[Wanderer]

I was some time ago asking in modding section about capital ships shooting shooting through themselves with standard primaries, beam weapons (both can be partly taken care of with fov adjustment) and especially missiles. I understood there this had been implemented earlier but was prone to unbalance some cap ships (like Colossus) and was removed. I just wonder how bad the effect was i mean could it in some refined form be used in FSO.

And now there is a new threat about rotations (subsys on using only limited axis) and i would like to know if this could be used with turrets to limit firing areas if the above is impractical.

And finally: Is it possible to implement some sort of 'real' armor system to the game, like when firing a certain hull the damage is always reduced by the same amount regardless of the weapon firing. This would more or less replace the 'corvette' and 'capital' and other such table flags with limitations to the damaging weapons (*huge*). Such reduction or threshold system would influence standard primaries quite much but its effect on cap ship killing weapons like bombs or beams would be minimal (as it should).
 
Example:
Weapon a with damage value of 20 points firing a hull with armor of 10 deals mere 10 points of damage against hitpoints. Some other weapon dealing say 45 points would make 35 damage against hitpoints.

[StratComm]

The armor discussion has come up more times than I would care to remember.  While it sounds like a good idea, most of the time it just adds complexity to a modder's life without actually making much difference in-game.  The suggestion you're making is probably about the most reasonable I've seen, but it has been brought up before.  It tends to break compatability, especially when you talk about replacing things that already are there (and that do more than just flag damage settings; those flags also have a big effect on AI), but the concept as a whole is actually not a bad one.

I have not yet heard of a good solution regarding turret FOV.  The non-firing-through-own-hull fix didn't just affect the Colossus, it made the mission where it has to kill the Repulse simply not work.  Backwards compatability - being able to play the retail campaign - is top priority, so that change is out permanently unless some kind of hack is put in to deal with it.

[WMCoolmon]

The no-fire-through-hull thing can be reimplemented easily enough. Maybe through turret flags, or a ship flag.

Also, what you say about weapon reduction on certain types of shps for certain types of weapons is already implemented.

[Goober5000]

I wonder if the no-fire-through-hull thing would work best as a mission flag, or a ship flag within the mission, rather than a ships.tbl or *.pof flag.  This would allow for the possibility of ships firing through their hull in scenarios required for certain missions.

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm, I think I know how to easily satisfy that and add some extra functionality as well. Unfortunately it's 2:30 AM now, I shouldn't even be up.

[Flipside]

I think the Line of Sight thing should be marked on the turret itself in the table file, this means that backwards compatability is kept, and is probably the easiest way of arranging things. Organising it in Fred would be a nightmare, since I can never remember which turret is which

[Goober5000]

The FRED flag would be for the whole ship or the whole mission.  This would let you give the Colossus the proper FOV for all its turrets in certain missions but still let it fire through its hull in Feint! Parry! Riposte!

[Hippo]

Its supposed to do that?

[Goober5000]

The mission breaks if it doesn't.  Play it again and watch the beams closely.

[Kosh]

That's not the only mission that happens. One of my favorite examples is "the sixth wonder". When it jumps in and tries to take out the Hawkwood, it can only use 1 Terslash and 1 BGreen, so it takes an eternity. Same with that where you defend Knossos from the NTF when the Danton jumps in.



But from what I remember the Colossus was the only ship in the game that had a problem with the beam fix. Unfortunatly, it is kind of an important ship in the game.


Maybe this problem could be fixed with a high poly version of the
Colossus. I think the issue is simply where the beam turrets are.

[Hippo]

ah... never noticed that... i was always trying to get the repulse kill, or disable it or something...

[StratComm]

The Colossus main cannons are poorly-placed in general.  The solution was to give them firing arcs greater than their unobstructed field of view, which looks a little stupid, but that's why it's there.  I'd very much like to see a way of preventing my mod ships from firing through their bridge towers though.

[Wanderer]

What about the second thing i mentioned? To get turrets operate somewhat like Homeworld capital ship turrets or just like main gun turrets on WW2 battleships. That is to limit both the barrel and turret rotation (if barrels could only rotate between 0 and 45 degrees for example, not like current version that limits them mostly from 45 to 90 degrees). Ofcourse if no-fire-through-hull is in use this would not be very significant but still might be something nice to get your hands on to. This is perhaps more of a visual thing than anything else.

And that damage reduction is already implemented? Is there a thread about it? EDIT: after altering search i found several suggestions of the same armor system.

But if it in use, do i have to activate it somehow?

And i really didn't realize that "corvette" and "capital" flags were that much different from "cruiser" flag apart from the damage immunities. Atleast AI itself seems equally inept in all of these. My'great' idea (perhaps and old one) was to 'simply' add a new line in ships.tbl like $armor: or something. Main use would be to prevent excessive damage to big ships and heavy bombers (think bombers like WW2 IL-2, closest thing to flying tank) by very high rate of fire weapons while allowing easily editable armor system.

[WMCoolmon]

What I understand is that you wanted non-huge weapons to do less damage to huge ships...AFAIK, that's in effect.

[Wanderer]

Yes, but at a way table editor/modder can do it.

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm...I really don't feel like coding this right now (It's not exactly been a good week, and I think getting Linux audio set up and working properly exceeded my tolerance level for trial-and-error-debugging.)

However. It would probably require changes to the ship_do_damage and parse_ship functions, but not much beyond that, depending on the complexity of the system. Otherwise it might require some sort of parse_weapon and parse_armor changes.

There have been several proposals for an armor system, the easiest would probably be a table of armor type vs weapon damage type, and a multiplier applied to the weapon damage when that particular weapon strikes this particular hull. Then you give weapons/ships a damage type/armor index. When a weapon strikes a ship, then the code indexes the table and does

Code: [Select]

weapon_damage *= Armor_table[sip->armor_index][wip->weapon_index];
or, in other words, multiplies it by the entry in the table that corresponds with the damage/armor type of the two objects.

[Trivial Psychic]

Perhaps it could be taken one step further.  Now that we have destroyable, non-targettable submodels, a model could have sections of hull plating.  Their hidden subsystem designation of armor would mean that they still take dammage as they normally would, but hits on that submodel would not effect the overall hull strength of the ship they're on.  Granted if the armor submodel is destroyed or if a hit strikes an unarmored area, the overall hull strength would be reduced.  Doable?

[StratComm]

The non-targetable, destroyable subsystems raises a couple of problems though.  Namely, it prevents you from assigning up to 100% of hull strength to true subsystems and turrets.  It changes balance when adding them to older ships, because in order to give the damage subsystems HP you have to take it away from the other real subsystems.  But the idea makes sense.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by StratComm
It changes balance when adding them to older ships, because in order to give the damage subsystems HP you have to take it away from the other real subsystems.

I should take a look at that again. For a long time I've said that you can't have subsystems adding up to more than 100% of hull because nasty things will happen in the code.  But now I'm not so sure.

[WMCoolmon]

The armor system can be pretty easily applied to individual subsystems too, if/when I find the spot where it actually subtracts the damage from 'em.