[blowfish]

So, I was making this mission where I have these two capships fighting, one of which has a large main beam turret.  Now, I noticed that the other ship destroyed this turret far to often with its own beams (not good because this needs to be the player's job), so I created a variant of the beams it uses that do no subsystem damage.  After some experimentation, I found that the $Subsystem Factor: field in weapons.tbl has no effect on beams

Now, what I'm wondering, is how this should be addressed.  If there is an easy solution to this problem, I'd like to know.  As a last resort I'll use a repeating fire-beam SEXP that fires on a subsystem far from the main turret.  But I'm wondering if this should be classified as a bug/SCP feature request (and possibly submitted to mantis ).  I don't really think that making these values affect beams would really affect any beams that already exist, as I don't recall any beam (canon or not) that didn't have armor/shield/subsystem factors of all 1.0

[Dilmah G]

So, I was making this mission where I have these two capships fighting, one of which has a large main beam turret.  Now, I noticed that the other ship destroyed this turret far to often with its own beams (not good because this needs to be the player's job), so I created a variant of the beams it uses that do no subsystem damage.  After some experimentation, I found that the $Subsystem Factor: field in weapons.tbl has no effect on beams

Now, what I'm wondering, is how this should be addressed.  If there is an easy solution to this problem, I'd like to know.  As a last resort I'll use a repeating fire-beam SEXP that fires on a subsystem far from the main turret.  But I'm wondering if this should be classified as a bug/SCP feature request (and possibly submitted to mantis ).  I don't really think that making these values affect beams would really affect any beams that already exist, as I don't recall any beam (canon or not) that didn't have armor/shield/subsystem factors of all 1.0

You could have them start a larger distance from each other and have the player go in and disable it before they come in range, if that's viable. Otherwise I can't think of anything now

[FUBAR-BDHR]

You could try aligning the ships so that subsystem is out of the cone of fire of the attacking ships beams. 

[blowfish]

Neither are really viable options, considering how I want this mission to work out...

[Snail]

How about using the Armor Table?

[redsniper]

You could give the player a new job, or let him take the day off since he isn't needed here.

[blowfish]

How about using the Armor Table?

Tried that.  It has a tendency to make the beam do no damage to the ship (about 50% of the time)...


EDIT: I found out why beams' shield/subsystem factors are not applied:

Code: [Select]

if ((weapon_info_index >= 0) && (other_obj->type == OBJ_WEAPON)) {
if ( Weapon_info[weapon_info_index].wi_flags2 & WIF2_TRAINING ) {
return damage_left;
}
damage_left *= Weapon_info[weapon_info_index].subsystem_factor;
}
The object doing the damage must be flagged OBJ_WEAPON, however beams are flagged as OBJ_BEAM.  I guess it makes sense now...