[Warnstaff]

Hellow everybody. New-ish visitor, first time vistor, long time Freespace fan.

I'm trying to simulate a fleet battle, and being rather succesful too, I might add. What I have done is set up 6 terran cruisers in a line in front of a Hecate and a Diemos, facing their Shivan counterparts in equal numbers (minus their corvette). All are in wings with 14 waves. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to get the beam-free-all, or any sort of equivelent to carry through the various waves, even though they only work for the starting wave. I would like some help please, as I havn't found this in any FRED documents (unless I miss something).

[EDIT] I've put a 3 to 5 second delay between waves. [/EDIT]

And no, I am not using the SCP, just regular FS2 (SCP doesn't like me for some reason).

Thanks in advanced, and I like this community, from what I've seen, may stick around for a while

[karajorma]

Beam-free-all only works for a ship that is actually present in the mission. If you're setting it up for a ship that arrives later add an event that triggers when the ship arrives and put the baem-free-all for that ship in there.

[Polpolion]

[Shade]

Since you're using wings and waves, it actually gets a bit tricky. You can't directly pick ships of a wing not initially present for use in events, such a beam-free-all, but there may be a way around this. I don't know if retail actually allows this, but in theory using edit data to manually type in the ship name in has-arrived-delay and beam-free-all should work. You would need an event for each ship in the wing not present at the start though, which could push you close to the sexp limit.

[Warnstaff]

Thanks guys. Unfortionetly, Karajorma's suggestion would end up crashing FRED on me, as it would need 90 cap ships (and I can't get past 20 without crashing FREd, and crashes with that many when loading mission).

I just tried your suggestion Shade, but it crashed on mission startup, giving me an sexpression error on the SEXP event

Is there some way to edit the weapons themselfs to not require beam-free? Or trick FRED into thinking beams are regular turrets, but are beams ingame?

[Shade]

Well, I'm stumped then. The whole beam thing is pretty much hard coded so it's not something you can circumvent. Only thing I can think of would be to simulate beams with very fast, long trail dumbfire missiles similar to how the Lucifer's main guns worked in FS1, but it won't look right.

Oh, one thing - Did you try turning off the display of models and wireframes in FRED? If not, that might allow you to have significantly more ships in the mission without it dying on you.

[Warnstaff]

I'd only get 12 models with it on

I take a look and see if I can't simulate the beams (thanks for the idea).

Oh, and thanks for the warm reception here. Think I'll stick around

[karajorma]

To be honest I suspect the fact that you can't do it is actually meant to be a big ass warning that you should not do this.

It really does sound like a very bad case of Battle of Endor Syndrome to me.

[Warnstaff]

I read that before I posted this thread It solved the mystery "crash on mission startup" problem

Unfortionetly, I can't exactly make heads or tails of the weapons (aside from the basics - damage, ROF and ect). Graphics processing, of any type, isn't my strong point (if thats not the understatement of the century).

Hmmmmm, is there a way to "re-classify" the beam weapons as regular turrets? Without changing the actual weapon (just it's classification, or whatever FS equivelent it is)?

[Dark Hunter]

I know you can change the weapon a turret fires..... I wouldn't know if you could just label something a turret and give it beam characteristics. That has to be done in the table files (and I would recommend not messing with those unless you have some idea of what you're doing... I know from experience.  ).

[Warnstaff]

Thanks for the suggestions guys Really appreciate it. Unfortionetly for me, some are not possible do to engine limits, and some are beyond my modding skills

So, I'm gonna go with plan B, and modify existing non-beam turrets to make them nearly as powerful (and hopefully larger) as a beam weapon. When it's done, I'll post it here for anyone who wants a "battle of Endor".

Thanks again, and I'm gonna stick around with this community

[Warnstaff]

I got it finnished. It uses both the FRED 2 file, and the weapons.tbl. I've tested it a bunch of time, and I have stabalized it, so it's not likely to crash at all. The weapons table is not required, but it makes to battle worth fighting.

Thanks for the support guys Hopeyou enjoy this

EDIT : Just found a small bug in which I forgot to add the number of waves for the dragons. it's fixed in this new one.

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[Polpolion]

wee! fun on a bun!