[SadisticSid]

I can't remember whether either of these requests have been asked for before. Hopefully not

At the moment the game groups turrets into beam, laser, flak and missile on the HUD when you target them individually. What I'd like to see is an added field in weapons.tbl entries which specify what the turrets should be called when that weapon is installed on them. It's mainly for Inferno in my case, as we have so many weapon types, and I'd like new players to be able to identify key weapon systems without knowing innately where they are on the model. Perhaps we could also have a prefix field for ships.tbl entries which are added before the turret name, so a beam weapon entry could have "Heavy Beam Turret" and the primary turret on a ship could have the prefix "Main".

The second thing that'd be cool is turret targeting priority. You assign a value to each weapon type and then pressing something like Alt-K will cycle through the turrets starting with the greatest priority weapons. Remember the second mission with the Colossus where an NTF Fenris attacks the convoy with its forward gun and you're tasked to destroy it - getting lock on that turret was annoying given the urgency of the situation.

Any chance someone could have a go at these?

[Nuke]

well the first part can already be done. but it has to be done from the subobject options in the pof file. the second part i think you can use "target subsystem in retical" rather than cycling through them all last i checked it worked on turrets too.

[Woomeister]

Sid:
The prefix should be in the weapons table on a per weapon basis, this way if a weapon is changed then the turret data wouldn't be inaccuarte. You don't want a anti-fighter laser turret that now has an anti-cap railgun to still say it's an anti-fighter laser turret.
Though asking for new features when the mod only works on Sept 2005 builds is a bit of a waste...

Nuke:
I think what he wants is a better way to tell what weapon is on a turret. Most primary weapons are marked as 'laser turret' in the bottom left of the hud. For Inferno this could be one of several types of anti-fighter turret or an anti-cap plasma/railgun weapon that needs to be quickly disabled. It would also help to determine if a beam is a AAA beam or a big anti-cap one to for those unfamiliar with what a ship is carrying. Until one of our railgun/plasma weapons is fired the player might think it's a standard anti-fighter weapon. The POF data can say it's whatever turret you want, but the hud could say something different. The target subsystem in retical isn't always accurate if you have a turret defending a subsystem as that function may target the subsystem even if you directly facing the turret because the subsysten radius covers the turret.

This is less of an issue for regular FS2 ships as they rely mostly on their beams to attack other ships and have far less variation in weapons than our ships.

[WMCoolmon]

Though asking for new features when the mod only works on Sept 2005 builds is a bit of a waste...

That's funny. It must work, because I see nothing in Mantis, and there's been over three months to write up a bug report. Especially since redmenace has been releasing Inferno builds all that time.

[Woomeister]

I only upgraded my laptops INF build once the species_defs and difficulty table were out of date. So it' only been a problem since mid December. I contacted Taylor thinking it was an Open Al problem since we were getting crashes a few builds before from some of our sounds being encoded funny. However he thought it was a memory overwrite problem and wanted to get me some special retail and debug builds both DS and Open Al to narrow down the problem.

Actually most Inferno problems aren't put on mantis. We have some...unique issues that no-one else seems to have. Unforunately we lack the staff to do proper testing and no-one seems to have the time to actually get them on mantis. We've had some gameplay issues lying in our internal for far longer than 3 months now such as the ai ignoring the protect ship flag and not playing dead. Goobers aware of those two.
I'm hoping to assemble a proper testing team in the near future and to get someone who will work with mantis and our testers so we can get feedback to you as quickly as possible. We currently having different staff modifying the same tables at the same time, which is causing slowdowns with getting things up to date for proper testing.

[WMCoolmon]

Well at this point, one of the handicaps to mods getting bugs fixed is that I notice a lot of them seem to work around bugs rather than actually try and get them fixed. As a result you have various features that don't work, but nobody actually knows because nobody bothers to report them.

Even if something turns out to just be a data error, it's usually possible to throw in checks or a more accurate error so the next person that comes along doesn't spend 3-4 hours trying to figure it out aswell.

[SadisticSid]

Nuke: the POF way of doing it is not adequate and it wouldn't work when you changed a turret's weapon, which is necessary sometimes.

Woo: I wasn't thinking of adding anti-fighter or anything like that - something generic like Primary or Armoured dependin on the sort of weapons that might be added to it. Just an idea.

[Woomeister]

Well at this point, one of the handicaps to mods getting bugs fixed is that I notice a lot of them seem to work around bugs rather than actually try and get them fixed. As a result you have various features that don't work, but nobody actually knows because nobody bothers to report them.

Before Redmenace starting providing builds we also had the problem of being several months behind in builds and so there was no point putting stuff on mantis when your running way outdated builds (when the problems were fixed when we got a new build)

Well the only one we have a full work around for is the colliding support ship problem which Goober thought was quite funny.
He suggested a work around for the play dead problem by disabling all the 'dead' fighters. However they then self destruct after a certain amount of time as the game does that to disabled ships in wings to allow additional waves to arrive. However 20 fighters exploding together for no reason kind of spoiled the mission so I left it as it is. That particular error seems to be very random.
The protect flag bug can only be bypassed by ordering all wings to ingore the protected target, since the capships also follow the order it's an effective workaround, but annoying to remember to do.

This crashing problem only I can confirm, I get a CTD on mission load and a 'DAMAGE' error in the debug builds (though not in the latest cvs build I tried today) Last build I have that this doesn't happen with my last own CVS build in September. I'm trying to narrow it down with the little time I have for testing.

[Goober5000]

We've had some gameplay issues lying in our internal for far longer than 3 months now such as the ai ignoring the protect ship flag and not playing dead. Goobers aware of those two.

Yes but I've had a lot less time to bugfix lately.

What you could do is open a private bug on Mantis.  That way only the reporter and the coders will see it.

I'll try to fix the ignore bug tonight.  It's been half-done for ages now and I really need to finish it.

[Woomeister]

The bug list on INF Internal isn't there because we want to keep the bugs private, it's there so we don't forget about them ourselves and so they can be confirmed by others. The only ones that maybe mod specific are this crash I'm having and the support ship problem. The rest seem pretty standard and I'd assume aren't unique to us.

[Goober5000]

The bug list on INF Internal isn't there because we want to keep the bugs private, it's there so we don't forget about them ourselves and so they can be confirmed by others. The only ones that maybe mod specific are this crash I'm having and the support ship problem. The rest seem pretty standard and I'd assume aren't unique to us.

So keep a thread with links to the Mantis bugs, or something.  Of all the coders, only phreak and I have access to the internal.  Poor bug visibility decreases your chances of a fix right from the beginning.

The other reason is that if a coder feels like fixing a bug, he's going to fire up Mantis and see if there are any bugs that he might like to take a shot at.  He's not going to want (or have time) to hunt through the forums in search of bugs; he's going to want all the bugs in a centralized place.  If every hosted mod kept their bugs in their own forums, the coders would be forced to spend more time looking for bugs than actually fixing them.  That's hardly an efficient use of time.