[Admiral Nelson]

Could I just ask for whatever it is that the Wing Commander Saga folks want  done to get done?

[Nuke]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
How about this one?  Some mods would benefit from an alternate support ship type.  Instead of having a ship warp in when the player calls for one, the player would fly towards a ship already in mission and once within a certain range, use the same key command as FS, but then AI will take over for the pilot and dock to the designated ship.  Once docked, the rearm/repair sequence would occur.

Using BSG as an example, some dockpoints would be added within the bay pods so that the player could enter, dock, and rearm/repair, then undock and return to combat.  It would almost be like a pit-stop.  It would probably necessitate a launcher flag to change over from the standard FS rearming method.

While we're at it, how about the ability to have dockpoints bound to sub-objects rather than the main hull?  That means that you could have objects docked to moving sub-models.  The only real dilema with this is how to deal with paths.  It may require that the dockpoints in question have no listed approach paths, or allow paths that allow the paths to move, staying relative to the dockpoint.

nukemod could use this too. carrier landings, passive rearm and maybe an ils hud gauge for both.

[Trivial Psychic]

Another change.  Allow ships other than transports and cargo to have a cargo content listed in the bottom left corner of the screen, for targetted ships.  Perhaps a table line like: $carries cargo:   yes/no.

[WMCoolmon]

Do transports and cargo automatically carry cargo if not specified?

EG would it break compatibility if that section of code were automatically enabled for all ships instead of just transports/cargo?

[Singh]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
How about this one?  Some mods would benefit from an alternate support ship type.  Instead of having a ship warp in when the player calls for one, the player would fly towards a ship already in mission and once within a certain range, use the same key command as FS, but then AI will take over for the pilot and dock to the designated ship.  Once docked, the rearm/repair sequence would occur.

Using BSG as an example, some dockpoints would be added within the bay pods so that the player could enter, dock, and rearm/repair, then undock and return to combat.  It would almost be like a pit-stop.  It would probably necessitate a launcher flag to change over from the standard FS rearming method.

While we're at it, how about the ability to have dockpoints bound to sub-objects rather than the main hull?  That means that you could have objects docked to moving sub-models.  The only real dilema with this is how to deal with paths.  It may require that the dockpoints in question have no listed approach paths, or allow paths that allow the paths to move, staying relative to the dockpoint.

This can already be done with FRED, albiet, in a roundabout way.

[Alpha1 Dock]
when
|
-and
|
--<
---distance
----Alpha1
----dockingwaypoint
----200
|
--<
---is-key-pressed
----
|
---player-use-ai
|
---lock-controls (is there such a sexp?)
|
---add-goal
----alpha1
----AI-dock
-----alpha1
-----station
------dock1
------dock2
[/Alpha 1 dock]

[Alpha 1 Rearm]
when
|
--is-ship-docked-delay
---alpha1
---station
|
---refill secondaries
[/Alpha 1 Rearm]

And the undock sexp would be a simple key press that would order the Ai to undock with the station and give back control the player...that should do it I think.

[Nuke]

yea but whats the fun in such a hackish implementation. and having the ai do it for you seems like taking all the fun away. i love making carrier landings and remember the space stations from elite. those were the days. i could probibly rig something up for a good carrier landing in fred and with some glopoint effects to use as a primitive ils. but it will always seem like a fakie solution to me.

my idea is you hit your standard rearm control, and if the mission has a designated passive re-arm dock, the hud will point you to it, and when withing range a gauge pops up and tells you what orentation you need to at to line up your dock with the capship's dock. then when youre in the proper angular and locational threshold you will dock automatically. fred would probibly need a carrier landing option, the name of the ship that does the passive rearm and the name of the dock that is designated as the ra-arm dock as well a place to put in the threshold options (lower thresholds means a harder dock). carrier landings would be similar, you pick your ship and dock in the departure cues and the ils guides you through the dock points on the capship during aproach and landing. i think it would really improve the versitility of the game and there are many tc's which would binifit, tbp bsg to name a couple as well as my mod.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon

What problem was that?
 

The clipping would be off, and you'd collide with objects that were far bigger than your ship, but the same (ish) size as the cockpit.

it was mentioned in the internal hosted forum.  I'll try and find the link as it was easier to illustrate with examples.

EDIT; http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,31028.0.html

Piccies are gone; basically, 2 things were happening;
1/ the ship was colliding despite being far smaller than the actual bay
2/ the bay was clipping 'through' the ship when it shouldn't have

Um, I can send the pofs as an example if you need them.  I honestly can;t remember if this was fixed or not.

[Nuke]

sound more like the collision trees didnt compile correctly when you converted your model. is this thing a build specific problem?. might have something to do with the fact that your pilot is an open model. might want to try closing up some of the polies or actually modeling him as part of the seat. i havent ran into your problem, bacause i havent made a pilot model for my cockpitted ships yet.

brings me to another idea, custom pilot model. perhaps you could use the vwep code. a select4ed pilot model would be placed at the eye point (you would also need to make the pilot's middle in or in front his head).

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Do transports and cargo automatically carry cargo if not specified?

EG would it break compatibility if that section of code were automatically enabled for all ships instead of just transports/cargo?

If no cargo is specified, then they'll display "no cargo".  If you select cargo for something other than a transport or cargo container, it won't display it.  I'd like to change this.  It wouldn't break compatability if only activated by table entry.  Perhaps not by the same type of table entry I specified, though perhaps by something more like just straight "+carries cargo", with no yes/no section.  It would only activate on a ship with this entry, and thus not break compatability.  It's just like the stealth entry in that respect.

[WMCoolmon]

Sounds like something for the custom ship classes idea, actually.

Is it time critical at all?

Edit:

Originally posted by aldo_14


The clipping would be off, and you'd collide with objects that were far bigger than your ship, but the same (ish) size as the cockpit.

it was mentioned in the internal hosted forum.  I'll try and find the link as it was easier to illustrate with examples.

EDIT; http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,31028.0.html

Piccies are gone; basically, 2 things were happening;
1/ the ship was colliding despite being far smaller than the actual bay
2/ the bay was clipping 'through' the ship when it shouldn't have

Um, I can send the pofs as an example if you need them.  I honestly can;t remember if this was fixed or not.

2) This should be fixed...if not then I know how to fix it.

1) The collission code should have nothing to do with the rendering calls in there...only thing I can see is if the gr_zbuffer_clear() function somehow effects it, but it shouldn't. (Seeing as how it's a graphics and not a physics function.)

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Sounds like something for the custom ship classes idea, actually.

Is it time critical at all?

Not extremely.  I just know that there are a few TBP transport ships that work better with fighter/bomber AI, but still should be able to carry cargo.

[TrashMan]

Say..that escape pod thing..can it currently be simulated in any way with some exotic FREDing?

[Nuke]

give fred the ability to save and load complex event scripts.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Sounds like something for the custom ship classes idea, actually.

Is it time critical at all?

Edit:

2) This should be fixed...if not then I know how to fix it.

1) The collission code should have nothing to do with the rendering calls in there...only thing I can see is if the gr_zbuffer_clear() function somehow effects it, but it shouldn't. (Seeing as how it's a graphics and not a physics function.)

I'm not sure.  It seems to only happen with that one particular model, and I'm having nagging doubts about its stability now.  Um..... I'll need to run some proper tests, I may have jumped the gun a bit.

As an aside; it'd be nice to be able to set objects to be only displayed on (i.e. if part of) the players ship.  For example, having a cockpit with really detailed greebling in the cockpit, only visible in the cockpit.  Can that already be done by subobject LODing?  (I'm thinking stuff like switches, high detail pilot models, etc)

It'd also be handy to turn off some objects in the same context; I'm thinking specifically to do with the pilot model here.

[Axem]

The ability to trigger Bob's rotational animation code through FRED

[WMCoolmon]

I think you could do that with subobject LODing. Mostly it depends on whether the code uses the eyepoint as the determining factor or the player ship position. It should use the eyepoint though, as if not it wouldn't work for viewing other ships externally.

[StratComm]

That sounds like what happened when I tried to give a capital ship the show ship flag.  It was displayed as though the model being rendered as the visible ship (from the current eye position) was about 10x as big as it should have been, with things rendering on top of it as though they were much smaller and much closer than they really were.

[WMCoolmon]

I don't see why it should've done that. If the ship has a show ship flag, it should be rendered last ie after the zbuffer has been cleared so it should be impossible for other objects to be in front of it...unless I misunderstood how the zbuffer works?

[CaptJosh]

I just had a feature idea for the launcher. How about altering it so that it can load mods that are in directories with spaces in the directory name?

[StratComm]

I'm going to pretend I didn't see you request as a feature something that's currently listed as a bug.  RandomTiger (the guy who wrote the launcher) is aware of it, but 1) he's not here right now and 2) it's not AT ALL trivial since the directory name is getting parsed from the command line (which is space-delimited).

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
I don't see why it should've done that. If the ship has a show ship flag, it should be rendered last ie after the zbuffer has been cleared so it should be impossible for other objects to be in front of it...unless I misunderstood how the zbuffer works?

That's what I thought, but I can still easily reproduce it.  I might need to point out that it isn't the player ship that's doing this, but a capship that I'm viewing from.