[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Raptor
Maybe when 3.7 comes, you'll put a simply worded txt document in with it, explaining all the changes in plain english?

What's wrong with the readme.txt file that's been posted with every single SCP release since the source came out?

Granted it's not always up-to-date, and I don't think it includes the turret features, but it includes a whole bunch of other features that you should know about.  And the majority of them are non-graphical.

[Raptor]

Originally posted by Goober5000
What's wrong with the readme.txt file that's been posted with every single SCP release since the source came out?

Granted it's not always up-to-date, and I don't think it includes the turret features, but it includes a whole bunch of other features that you should know about.  And the majority of them are non-graphical.

The last builds I tried didn't have any readme file IIRC...

I have now got a later build working, sort of...

I'll try the latest build again...

EDIT: Oh man, I didn't realise you HAD released 3.6.7  I'll try that ASAP.

[WMCoolmon]

[Raptor]

Okay, 3.6.7 does work.  It throws up a whole heap of error messages, but if click 'okay' with them all, I can still play.  Even with that 'ghost' mouse cursor:wtf:

Could I humbly ask one of you (Goober and/or WMCoolmon) to answer the following?  It's my 'wish list'.  I don't know any other way to post what I want to know...

1) Max number of subobjects: Want is the new limit?
I guess it's now far more that 110 (vanilla FS2), but just what is the new limit?

2) Max number of Turrets: Can we have 100+ turrets per ship?
If so, would each turret entry have three digits? Ie the first one would be turret001

3) Turrets firing all firepoints at once: Can it be done?
I tried using $shots: #  No effect.
$Swarm: #
+SwarmWait: 0
Had no effect either
With 2 number of weapons defined per turret, I sometimes saw 1 shot being fired per turret, and sometimes 2 from the same firepoint

4) Turrets fire at rate in tbl file
Turrets appear to only fire at some minuim rate even when the firewait in the tbl file is lower.  can this be looked at?

5) Max number of turrets engaging single target raised
[Suggestion] Could this be scaled per target type?  So the current 3-4 limit for fighters, with 6-8 for cruisers, 12-16 for corvettes, 24-32 for capitals?
(wants to see a ship draw up alongside hostile vessel and unleash entire 40+ gun broadsides:D )

6) Turrets not firing though ships hull
I know someone (Goob? Bob?) created a 'hacked' attempt at this, but it was ditched because of issuses about certain missions (IMHO it would the missions that were wrong in that case, since they were depending on something that should not happen IFL)
Maybe make it a command flag?

7) Player ship turrets make sounds
I want to hear that my own turrets are working!

8) Player turrets default to defensive fire
When flying shp with turrets, I've noticed that the turrets only target your curret target (except when the target is friendly), even when ouf FOV or range.  Can this be looked at?

As an aside, I've been expermenting with that 'initial Turret postion' stuff, and it appears to have altered the normals for the affected turrets.  I saw turrets not firing at a ship when it was clearly in their normal FOV  Will try again to be sure.

I'm not trying to be difficult or arguementative, but this is the sort of thing I wish to know/see in game.

[Wanderer]

4) Can be sort of fixed by giving "same turret cooldown" flag for the turret weapons.

BTW $Swarm: 1 'hackfix' doesn't work with flaks as flak weapons seem to ingore the swarm option.

[Nuke]

ive been beggin for turret upgrades from day one. so im pretty much up on them. il adress what i can.

2: turret names dont seem to be relevant as far as the game goes but autogen seems to cap at 99 turrets.

4: there was a flag implemented for this, to make turrets fire at the rate of fire of the weapon. i believe it was "same turret cooldown". btw does that hackfix really work or is it just a myth?

5: somone adress this, id like to see 30 or so of ssj's dante's beam turrets fire all at once. it would be hella cool

7: it does, just not very loud. this is to avoid annoying the **** out of the player. its louder if your in external view.

8: would be nice to be able to have turret commands so you can tell it what to shoot at or how to behave. or to be able to patch fire control to the weapon trigger.

and a few of my own:

9: GATLING TURRETS
sorry couldnt resist
after all i went through the trouble of making mr gatling smiley to poplarize the concept of gatling turrets so youre pretty much sure im serious about my request .

10: i dont know if anyone noticed but if you put a type 4 beam on a multipart turret the beam would follow the turret normal perfectly down its bore, the downside is it cant really hit anything worth a damn. fix this

11: on single part missile turrets, make it so the missile will completely travel the length of the normal before homing, it would be more asthetically pleasing.

12: just do a damn lobotomy on the turret code and replace it with something better. ive seen turret code done better in quake c by 2-bit modders. it shouldnt be that hard. if youre worried about balence throw in a "-advanced turrets" option. this has been my stance sence day one.

[Raptor]

Originally posted by Nuke

2: turret names dont seem to be relevant as far as the game goes but autogen seems to cap at 99 turrets.

Well, ATM it would only affect the Basestar I'm working on. It has 132 turret ATM, but I can lose 60 of those without loss of firepower (have 20 'turrets' each with 4 firepoints - and a custom weapon - than 80 single firepoint turrets)

7: it does, just not very loud. this is to avoid annoying the **** out of the player. its louder if your in external view.

I've never heard it.  If the sounds do play, then the voloume needs turing up! IMHO. command flag again?

and a few of my own:

9: GATLING TURRETS
sorry couldnt resist
after all i went through the trouble of making mr gatling smiley to poplarize the concept of gatling turrets so youre pretty much sure im serious about my request .

Oh that reminds me, I fotgot one.  Have more firepoints per turret.  Currently we're limited to four.  For a gatling gun with six barrels, thats a problem...

Rarely used I know, but it would be nice to have the option...

10: i dont know if anyone noticed but if you put a type 4 beam on a multipart turret the beam would follow the turret normal perfectly down its bore, the downside is it cant really hit anything worth a damn. fix this

That's kind of important to me, as that's kind of how I was planing on doing the Basestars mega pulsars...

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by Nuke
4: there was a flag implemented for this, to make turrets fire at the rate of fire of the weapon. i believe it was "same turret cooldown". btw does that hackfix really work or is it just a myth?

I'm not sure to which one are you referring to but in my experience both the 'same turret cooldown' and the trick of giving multipart turrets swarm flag work quite fine.

But both have their downsides. With the 'same turret cooldown' difficulty level no longer influences the turrets ROF (IIRC it does so without the flag). And to function (forcing the weapon to fire only on the barrel line) the swarm requires a fully functional multipart turret (for example non-HTL Aeolus has atleast one non functional). In singlepart or nonfunctional multipart turrets weapons with swarm flag fires only on their normals. And swarm doesn't work with flak.

[CaptJosh]

But a gatling gun only fires out of one barel at a time. It shouldn't need 6 firepoints. The barrels spin past the chamber. A single firepoint that would line up with the barrel as it spins past should do it, assuming that's not actually harder to do than increasing the firepoints and using fire rates.

[Fade Rathnik]

if you watch vids of rotory cannon firing you may notice that all bullets fired dont fallow the same path some times a shell is fired a split second early or late which can give the bullet stream a little spread and more organic form, if you just have the one fire point you cant emulate this aspect; but with many fire points, a spin and fire time variance(wouldent need much in either) you can make a steam of projectiles that look  whole lot meaner and nastier than a simple perfect steam.

If you doubt me, go find the gatling gun vids from spiked humor they'll prove my point.

[CaptJosh]

The dispersal pattern of a modern gatling gun is primarily due to recoil from being fired. We're not talking about an old post American Civil War era gatling gun that was as inaccurate as it was unreliable.

Any gatling guns used in space are going to be a development of weapons like the minigun, which is as accurate as the person or mechanism pointing it at the targets to be serviced, as long as those targets are within effective range. In the case of a person, it's not that hard to aim, just watch the solid line of tracers. It looks like what they thought rayguns would look like in old science fiction movies and serials. Conversely, this does make it easy to pinpoint the source of fire, but damn! It's a trip to watch, man.

[StratComm]

Because you're obviously going to notice that in a combat space sim .

Of course I still believe you're not going to notice it if a barrel isn't spinning either.

[Nuke]

have you seen the main gatling gun on the rumrunner, its the size of a house, i doubt you could miss it. when it comes to eye candy its not that you see it that matters, its that you can see it.its like those bunny things in the first unreal . everything that makes for gatling gun behavior is already implemented (deflection angles for example), we just need the animation of the spinning barrel. perfect fire/rotation syncronization is not that important to me because the screen refresh rate is not suffietient for you to see it anyway.spinning barrel code already exists in the vwep system, they just need to make it possible to apply to turrets.

anyway back to the subject of the hackfix, what i want to do is make it so my single part missile turrets fire straight down the barrel all the way to the normal before they start homing. i dont like the way they leave the barrel at an unrealistic angle. would the hack fix fix that?

[Wanderer]

Yes, to some extent. I had a discussion about this some time ago and it seems that from secondary banks (on fighter) missiles fly directly on the normal for 1/4 (or was 1/2 second) after which they turn to home on the target. There was even discussion about making this value changable by table editing as a bit longer values would perhaps be better for slow secondaries.

Same can be achieved with $Swarm flag and turrets. Multiparts fire straight along ther barrel line and single parts on their normals.Turrets fire if the target is within turrets FOV and set weapon range. If the multipart turret happens to be pointing to a wrong direction then it start firing to the wrong direction as it begings to turn towards the target. That is with all weapons with $Swarm: 1 hack fix (or with greater Swarm values).

I even run quick tests with this and it works ok.

With swarm flag the homing turret secondaries however wobble a bit (set missiles to have a very narrow trail to see it properly or alternatively no trail at all or very wide to hide it) and also tables should be changed so that missile can actually home on to a target which is so far from it (Heat seekers homing cone) and also so that it can turn to the target (turntime/lifetime adjustments). Missiles also seems to have a kind of split-second pause after the launch phase and the homing phase but i do not find these problematic.

[Wanderer]

I decided to do some little checking with beams and multipart turrets. Type 2 beams didn't even fire. Type 0, 1, 3 and 4 fired nicely. Types 0, 1 and 3 didn't bother to fire on the turret's barrel line. Type 4 fires constantly on the turrets barrel line even if the turret is rotating (kind of a combining effects from types 0 and 1 = standard heavy beam and slasher).

Type 4 seems to respect $lifetime: and $velocity: entries quite much. Weapon range entry (+range: entry under the standard beam entry) didn't seem to influence firing distance but rather the hitting and effects range. Lifetime x velocity gives you it's maximum range where it start to fire and high velocity causes AI to take very little lead on the target (improving the accuracy). So if you want to have an accurate type 4 beam in multipart turret with range of 10 000 just set the velocity to 100 000 and lifetime to 0.1. That should solve the accuracy issue. I got the too high accuracy limited by both slow turret rotation and by assigning the weapon with lower velocity. Too low +range: setting causes beam to 'dissipate' prematurely but i think this effect has much to offer (it is not used to its fullest extent, Homeworld 2 type pulsars and pulsar gunships kind a popped into my mind from the dissipation effect).

I didn't test the other types of beams with different velocities or weapon ranges.