[Snail]

Damn, I just wasted about ten minutes of my life retexturing the NavBuoy so that it was invisible, and giving it a table which had a stealth flag. I was using it for a shoot me location for a beam. Although what I did was pretty simple, is it possible to create a SEXP which will fire a beam at a location rather than a ship? Is that too hard to ask? If it is, can tweaking the SEXP fire-beam to shoot at waypoints as well work?

I know it can be easily done by simply creating an invisible non-colliding ship, but I think this would make life easier for FREDders.

[Turey]

can tweaking the SEXP fire-beam to shoot at waypoints as well work?

That's the better idea IMHO. It's easier to move a waypoint intuitively than try to edit those co-ordinates when you want to change where it shoots at.

[CP5670]

It would be nice to have this, but simulating it as you have done is not all that hard to do. I've done bigger hacks than that.

[karajorma]

That's the better idea IMHO. It's easier to move a waypoint intuitively than try to edit those co-ordinates when you want to change where it shoots at.

While it's easier to place a waypoint it does however mean that it's impossible to generate the location you want the beam shot at when the mission is running.

Suppose you wanted to generate a mission where you said pilot x was an enemy ace. Having a friendly capship shoot and miss him continually would look very cool. But doing something like that with a waypoint would be impossible AFAIK with the waypoint version of the SEXP as you couldn't update the position of the waypoint based on the Ace's position (And even if you could its a stupid thing to have to do compared with simply offsetting the Ace's coordinates directly).

After a quick glance at the code this looks like the sort of thing that's doable but not a 5 minute job since the beam fire code does appear to require a target object to fire at.

[Turey]

While it's easier to place a waypoint it does however mean that it's impossible to generate the location you want the beam shot at when the mission is running.

Suppose you wanted to generate a mission where you said pilot x was an enemy ace. Having a friendly capship shoot and miss him continually would look very cool. But doing something like that with a waypoint would be impossible AFAIK with the waypoint version of the SEXP as you couldn't update the position of the waypoint based on the Ace's position (And even if you could its a stupid thing to have to do compared with simply offsetting the Ace's coordinates directly).

On further consideration, you're right (AGAIN!!!  ). If you wanted to do a waypoint, just use the co-ordinate version and get the respective co-ordinates from the waypoint when it runs.

[Nuke]

can waypoints be dynalically generated by script?

[karajorma]

Not certain.

Having to leave FRED to script this only to go back to FRED after setting the waypoint is not my idea of an ideal solution anyway though. Especially when you consider that using a waypoint is already a FRED hack anyway.