[KeldorKatarn]

I'm not sure whether this is WAD or a bug so I'm asking first here:

I have a ship that has a forward fixed, non moving 90° FOV torpedo launcher with firing normal 0,0,1 (forward).
I recently set $Free Flight Time: for that torpedo type to 1.5 seconds... my hope was that the missile would fly 1.5 seconds in the foward direction, then turn towards the target.

Instead it flew towards the target as usual, and just didn't start homing for 1.5 seconds. So I checked without $Free Flight Time: and same behavior, just started after the standard time to home.

Why is such a torpedo immediately oriented towards the target? The launcher 'turret' can't turn towards the target, it isn't animated and has turn speed set to 0.0 in ships.tbl
So how can the torp be pointed towards the target already? I can lock because of the 90° FOV, but it shouldn't be able to immediately fire it in that direction.

Any ideas, insights, explanation whether this is WAD or not and if so, why?

Thanks.

[General Battuta]

You need to turn on 'fire down normals', correct? Otherwise the turret normal will be ignored and the projectile's starting angle will just be aimed at the target.

Could be totally wrong, though.

[KeldorKatarn]

How do I turn such a thing on. I didn't find anything like that. There is a feature that the turret doesn't fire before the barrels aren't pointing at the target. But that cannot be used here since this turret cannot move, so it would never fire.

[Dragon]

Subsystem flags.
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Subsystems#.24Flags:

[General Battuta]

Yep, exactly.

[KeldorKatarn]

Thanks. I somehow completely overlooked this. I'll try it out =)

[KeldorKatarn]

Tried it. the flag has no effect at all in this case. It still immediately is fired in the target's direction.

[General Battuta]

Try combining it with the swarm flag.

I know weapons of the type you're looking for have been done.

[KeldorKatarn]

I just looked at the code... from what I can see the "fire down normals" flag doesn't do anything at all. It sets an integer variable to 1 which is never used again anywhere in the code.

Is this feature even implemented? I see no code taking any effect from this whatsoever.

[General Battuta]

I could've sworn it'd been used in weapons that achieved this effect. However, you'd be able to tell better than I.

You may want to check out other modpacks that use missile weapons with a similar effect. I don't know of any off the top of my head, however...

[KeldorKatarn]

I don't need to check out any modes if I look at the source code and see no indication that this flag has any effect at all.

Can someone from the SCP who has worked on this please check this out? I'm posting this on Mantis.

Edit: Correction. There is one single usage of the value. I'm going to check out what it doesn. In-game I see no result so there must be a bug in this somewhere.

[General Battuta]

Keldor, that's not what I mean. You may want to check out mods with weapons that work the way you want your weapon to work so that you can see how those weapons work and imitate it.

Does that make sense?

[KeldorKatarn]

It might but I just confirmed there is a bug in the code, so no need to look at something else and imitate.
The code takes the argument, calculates the correct vector, then later uses a wrong vector instead. This might actually cause a lot more trouble than just this since the entire vector calculation is disregarded to a point.

I already posted a mantis report with a proposed patch.

[chief1983]

I don't recall, but Wanderer might have written code that supercedes that flag, that or that is his code and it's his bug.

[General Battuta]

It might but I just confirmed there is a bug in the code, so no need to look at something else and imitate.
The code takes the argument, calculates the correct vector, then later uses a wrong vector instead. This might actually cause a lot more trouble than just this since the entire vector calculation is disregarded to a point.

I already posted a mantis report with a proposed patch.

All right, cool, but in the meantime, don't you want to get your weapon working?

[Tolwyn]

It might but I just confirmed there is a bug in the code, so no need to look at something else and imitate.
The code takes the argument, calculates the correct vector, then later uses a wrong vector instead. This might actually cause a lot more trouble than just this since the entire vector calculation is disregarded to a point.

I already posted a mantis report with a proposed patch.

All right, cool, but in the meantime, don't you want to get your weapon working?

Wouldn't achieve anything - we are releasing neither today nor tomorrow.

[General Battuta]

Eep! Tolwyn!

Sorry, didn't mean to step on any toes.

[KeldorKatarn]

I don't recall, but Wanderer might have written code that supercedes that flag, that or that is his code and it's his bug.

Well whoever wrote it can assign the issue to himself. There is a Mantis entry now as mentioned and I already attached a patch to it (basically just one line needs to be changed for the code to make sense and work.)

http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=1948

[KeldorKatarn]

I just looked at this again. This doesn't seem to be a recent problem. This was in there at least since March 2008, and even then it was nonsense from what I can see.

[chief1983]

Then it's not Wanderer's new code I don't think.  He's committed some stuff to trunk recently that might help fix it, if I recall.