[rcrph]

I am attempting to design a mission ( which is somewhat humorous in itself) in which you have to disable ( shut down the engines) of a fighter to prevent a character from escaping. To prevent the ship's accidental destruction, which is highly likely due to the size of the ship, I've set it to guardian. I've also been able to sabotage the engines to zero by damaging the over-all vessel,which triggered to response ... but even with the engine at zero percent, the engine is not recognized as disabled. That is, the fighter continues to move at normal velocity.  Any suggestions ????  I would like to have the fighter come to a halt so that I could have a shuttle rendevous with it to capture the pilot.

[I_E_Maverick]

i dont know much, if not anything about mission scripting, but wouldnt it be possible to add a sexp like, when subsystem=0 stop ship *** or something similar? you could use that

[IPAndrews]

What class of ship are you trying to disable?

[Trivial Psychic]

There is always the "play dead" order.   That's under AI commands.

[rcrph]

I was trying to disable a frazi fighter. I was using the sex-ep when percent ships destroyed then using sabotage sub-system, that being engines, and setting that to 100 percent. But knowning that I not a very good pilot, I also am using the guardian sex-ep to prevent myself from being over-zealous and destroying the small fighter. I also tried using a combination of sex-eps when sub-system destroyed (ex.weapons) to sabotage-subsystem engines to mimic a cascade systems failure. I can get the engines to fall to zero percent but the ship just flys on. Fred certainly offers a multitude of possibilities but selecting the appropriate sex-ep can be a little confusing.

[karajorma]

Well it sounds like you're misusing percentage ships destroyed to me. The SEXP is designed to trigger when say 90% of the ships in the list you've given are destroyed. What you want is hits-left which measures the damage done to an individual ship. You'd trigger it like this.

When
- <
--hits-left
---Frazi Name
--10
-do whatever

If you wanted it to trigger when the Frazi was at a certain percentage.

Furthermore I suggest you use ship-guardian-threshold instead of ship-guardian and set the percentage slightly higher than the threshold. This will prevent you always ending up with a ship at 1% hull when damaged. True perfectionists like me would set the threshold to a narrow random value (I'd lay odds that IP Andrews would agree with me on this).

BTW it's SEXP. It stands for Symbolic EXPression apparently.

[rcrph]

Ah, thx for your advice.  I'll give it a try. (BTW,as for my mis-use of the expression, sorry .. you can guess what I've got on my mind for tonight) 

[Trivial Psychic]

I thought it stood for Special EXPression.

[karajorma]

BTW,as for my mis-use of the expression, sorry .. you can guess what I've got on my mind for tonight 

Less worrying than what the actual expression is

From the FS2 Walkthrough

Working With SEXPs
     
This file explains how to use SEXPs, or symbolic expressions, to program complex behavior into your missions. (It's pronounced "sex pee". Stop snickering!)

[Trivial Psychic]

I stand corrected.

[Goober5000]

I think it's actually pronounced "ess exp".  spells it "s-exp" pretty frequently in the code.

Also, it's a holdover from LISP, and I think they pronounce it that way there too.

[Dwin]

IMO, you should let the player be able to destroy the fighter, but doing so would fail the mission.

[karajorma]

I can see where you're coming from Dwin but disabling fighters is very tricky as they have very small engine subsystems.