[Wanderer]

The ones recently shown by BP... There has been some discussion on how the effects, and especially when they are drawn should be controlled. That is there might be some need to form weapon - ship pairs like armor table (or include some piercing effects settings into armor table) or then add more ship/shiptype flags.


Ideas, comments, opinions?

[Fury]

My suggestion is to use armor.tbl to fine-control this. An example below.

Code: [Select]

$Name: Armor 60
$Damage Type: NormalWeapon
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.6
+Piercing: 0.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: HugeWeapon
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.6
+Piercing: 1.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: NormalFlak
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.6
+Piercing: 0.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: SmallBeam
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.6
+Piercing: 0.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: HugeBeam
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.6
+Piercing: 1.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: PunctureWeapon
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 1.0
+Piercing: 0.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
$Damage Type: SpawnWeapon
+Calculation: Multiplicative
+Value: 0.2
+Piercing: 0.0
+PiercingIntegrity: 5
Edit: I've added an example of hull integrity override. In the example above all weapons use 5%, which means that when hull hits 5% in integrity, piercing effects trigger.

[Admiral Nelson]

Would it be useful to regulate the distance to which the debris is thrown b measuring the distance between entry and exit point of the beam in question?  In this way a beam which entered the bow of an Aelous and exited at the stern engines would throw out far more debris than a beam which entered the top of the section which connects the engines to the main hull and exited straight down.  In this way one might avoid the need for a great deal of custom values to be defined for every individual ship class.

[Fury]

That still won't solve the root problem. There are many different kinds of weapons. Normal guns used by fighters, huge guns used by capital ships, bombs/torpedoes, you name it. So what you suggested above simply won't cut as one-for-all-solution.

To give modders and fredders real flexibility, this really should be in armor.tbl. Since the default is 9% hull strenght when piercing effects occur for non-beams, this value should also be able to be overridden in armor.tbl.

When both of those are in armor.tbl, it gives maximum flexibility over the feature. Especially since there are new sexps in 3.6.11 that allow changing armor classes of hull, shield and subsystems on-the-fly in-mission.

Need an example? A long-range beam artillery strikes a critical hit at a ship that is "healthy", yet the beams seems to strike through the target with piercing effect, this is one-time only effect in the mission. This could be accomplished only with armor.tbl. You can replace the beam with a huge-ass railgun if you want.

[Vasudan Admiral]

I think I'd agree with Fury here. Give control of what a blow-through will look like to the individual weapon's table entry (where the weapons creator can perfect its look in terms of scale, velocity, effect used etc) but give control over when it occurs to the armour table. (where the ship creator/mission designer can decide if it would be physically possible for a weapon to ever pierce.)

To aid in that I'd echo Fury's suggestion that it be possible in the armour table to override the 9% integrity value for each class of weapon with any percentage. So the BFReds for example would be able to achieve blow-through on a ship on full integrity with any shot, while a dinky little SGreen might only achieve it when the target is below 5% or so.

Such a feature would also mean examples such as the one Fury gave would need no fiddling on the mission designer's part, because the huge-ass railgun would do damage of type "pwned", which the armour table would interpret as being able to pierce at any hull integrity.

[Galemp]

where is
effect tables
where

[General Battuta]

where is
effect tables
where

Blue Planet 3.6.12 feature pack.

If I'm understanding your question correctly.

If you played 3.6.12 with the feature pack you can see lots of sweet blowthrough, though as an artist you may have some feedback on whether the plumes are too large?

[Galemp]

I checked the thread, it said it was a special mod that included lots of stuff (like AI changes) and was meant to be run separately from the MediaVPs. I just wanted a TBM I could plug into my MediaVPs folder to get them.

[General Battuta]

Hrm. I bet Fury can provide. I will ask him, and if you want to toss a PM his way?

[Fury]

Eh?
#1: Each of the listed mods are separate and do not require each other. Some are recommended to be used together though.
#2: Instructions had been written for the convenience of a player, not a modder.
#3: Piercing effects use a combination of armor, ship, weapons and weapon explosion tbm's. Note that tweaked impact explosion radii are located in BP AoA wep.tbm.
#4: Taking bp-3612-sfx.vp and dropping it in your mediavps dir does what you want. But you need to edit "Flash Effect:" lines in bp-exp_flashes.cfg if you want to use flashy death script without BP AoA. For example, replace Flash Effect: 7 with Flash Effect: 6 for all entries.
#5: BP SVN version of the mod already has much reduced beam impact and piercing effect sizes among other tweaks, but I am waiting for this before releasing new 3.6.12 Feature Pack.

[Fury]

There's a bug in piercing effects for normal weapons.

Whenever beam triggers a piercing effect, the effect is generated directly from opposite side of ship being struck. However, whenever a normal weapon hits a ship, piercing effect is generated from point of impact.

Take a destroyer size target for example. If a normal weapon like laser or missile impacts a ship, the piercing effect is often lost within the ship because effect is generated from point of impact. The larger the ship, more of the effect is lost and sometimes may not be visible at all.

Can this be fixed, pretty please?

Edit: And mantised: http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=2197

[Nighteyes]

hmm that's not all that bad actually, because this way when a small primary hits a fighter for instance, the piercing will be visible, but to pierce an Orion with a simple primary weapon, no matter how beaten the Orion is, will not be very realistic...

[Fury]

You're forgetting that same limitation affects all primaries and secondaries no matter their size or intended use. The effect looks crap for BP UEF mass drivers and torpedoes for one.

And some player usable weapons aren't producing sufficient piercing trails even when impacting a fighter or bomber either.

[Dragon]

I think that it should be made customizable in some way, for most fighter weapons, piercing should appear on fighters, but not on capships.

[Fury]

Those can be controlled with armor types as has been done in BP2.