[DrewToby]

I've browsed around a bit, so I'm already sort of scared of you people. =P But that's beside the point. I've got a question.

I'm trying to make an FS2 version of a battle in a little story thing I'm writin' (it has nothing to do with FS2, but FRED presents an opportunity I can't resist!), but one event has me a little...well, I'm just curious. If this doesn't work, I'll have to skip the cool and frenzied beginning.

When the beam of a cap ship goes through the hull of its target, when it kills the enemy, does that beam still do damage, or is it just a pretty effect? Would it be possible to ...arrange... for that errant beam to, say, pierce a transport behind the target and destroy it? Sorta like...in some shooters, you take a shot, and it goes through the intended target and you kill two people at once. Know what I mean?

Is that possible? And at that, possible for a total FRED n00b like me? *is mucking his way through FRED with the help of the FRED Docs*

EDIT: ...hm. Oops. Should I have put this in the FRED forum? Ack. x_x;; Yay for newbie mistakes.

[Turey]

COMMAND: INCOMING JUMP SIGNATURE! NEW USER CONFIGURATION!

Helm! Ready all beam cannons!
Lock Beam Cannons and fire on my command!
FIRE!


NO, YOU IDIOT! USE THE BIG BEAM CANNON!
FIRE!


Welcome to HLP! Exits are to the right and left. In the event of a landing of any kind, you can and will be used as a flotation device. Flamethrowers are conviniently located under your seats, however, due to the recent funding cuts, a $3.5 million donation is required to obtain a flamethrower with a full load of napalm in it. If you do not wish to make a donation, your flamethrower will remain filled with water. If you don't wish to donate and still want a working weapon, you'd have to try the weapons locker. However, only HLP Admins, a God, or a Hyperintelligent shade of Blue can open the lock, so you'd have to break in. If you find yourself inside a ventilation shaft and you catch a glimpse of a Shivan, you don't need to worry... much. It's just Carl, and you have two choices with how you want to deal with him:
    1. The first possible course of action is getting one of the weapons from the afore-mentioned weapons locker, and trying to ward off Carl by threatening him with the weapon. Be advised that many of the weapons in the weapons locker are covered with the blood of people who thought it a good idea to break into the weapons locker and use the procured weapon to ward off Carl. So, please, if you decide you want to choose this course of action, choose one of the already-bloody weapons, so you don't get blood all over one of the clean ones.
   2. Your second course of action when you see Carl is to throw your lunch to him and hope he isn't hungry. This is the better option.
   As a final note, please remember that any attempt to use the ASCII characters 0046h, 0053h, and 0033h in sequential order will result in you being trampled by Freespace Fanboys. Your trampled remains will be fed to Carl so that the rest of us don't have to carry around so much food for lunch.



I THINK it still does damage, but why don't you try it?

[DrewToby]

o_o; You know, even though I've read that a few times in my, eh, lurking, that's still surprising to see. But thanks. I think. ^^;

Cool. I guess...an easy, but sad, way to check would have been to try to get shot. But that's nto fun. I die too much as it is.

Hm. I've got a few new questions. I hope that they're not blatantly answered elsewhere. *koff*

I've checked around, and I've seen a few modelling programs mentioned. Does anyone have a suggestion on what's modelling-newbie-friendly and what, well, isn't? I've never done any modelling in my life, and haven't the slightest idea how to. *cry* But I'd like to try my hand at it, so are there any really user (read: newbie) friendly programs? Or are they all newbie friendly, in their own way?

[Tyrian]

*Welcome speech removed 'cause Turey beat me to it* 

That should be doable.  Just have the shooting ship fire at a specific part of the target ship, then put any bystanders in the path of the beam.  That same process has happened to me more than a few times while hiding behind a cruiser while rearming.  

I would try TS 3.2.  It's a little cumbersome at first, but you get used to it.  I recommend it 'cause it's F-R-E-E and I have a limited budget.

[starbug]

If the beam lasts long enough then yeah after destroying a vessel  it will go on to damage the next one behind it, kind of tricky to do as beams only fire for a few seconds

[DrewToby]

*and so, now has TS3.2* It'll probably take me a while to learn how to use this. @___@ Well, at least there's tutorials. They helped on FRED, they should help here. I hope.

So...an easy way to check would be to have, say, a Sobek skewer a Deimos through the nose beam cannon thing, and put the target behind the Deimos' engines? Hm. I'll try that out. As soon as I figure out these SEXPs. And ...well, everything. @_@

Wait a second, I can tell the cap ship to target a specific part of the enemy ship? Or do you mean simply ordering it to attack a subsystem that's lined up with the other ship?

I just realized that, for a while, I'm going to have a ratio of around 1:1 or even 2:1 between Questions and Posts. x___x;;

[RazorsKiss]

I just realized that, for a while, I'm going to have a ratio of around 1:1 or even 2:1 between Questions and Posts.

I know the feeling

[DrewToby]

...okay. *twitch* Something else. This is probably the worse question I've had to ask yet, and sadly, I actually looked around for the answer. Either I missed it (which is sad), or everyone else knows how to do it (sad, again).

Why, exactly, are ships that I add in showing up in the Tech room, but nowhere else? Not FRED, nor ship selection. At the moment, I've simply got the Azaes sitting in my MediaVP folder. Waiting. And ...not showing up in FRED.

Help? .__.;;

[vyper]

Using a SEXP, force (using the fire-beam sexp) the attacking ship to fire a beam at the second target ship at precisely 0 seconds after the first ship has been destroyed - FRED fires an is-destroyed event as true the instant the ship's hull reaches 0% so the actual model will still be there for a few seconds going all asplody and you'll get the right effect.

[bizzybody]

You can still shoot chunks of blown up ships. Then they blow up nicely. Just can't target the debris. Would debris from a cap ship block a beam a bit?

[Taristin]

For the record, and completely irrelevant to this discussion, I hate that newbie speech/beam thing. Much.

[Black Wolf]

I dunno if I'm being patronizing, but the Azaes install is practically idiot proof. Check right down the bottom of the list in FRED. As for newbie friendly modelling, Max is really the best option. Once you figure the layout it's almost 100% internally consistent (which is a claim TS'll never be able to make) and there're more internet tutorials for Max than any other 3d program.

As for telling ships to attack a specifiic part of another ship... Yes and no. Most capships have the "attack subsystem" or "Disarm ship" or whatever orders disabled at (what used to be) the code level. You can turn them back on thanks to the SCP, but I'm not 100% sure how the AI would handle that. Your best bet is to use the "Fire Beam" sexp, which can definitely be targetted at specific turrets/subsystems and whatnot, plus will give your mission a much higher likelyhood of being repeatable. Thaqt said, aiming your beam is going to be very tricky if you need to make it do a through and through - you'll need to have the other ship positioned in the exact right spot... to be honest I don't think it's the best project for a FRED newb - you're not only going to need to know exactly where each ship is in relation to each other, but you're going to have to arrange them specificaly to be in only that position. My advice would be to script the battle very carefully with waypoints and fire-beam rather than beam free all (you can beam free the AAAf turrets separately) and make sure you keep all the ships on one plane. It'd also probably be an idea to run through the maths of the thing before you try to do it by guessing and checking - I can see that being a tad frustrating.

Oh, and kudos for doing the walkthrough without being told. Not many new FREDders do that. Good luck!

[karajorma]

I dunno if I'm being patronizing, but the Azaes install is practically idiot proof.

In this community if you make something idiot proof someone simply goes and builds a better idiot That said I suspect I know what's going on here and it's a fairly easy mistake to make.

Why, exactly, are ships that I add in showing up in the Tech room, but nowhere else? Not FRED, nor ship selection. At the moment, I've simply got the Azaes sitting in my MediaVP folder. Waiting. And ...not showing up in FRED.

The tip off was where you've installed the Azaes. You've put it in the mediavps folder. That is going to cause a whole bunch of issues so lets deal with them in order.

1) Never install mods to the mediavps folder unless you know exactly what you are doing. When you install there you basically override the default FS2 setting. If you install mods correctly you can flick between your mod and FS2_open with a few button presses. If you stick things in mediavps your mod is the only thing you can play. What you should do is make a new folder in your main FS2 folder. Let's call it mymod for the sake of argument. Make a data folder inside that and install your mods there.
 Now go to the mymod folder and create a new text file. Call it mod.ini and cut and paste this text into it.

Code: [Select]

[multimod]
secondarylist = mediavps;
 Then go to the launcher's mod tab. Press select mod and choose mymod. There's a lot more information on what that all means and why you should do it here

2) The above will save you from corrupting you FS2 install needlessly. It won't solve your FRED problem but that's pretty easily solved. I don't know if you're running FRED retail or FRED2_Open but neither of them actually look in mediavps or mod folders by default. To get things to work you'll need to be using FRED2_Open. If you were running it before you'll probably have made a shortcut to get rid of that annoying HTL warning. What you need to do is open that shortcut and add -mod mymod,mediavps after the -fredhtl entry.

Once you've done that FRED knows to read your mods data as well as the stuff from the main folder and mediavps.

[jr2]

   As a final note, please remember that any attempt to use the ASCII characters 0046h, 0053h, and 0033h in sequential order will result in you being trampled by Freespace Fanboys. Your trampled remains will be fed to Carl so that the rest of us don't have to carry around so much food for lunch.

  0x0046, 0x0053, 0x0033  <- that's funny!!
'course, you could use:
101110, 110101, 100001 (binary) ASCII code, hmm...
[whisper]101110110101100001[/whisper]
*screams as he is hauled away for feeding to Carl*

[Colonol Dekker]

*hears ravenous noises coming from the fabled -"duct 13"Seeya later 

[DrewToby]

Is it, therefore, a bad idea to ask exactly what those numbers mean?

Also. Karajorma, that fixed everything. Thanks a lot! =D I can't wait to fly the Azaes and its 'little friend' in a battle. And I've figured out to orchestrate it, too; I'll just position the transport directly close behind something small, like an Aeolos or a Deimos, and put both at None AI and badly damaged hull %. Sweet. Now I just need convincing dialogue (er, text), and I'm good to go. Ish.

This'll be hard, I bet. Well. If I need any help, I know where to go to. =D

Also, I'll be checking out Max this weekend, then. TS is...confusing. @_@ But either way, I wanna at least...try to make a ship. *koff*

Are there any modelling FAQs/walkthroughs/tutorials on HL? I haven't found any, but I figure they must be around somewhere... *koff*

And P.S: If I find walkthroughs/tutorials/anything that'll help me learn, believe me, I do them. Especially for something like FRED, when I open the program and can't even figure out how to move the camera. .___.;;; That walkthrough helped so much, it's absurd.

[Flipside]

Heh, I'll hold my hand up to being part of the problem there because I think I actually said 'Put it in your MediaVP folder' when I released it, so my bad in part It DOES work there, but can mess things up, as I've found out. Just remember that the Maul needs to use an animation from the MediaVP's, it was the whole mod.ini thing I forgot about

[WMCoolmon]

The SCP solution would be to use change-turret-weapon (or ship-turret-change-weapon, turret-change-weapon, I forget which I named it) SEXP to swap out the beam cannon to a more powerful version that looks exactly like the original, allowing omfg killing power and whatever other attributes you like. Good for theatrical timing.

And use the Wiki link at the top of the page.

[vyper]

Pfft, the old-school inventive solution would be to do what I said, and then just self-destruct the target ship 1 second after the beam-fire event is triggered...

[DrewToby]

Well, I'm playing around with SEXPs now, so that's still open to use. =D But they confuse me. Um, quite a bit. So...to use them, I just create an event, and enter the SEXP that I need and everything associated with it?

I feel so newbish. ;_;

*runs over to the FRED Walkthrough and all that to figure this out* For once, I'm happy a read-me is long and detailed.