[CP5670]

Does that actually work? If I ignore the bombers, the Nebtuu dies like four out of five times while the Abraxis still survives. The main reason it's an undesirable outcome is that two Seraphims arrive only if the Nebtuu is still around but the Abraxis is dead, so you lose out on two easy kills.

That ignore ship bug is still there in the latest SCP builds as well. As you said though, it can be useful in some cases.

[karajorma]

Not tried it but it might be interesting

I'd heard that the ignore bug was solved fairly recently though.

[ShadowWolf_IH]

I usually use 30%....and if they die in the mission i say something in mission like....Alpha 2 is extravehicular, recovery craft en route.  Then in the debrief i will mention that they have been picked up and are doing fine.  

Unless of course it is time for them to die, then i will make them invulnerable at 60% until it is close to time for them to die...then i will usually remove the invulnerability and let them die...sometimes a death is more scripted...but that's generally how i handle them.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by CP5670
Who doesn't do that?

Normal people.

Finding glitches is so much fun.

Agreed. So long as its not a blatantly annoying or show-stopping bug, finding errors such as the Ignore Ship bug can be a load of fun.

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by CP5670
I have had Snipes die in loop1-2 (Love the Treason) quite a few times. In fact, I ran into it just a few weeks ago. It looks really stupid when a ship that is supposed to have a conversation with some other ship is dead and the other ship keeps talking on anyway.

Speaking of good old Snipes, that might be a good issue to bring up with Singh regarding his plans to bugfix the main campaign.  That's really a case where Snipes should have been made invulnerable, since his dialogue is important to the mission; besides, it doesn't make much sense to have to rescue him in the second SOC loop if he was KIA.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by TrashMan
there is one problem with jumping out though - how come they can leave when they're critical and I'm branded a traitor???

Because you decided to FRED the mission that way?

[TrashMan]

and that's a matter of mission style and the belivabiltiy of the game universe..

so how hard would it be to code that escape pod thing?

Hm..come to think of it, escape pods should be protected by default  - the AI should ignore them unless specificly instruced to attack.

another issue that springs to mind is a recovery ship (support ship). If the escape pod has a dockpoint, a support ship (named Rescue 1 or something) would automaticly arrive and pick up the pod, and warp out.
However, there might be instances where you want the pods to stick arond for hte mission, so a ENABLE/DISABLE recovery would allso be usefull..

Might make for some really neat campaigns..

[Luigi30]

You could handle it like Wing Commander 3 and 4. All wingmen you get bug out or eject before they can be destroyed and are invincible, up to a critical plot point usually. After that plot point, they can be destroyed instead of ejecting. If they are destroyed, the game plays a funeral scene and none of their cutscenes are shown for the rest of the game, and they are unselectable as wingmen.

[Singh]

For my major characters, I almost always protect them, beam-protect them and then on top of that give them invulnerability.

This balances out a bit, since the pilot gets invulnerable wingmen, but suddenly he becomes everyone's target once the regular wingmen go BOOM.

*adds the snipes bug to the list fo things that need to be fixed

[bob-sama]

I was messing around today with FS2: col, and i noticed in the first nebula mission, I myself couldnt destroy either Alpha 2 or Zeta 1... but other fithers could... it was fun though... i got out of range of the ship i launch off of, and then just started shootin up Zeta 1... lol both alpha 1 and zeta 1 got to 1% and then no matter when i did (and i did everything), they wouldnt die... it was fun though... try to turn on ur allies when the colossus is first introduced... and then take on the 6km long supership... that sould b fun... with the anti-subsystem missles that is... lol

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by karajorma


Not an option Aldo. Besides the point that Trashman raised there are missions where your wingmen can't jump out (Lions Den) or where you need them to stick around for plot purposes or to say something.

I know.

[q]That's presuming that you can arrange the dialog in some way to suit, though.[/q]

But IMO where possible, it's the best solution in terms of gameplay as the player isn't given an infinite resource to do their job.  The traitor thing never occured to me, but you can probably bodge that simply by using the 'get me out of here' type messages and adding an acknowledgement from command.

Obviously if you're having all 7 of your wingmen buggering off midway through it's going to be an issue, but in certain 'open' battle cases IMO it's better than having invulnerable allies or messages from ghosts.

[TrashMan]

I would kill for an escape pod system.. so that the wingman don't run, aren't invulnerable and can send messages even if ejected...

[aldo_14]

What EP would hang about a battlefield to send messages, though?  Plus you'd have to make messages contextually ambigous because you don't know if they're being sent by an active in combat vessel, or an escape pod.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by TrashMan
I would kill for an escape pod system.. so that the wingman don't run, aren't invulnerable and can send messages even if ejected...

What's stopping you then? There's no good reason you couldn't implement one now.

Having that String Concatenate SEXP that myself and IP Andrews wanted would help a huge amount but there's no reason you couldn't do it now.

The thing is that an escape pod system simply pushes you one fudge futher along. Instead of an invulnerable ship you've now got an invulnerable escape pod. Somehow I can't see the Shivans leaving them alone.

[Singh]

Originally posted by aldo_14


I know.

[q]That's presuming that you can arrange the dialog in some way to suit, though.[/q]

But IMO where possible, it's the best solution in terms of gameplay as the player isn't given an infinite resource to do their job.  The traitor thing never occured to me, but you can probably bodge that simply by using the 'get me out of here' type messages and adding an acknowledgement from command.

Obviously if you're having all 7 of your wingmen buggering off midway through it's going to be an issue, but in certain 'open' battle cases IMO it's better than having invulnerable allies or messages from ghosts.

Invulnerable allies can be easily balanced off by simply cutting off their usefulness. Simply putting them to protected/beam protected will mean that everyone targets you and makes it harder or simply making sure you can't give them orders apart from their own objectives will fix things, since all you need to do then is give the player his own objectives. Balancing the numbers helps too - if you have two invulnerable wingmen, it still wont help if you have a Deimos at 5% and nearly 5 seraphim inbound from different directions throwing cyclops at it every thirty seconds.

There are many ways to resolve the problem. Although in the end, it may seem more like going for the cure rather than the vaccine, realize that its more of overcoming a handicap (which is possible) than growing a new arm (which isn't possible yet).

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Singh


Invulnerable allies can be easily balanced off by simply cutting off their usefulness. Simply putting them to protected/beam protected will mean that everyone targets you and makes it harder or simply making sure you can't give them orders apart from their own objectives will fix things, since all you need to do then is give the player his own objectives. Balancing the numbers helps too - if you have two invulnerable wingmen, it still wont help if you have a Deimos at 5% and nearly 5 seraphim inbound from different directions throwing cyclops at it every thirty seconds.

There are many ways to resolve the problem. Although in the end, it may seem more like going for the cure rather than the vaccine, realize that its more of overcoming a handicap (which is possible) than growing a new arm (which isn't possible yet).

The problem is;  with the former it's not as realistic to protect allies.  IN many ways it's unfair and it'll piss off the player as a result, even if they're partly to blame.

More important, IMO is that you can't balance stuff by tipping the scales in the latter way; if you have a setup with tight restrictions on exactly what the enemy has available to them, not just in general but across the whole campaign, you can't swamp the player without losing authenticity.  The reason I started thinking of this was, actually, an older plan for a campaign essentially centred around 2 fighter carrying, smaller than destroyer size, vessels in contention.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by TrashMan
I would kill for an escape pod system.. so that the wingman don't run, aren't invulnerable and can send messages even if ejected...

The SEXP limit has been bumped multiple times. There's a nice fancy SEXP called ship-create. I believe there's also a fancy SEXP about any-ship.

I for one have no problem with protected wingmates, because it seems a bit unrealistic when all your wingmates die within 30 seconds of starting the mission. At least then I can pretend that they have equal skills to myself.

And if I want to be lazy and send them to attack some ship, that's my own business. Maybe I'm just not good enough to destroy some objective in mission. It's a lot more fun than dying five times to get the message to come up.

If you want to be anal about the realisticness of it all, I'm going with aldo's reply, what idiot hangs around the mission in a defenseless escape pod if they have subspace drives? And if they don't have subspace drives, how will you explain them coming back every mission?

If you really want realism you should be asking about being able to use campaign-persistent SEXPs in briefings in the like, so if someone dies you can have a brief blurb about how they're being replaced. Or, SEXP escape pods yourself rather than nag people to spend several hours of their time to implement this feature that only you want, rather than working on something that would benefit more people than just you.

[Luigi30]

For escape pods: an engineless cockpit section that floats around until the end of the mission, or gets picked up by a support ship?

[TrashMan]

If you read what I wrote then you would see that I propsed a recovery ship option.

An escape pod is just that - an escape pod. Designed to save your sorry ass when hte fighter blows - like an ejection seat.

it doesn't have engines (alltough it could have very small thrusters really) and especially not a jump drive. What next? Weapons on it?

Basicly if you want usefull wingman you can allways use the Special HP in combination with this and AI set to general - that way their survival rate is greater but they can still be destroyed.
You cna still order them around but you got to manage them carefully and protect them.

And hte problem with hte ship-create is I can't create antoher Alpha 2 if there is one allready. Would hte game treat it as the original ship and route messages tough it?

Or, SEXP escape pods yourself rather than nag people to spend several hours of their time to implement this feature that only you want, rather than working on something that would benefit more people than just you.

Interesting... So you see no benefit to anyone in this?

[karajorma]

Originally posted by TrashMan
If you read what I wrote then you would see that I propsed a recovery ship option.

Not very useful in any mission where you get outnumbered and told to run by command is it though?

Originally posted by TrashMan
An escape pod is just that - an escape pod. Designed to save your sorry ass when hte fighter blows - like an ejection seat.

The Shivans are xenophobes. They'd blow anyone in an escape pod away.
The NTF rejected BETAC including it's articles on prisonners of war. They'd blow anyone in an escape pod away.
The HOL think that the Shivans are going to kill everyone. They'd blow anyone in an escape pod away.
Pirates in general are murderers and thieves. Most of them would blow anyone in an escape pod away if only to silence their radios.

Has anyone ever considered the fact that maybe Freespace fighters do have escape pods but it's just that no one we've yet seen has ever been stupid enough to use one?
 As far as I can see you're better off staying with the fighter under almost every circumstance.

Originally posted by TrashMan
And hte problem with hte ship-create is I can't create antoher Alpha 2 if there is one allready. Would hte game treat it as the original ship and route messages tough it?

• Create a pod called Alpha 2< ALT followed by 4 numbers >.
• In the same event write this value into a string variable called Who'sAlpha2 with a default value of "Alpha 2".
• Use this string variable instead of "alpha 2" in every send-message SEXP.
•  Kick yourself that you haven't been using string variables for ages even though the beta version of my FAQ has had an explaination available for them here for over a month.  :D
  

Of course that's dependant on it being possible to affect a ship-created ship with a SEXP but we never know if that works or not until someone gives it a try.

Hell even if that doesn't work all you need to do is change the SEXP so that the message comes from #Alpha 2 instead of alpha 2 and apart from the disappearance of the targetting brackets no one would notice the difference.

Originally posted by TrashMan
Interesting... So you see no benefit to anyone in this?

Nope. WMCoolmon's objection is that he implimented the create ship SEXP largely to satisfy your request to have escape pods but instead of saying thank you and using it you're bothering him to spend a large amount of time working on a feature that you want, that no one else has expressed an interest in and that could be implemented using SEXPs by anyone else who was interested in it.

This isn't the first time you've asked for everything on a plate and basically try to sway someone by demanding/insisting that it was a valuable feature even though the programmer involved didn't particularly think so.
  I'd already posted in the thread to say that it was possible to implement escape pods. If you want to ask how to use current features to implement escape pods I'll be more than happy to tell you.
 If you want to make snide comments in an effort to get a programmer to do all the work for you then you'll just get the thread locked.