[Amon_Re]

Hi,

I just noticed while testplaying this here mission i'm writing that my wingmen stay waaaay to close to an "about to explode" PVT Aten. Is there a way to make sure they'll fall back to a safer distance instead of blowing up along with the Aten in the blast?

Keep in mind that my mission takes places pre-FS2, it takes place in a time when there were no shields...

[Mars]

From a players or a mission designers prespective?

As a player, you order them to form on your wing <Shift-W>

As a mission designer, you could have a small wing of weak fighters (Anubis for example) jump in and have the wing attack them, preferabley with a message like "Alpha 1, you finish the job, we'll deal with these bogies."

[Cobra]

the codemonkeys need to put in an AI code that has the other fighters get the **** away from an exploding cruiser or higher when it's going up.

[SadisticSid]

Or you could just give them a waypoint order when the cruiser reaches 0 hull. Asking the coders for something so trivially solved by adept mission design is silly.

[Amon_Re]

Hmm... i was thinking more of a command from the Fenris, but it seems you can't create an event that has to start once the hull of a ship goes below a certain %?

[CP5670]

They don't use the afterburners when following waypoints though. One way to do this is to have a disabled Pegasus or something jump in far away and send them after it, so they use the afterburners. Or a simpler solution is to just make them all invulnerable while it's blowing up. The player won't notice what's going on either way.

[Amon_Re]

They don't use the afterburners when following waypoints though. One way to do this is to have a disabled Pegasus or something jump in far away and send them after it, so they use the afterburners. Or a simpler solution is to just make them all invulnerable while it's blowing up. The player won't notice what's going on either way.

It's the detection of when it's about to go boom that eludes me 

[Axem]

The AI may not use afterburners, but I've noticed them travelling waypoints way above normal speeds.

Detecting the ship exploding could be done with is-ship-destroyed-delay. Though there won't be much time between the death roll and the explosion. Or to give them a bit more time, when the ship has a low hull, send the fighters away and self-destruct the ship.

[Mars]

They don't use the afterburners when following waypoints though. One way to do this is to have a disabled Pegasus or something jump in far away and send them after it, so they use the afterburners. Or a simpler solution is to just make them all invulnerable while it's blowing up. The player won't notice what's going on either way.

That's why I suggested he use weak fighters and ai_chase instead.

[Shade]

but it seems you can't create an event that has to start once the hull of a ship goes below a certain %?

You can. The "hits-left" status sexp gives the hull %, so it's a simple matter of checking when that drops below your desired number.

[Amon_Re]

Cheers guys, that's what i needed to know 

Edit: Erm, why is 'hits-left' greyed out in fred?

[Axem]

Hits-left is a number, not a condition. You have to use some of the logic sexps to use it. In this case, you'd probably want to go something like...

Code: [Select]

- <
-- hits-left
--- Ship A
-- 1
That is when Ship A has less than 1% hull, some event gets triggered.

[Shade]

Yep. Simplifying a bit (well... a lot), you can say there are basically three types of SEXPs: Those that carry out actions, those that can take arguments, and those that exclusively are arguments, with SEXPs that take arguments also in turn being usable as arguments themselves. For the purposes of this, the action SEXPs are irrelevant.

Only the ones that take arguments can be used to carry out evaluations, such as here when you need to evaluate whether the hull is below a certain percentage. And so any that can only be used as arguments are greyed out, as those can only be used to supply values for an already existing evaluation. Hope that clears up why this happens

[Colonol Dekker]

Isnt there a ship> stay-away-from (or similar) under Ai ?
Surely that would look better than a uniformed retreat.

AI-SHIP-AVOID I'm certain thats the one !!
Any help, saves all that flippin "invisible target stuff".

[Amon_Re]

I opted to make the wings invulnuble (spelling?) for the last few remaining seconds of the Aten's life, works great

[Trivial Psychic]

Isnt there a ship> stay-away-from (or similar) under Ai ?
Surely that would look better than a uniformed retreat.

AI-SHIP-AVOID I'm certain thats the one !!
Any help, saves all that flippin "invisible target stuff".

There's ai-keep-safe-distance, and ai-evade, which may do the trick.  Personally, I'd much rather an antomatic AI behaviour be added into the advanced AI stuff was added about 6-8 months ago.  If a fighter or bomber is within a certain distance of a cruiser or larger class which has just hit 0% hull strength, then regardless of whether that fighter/bomber is hostile, friendly, neutral, or whatever, it'll drop whatever its doing and make a run for it away from the dying ship.  Granted, it can't be that simple, as objecttypes.tbl can add in classes which may not fall under the default class distinctions between large and small ships.  Perhaps it would necessitate fields in the objecttypes.tbl, such as $evades big explosions: true/false, for the fighter, bomber, or whatever class you want to run from explosions, and then a $evade this when dying: true/false, on the large ships.  You'll need both as there are classes in between fighters and cap-ships that can't run from exposions and won't generate big explosions that need to be run from... transports for example.

[Nuclear1]

IIRC, fighters and bombers did this in FS1 when a destroyer was breaking up, but it also allowed fighters to pick them off easily while they were still running.

[Trivial Psychic]

In my view, it would be coded so all "small craft" regardless of which side their on, would run from the explosion.  This would prevent any side from taking the advantage.

[Scooby_Doo]

Sorta off topic, yet dealing with capital ship explosions....

I managed to find and reinstall WC Prophecy a while ago.  Would it be possible to have that style of cap ship destruction?  You get a death cry (no biggie scripting can handle that), followed by a massive shockwave (built in, although would like to create a big shockwave that just throws you around without taking much damage).  But whats missing is the secondary detonations, while keeping the ship mostly intact or at least in big pieces, but have explosions keep going off at least a few minutes after it's death. (sorta like batteries, fuel and ammunation baking off)  You get to see the devistation after it's all done, instead of just a few big chunks floating around.

[Colonol Dekker]

I gotta say the best cap-ship deaths IMO are starlancer through and through, Freelancer cap-deaths are awful...