[Fury]

Could someone pretty please implement +Friendly Miss Factor and +Hostile Miss Factor that overrides retail +Miss Factor when present in table entry. That would remove need for having two different beam entries of same beam, one for friendlies and one for hostiles. Naturally these would need to perform a team check before firing and apply correct miss factor.

Goober said on IRC that it "seems simple enough", if so would there be any chance getting this for 3.6.12?

[Goober5000]

There would...

The question is whether we would want to.   But we're not in a code freeze ATM, so I think it's acceptable.

The other question is whether any coder could be prodded into doing it.

[Qent]

How would this affect other "teams," like neutral and traitor?

[Spicious]

This does look quite straightforward for the most part. I'll have a look at it.

I'd probably just compare to the player's team and use that as friendly; everyone else as hostile except for TvT where everyone's friendly.

Edit: Do you want Friendly to be applied to beams fired by friendlies or at friendlies?

Edit2: It's pretty much done now. It just needs to be decided which it should use for TvT.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Fury]

Huh, that was quick. All it needs a review from an SCP coder I guess. Thanks Spicious.

To answer to your question though, +Hostile miss factor probably should be used when ship firing beam is hostile for simplicity's sake. Both neutrals and unknowns probably should use hostile miss factor as well.

[Goober5000]

How would this affect other "teams," like neutral and traitor?

This is a good question.  Do we want to define "hostile" as "anybody your team attacks", or as the Hostile IFF?

The difference is subtle, but important.  If each IFF has their own beam miss factor, then your experience will be different if you play a mission when you're not the Friendly IFF.

This brings up another point.  What happens in TVT?  If each IFF does not have their own beam miss factor, then each team's calculation of what the battle should look like will be different.  It's the twin paradox!

[Sushi]

IMO the "friendly" vs "enemy" distinction should use the same logic as stuff like "Friendly/Enemy AI Fire Delay". Whatever that logic is.

[Spicious]

IMO the "friendly" vs "enemy" distinction should use the same logic as stuff like "Friendly/Enemy AI Fire Delay". Whatever that logic is.

That's pretty much what I ended up basing it on (ai/aiturret.cpp:1320). Friendly is entirely determined by whether they're on the same team as the player, except for TvT where it's treating all beam firers as friendly. The TvT missions I've found seem to keep default AAAfs so I guess using friendly here makes some sense.

This brings up another point.  What happens in TVT?  If each IFF does not have their own beam miss factor, then each team's calculation of what the battle should look like will be different.  It's the twin paradox!

There's a simple solution: each team gets to see what would happen if they were the "friendly" team and then the game gets horribly out of sync like some other game whose name I've forgotten.

[Spicious]

A demonstration; try the attached mission on easy, medium and hard using the provided table.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Spicious]

Were there any problems with/comments on this?

[Goober5000]

I have it bookmarked, but I haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

[Fury]

I assume this didn't make it into RC2?

[chief1983]

Not if it's not in the commit log in the release thread.  I'm currently trying to get a list of uncommitted fixes in Mantis and other things we need for RC3/final.  If it's a short enough list we'll just go final, otherwise we should probably have one more RC.  But hopefully we limit it to stuff that's already done/mostly done so we're not waiting on more to be finished items.

[Goober5000]

I still need to look at this.

[Fury]

I've been thinking a lot about AAA beam miss factors. Generally friendly AAA beams have miss factor of 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.0, while hostile beams have 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 1.5.

Now, this is clearly different from all other weapons where accuracy of weapon is identical between hostiles and friendlies on same difficulty level. For the sake of fair and equal fight (not counting player's presence), shouldn't beam miss factor be 5.0 4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 (just an example) for both hostile and friendly beams?

[Qent]

Well Shivan beams all have miss factors decreasing with difficulty (and Shivan AAA beams have the same miss factors as AAAh). It's true that there are no f/h-versions of other beams, but it seems reasonable to me that figured hostile AAA accuracy is an important part of difficulty. So I'd say that in general, friendly beams should become less accurate and hostile beams more accurate with increasing difficulty.

[Fury]

So I'd say that in general, friendly beams should become less accurate and hostile beams more accurate with increasing difficulty.

That would be logical but it is in contrast to all other weapon types in the game.

[Qent]

Oh I see what you mean now.

[Fury]

I would have imagined more people would've been interested in discussing the subject.

[Commander Zane]

I like it, though in my experience playing the majority of my FreeSpace 2 on Very Easy (With gaps in not playing FreeSpace it would have to be six or seven years, with only the past year of me playing on Medium), staring at Shivan Bombers being attacked by AAAfs, I've noticed that they miss too ****ing much for such a low miss factor of 1.5, maybe it's just chance being foul with me, put you'll have to be on Insane every time if you want any hope of beams hitting anything.


Or maybe it's for every number that is added in increments of .1, the chance of missing goes up by 100%...