[Woolie Wool]

The Condor superbomber in my Starforce mod has a dual-mount beam cannon in one of its primary banks. I used the non-player Whitestar beam from TBP as my base, modifying it for Starforce. It has a fire wait of 7.0, but it's firing around twice a second when I hold down the fire button (especially annoying since the beam has a lifetime of five seconds so the beams overlap). I am using the 5/20/2007 HEAD build. Here is my table entry (the energy consumption is huge as you're only supposed to fire it once and let it recharge--however it keeps firing new beams as the energy drains, until it overruns the energy limit and goes to -60% energy or so):

Code: [Select]

$Name:                          Nova
+Title:                         XSTR("SIW X40 Nova", -1)
+Description:
XSTR(
"Particle beam cannon
Level 12 hull damage
Minimal shield damage", -1)
$end_multi_text
+Tech Title:                    XSTR("XSTR("WS Neutron Beam", -1)", -1)
+Tech Anim:                     none
+Tech Description:
XSTR("The enormous Nova cannon is the first beam weapon ever developed for a fighter-class ship. Designed to fit the

enormous Condor bomber, the Nova is devastatingly effective against hulls and subsystems. Optimizations for hull damage

prevent it from being very useful against shields, but it is far and away the most devastating weapon available to

fighter pilots. Due to the extreme energy usage, it almost completely drains the Condor's capacitor with each shot and no

other ships have enough power to use it.", -1)
$end_multi_text
$Model File: crapboxthing.pof
@Laser Bitmap:                none
@Laser Color:                 150, 230, 30
@Laser Length:                0.0
@Laser Head Radius:           0.0
@Laser Tail Radius:           0.0
$Mass:                        2.0
$Velocity:                    2000.0
$Fire Wait:                   7.0
$Damage:                      280
$Armor Factor:                1.0
$Shield Factor:               0
$Subsystem Factor:            0.4
$Lifetime:                    10.0
$Energy Consumed:             175.0
$Cargo Size:                  0.0
$Homing:                      NO
$LaunchSnd:                   125
$ImpactSnd:                   88
+Weapon Range:                3000
$Flags:                   ( "beam" "no pierce shields" "huge" "supercap" "player allowed" )
$Icon:                        IconScalpel
$Anim:                        scalpel
$Impact Explosion:              exp20
$Impact Explosion Radius:       10.0
$BeamInfo:
       +Type:                        2
       +Life:                        5.0
       +Warmup:                      1500
       +Warmdown:                    1000
       +Radius:                      8.0
       +PCount:                      0
       +PRadius:                     0.0
       +PAngle:                      0.0
       +PAni:                        particleexp01
       +Miss Factor:                 0.5 0.7 0.9 1.1 1.3
       +BeamSound:                   146
       +WarmupSound:                 152
       +WarmdownSound:               158
       +Muzzleglow:                  beamglow3
       +Shots:                       0
       +ShrinkFactor:                0.0
       +ShrinkPct:                   0.0
    +Range:           3150
    +Attenuation:        0.02
$Section:
+Width: 3.5
+Texture: beam-red
+RGBA Inner: 255 0 0 255
+RGBA Outer: 89 90 90 10
+Flicker: 0.0
+Zadd: 4.0
$Section:
+Width: 3.4
+Texture: beam-green2
+RGBA Inner: 80 255 0 255
+RGBA Outer: 100 89 91 10
+Flicker: 0.45
+Zadd: 3.0
$Section:
+Width: 5.0
+Texture: beam-green
+RGBA Inner: 80 255 0 255
+RGBA Outer: 120 120 0 255
+Flicker: 0.4
+Zadd: 2.0
$Section:
+Width: 6.0
+Texture: beam-green3
+RGBA Inner: 0 255 0 255
+RGBA Outer: 89 89 89 10
+Flicker: 0.5
+Zadd: 0.0
Am I doing something wrong?

[TrashMan]

AFAIK, no..

You jsut don't HOLD the fire bottum when you use beams, but press it...

Well, that or the re-fire rate should be set very high..like 10-20 secdons

[Woolie Wool]

Yes, but you see, FreeSpace players instinctively hold the primary fire button when opening up with primaries. And holding down the primary fire causes the beams to merge into an ULTIMATE BEAM OF DEATH.

[Stormkeeper]

Yes, but you see, FreeSpace players instinctively hold the primary fire button when opening up with primaries. And holding down the primary fire causes the beams to merge into an ULTIMATE BEAM OF DEATH.

I'm actually partially guilty of spamming my Kaysers then spending the next 1-2 minutes running from Shivans but still .... I'm a newbie modder as far as FS2 is concerned, but imo, you should up the re-fire rate and drop the beam life time, but if the beam does DoT based on life time, then up the dps on the beam.

[Woolie Wool]

The thing about this weapon is that I want to discourage the player from using it against fighters. It already does next to nothing to shields, but I want to give the impression that it's a big ungainly gun.

[Bobboau]

give it a long warmup time and a relitively short fireing time (but with high damage).
it will be useless against fighters.

[Snail]

Starforce?

[Woolie Wool]

It's a mod for FreeSpace 2, set in the 41st century. I'm not too far away from releasing a demo, I just need to add some more ships, fix a few issues, and finish FREDing the demo missions. I'm no modeler so most of the models are culled from the modding forum or TCs that allow me to borrow resources (like Inferno). However, the gameplay and balance is my own, and very different from FS2.

[Snail]

Ahhhh, that one. The one with the freaked out species_defs.tbl, right?

What happened to 'Twist of Fate?'

[Woolie Wool]

Ahhhh, that one. The one with the freaked out species_defs.tbl, right?

What happened to 'Twist of Fate?'

On hold due to a hideously messy FS2 folder and the huge amount of progress I'm making on Starforce (which is on a separate FS2 installation I've been careful to keep tidy). I'm going to rebuild Twist of Fate using FSPort as a base. There's no way I could make a release with the way it is now, with files thrown everywhere, plus it suffers from having way more mods than it needs.

At least for now, I've dropped the species_defs table and am using custom thruster effects.

Right now, I'm trying to get mission balance right. Starforce capital ships have powerful AAA weapons and the pirate shields are rather substandard. The result is a massacre as allied capital ships slaughter pirate ships wholesale.

[Stormkeeper]

Right now, I'm trying to get mission balance right. Starforce capital ships have powerful AAA weapons and the pirate shields are rather substandard. The result is a massacre as allied capital ships slaughter pirate ships wholesale.

My mission is around there ... watching an Aeolus wade through Shivan capital ships relatively unscathed is quite ... disturbing ...