difficult to explain any better, you need to try it ingame. It should work with TBP R2 fine so no need to get WIP stuff.

[SadisticSid]

If you mean the sound cuts out midway and restarts from the beginning as the next beam fires, it's not a specific problem to beams but to the whole way sounds are handled in FS2. Ideally we could put an (optional) extra flag in sounds.tbl to tell the game how to handle it; for instance, 0 = keep playing sound and don't play any additional ones until finished, 1 = keep playing sound and mix it with any additional ones, 2 = stop playing sound and play additional ones.

[Bobboau]

if that's your problem, then you probly use a looping sound for it, wich might not be such a good idea... actualy just now looking at the table, don't use the same sound for all three try setting either warmup or loop to 84, and the other two to -1 (wich means nothing, if that causes a crash then that's a bug that needs to be fixed)

[Liberator]

Or, mix an all new sound for the Nial's weapon.

[Fury]

Originally posted by Bobboau
if that's your problem, then you probly use a looping sound for it, wich might not be such a good idea... actualy just now looking at the table, don't use the same sound for all three try setting either warmup or loop to 84, and the other two to -1 (wich means nothing, if that causes a crash then that's a bug that needs to be fixed)

Crap, I forgot it was "-1" and not "0".

Its a little better now. And we do have Nial firing sound, taken from the show of course.

Bobbaou, is there a way to make fighterbeams to drain energy?
Normal drain entry does nothing.

[Fury]

And fighterbeams range is still unlimited, I thought you already included the feature for the beam to disappear after certain range?

Yet with 3.6 and with the build mentioned above, Nials can kill enemies from kilometers away, even though weapon range is set to 900m and lifetime to 840m.

[Fury]

Bobboau, some insights to the two problems stated above, pretty please?

[Bobboau]

hmm, I forget if weapon range was set corectly for the ai or not (as in if you had to do the speed/time thing). ranged beams are implemented and damage atenuated as well, I forget the exact syntax, and I'm in the middle of class currently, so I can't do the search.

[Fury]

If you are referring to velocity and lifetime, then that's less than 900m. Range is also set to 900m. But still the beam goes and does damage from many kilometers away.

I don't want to release R3 with those ****ty pulses with trails so I very much would like to get this fixed if you have the time. There are however more than this to get done before R3 but not coding. Except if someone wants to work on proper salvo fire code? At the moment salvo firing guns can't hit anything as you know. Maybe could get Et1 to work on that one...

[Solatar]

I did an ML-16 fighter beam once, and I got it to dissappear after 900m. Something in the beam code though, not the regular weapon range.

[Col. Fishguts]

Originally posted by Mr. Fury
If you are referring to velocity and lifetime, then that's less than 900m. Range is also set to 900m. But still the beam goes and does damage from many kilometers away.

Are you using the table enntry Bob posted a while ago in the "old" TBP forums ?
Cause I do, and the beam range isn't unlimited (2000m IIRC).
Just to make sure....have you checked this thread: http://www.hard-light.net/vwbb/showthread.php?threadid=9707 ?

[Fury]

With quick glance I can't see any real difference between the two.
I will check it out better when I am off from work.

[Bobboau]

Code: [Select]

+Range: 2000
+Attenuation: 0.5


those two entrys, they go in the beam section right before the sections... section

[Fury]

OK, thanks. I got it working. AI is still a problem because it starts firing far too early, thus draining energy reserves before target is even at range.