[DarthWang]

Is there any way to make primary weapon shots home in on targets?

[bigchunk1]

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl#.24Homing:

If you read that, I don't believe so. Primaries can autotrack targets(ex. prometheus frame in WOD), but in order for a shot to actively turn to seek its target it needs to be secondary.

[General Battuta]

Autoaim yes, homing don't think so yet.

[MetalDestroyer]

You can trick as a secondary weapons. Here an example for you in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzne3l5SsN0&feature=related#start=1:30

[headdie]

when you think about it the avenger should be capable of at least limited auto aiming from it's description, I wonder if ever had that in mind?

[Getter Robo G]

MetalDestroyer, What do you mean by "trick".

Are you disguising a Secondary Entry as a primary weapon Description/Intent?

[Qent]

Yeah, I think you need to make the primary weapon explode (with Detonation Range) and spawn a homing secondary as a submunition. At least that's how I've always done it.

[Shivan Hunter]

Do that and it'll count as a secondary hit instead of a primary hit in the accuracy thingy. It should also detonate and release a primary just before it hits, using Detonation Radius, so this doesn't happen.

[Droid803]

Wouldn't that still affect accuracy due to the detonations?

[Nuke]

make 2 weapons weapon x is the primary weapon you arm your ship with. then make weapon y, a homing secondary weapon that looks kinda like x. then just run a script to detect any weapon with name x, then create homing weapon y, copy important data (orientation, position, velocity, and parent) from x -> y, then delete x (you can do this by setting its life to 0).

alternatively theres a new feature that lets you substitute a shot with another shot, supposedly you can use a secondary weapon as the replacement for a primary. dont know if its in trunk yet or not.

[Goober5000]

You know, one of the main distinctions between primary and secondary weapons is that secondaries generally home but primaries don't.  So what you're asking is contradictory by definition.

Making primaries home would gain you nothing you don't already have, and would introduce a great deal of confusion into the code.

[The E]

Then why are there dumbfire missiles....?

I mean, thinking beyond the weapon categories imposed by FS, homing primaries do have a place, I think. The people doing more anime-ish stuff would cetainly like it.

[Commander Zane]

Because like Descent, secondaries were explosive warheads, and there were dumbfire & homing missiles.

[Nuke]

we have already blurred the difference between primary and secondary to the point that its arbitrary. for example we have primaries that use ammo, and have explosive tipped ammo. doesn't seem like now is the time to draw hard lines between what makes a secondary weapon secondary and a primary primary.

the way i have always understood it is that primary weapons are the first choice weapons that you use most of the time, and secondaries are the weapons that you use at an appropriate time when you need a specific tool for the job at hand. if you follow military history there was a time when we considered guns on a fighter were obsolete, and made missiles the primary weapon, eliminating the gun entirely. of course there are situations where guns are appropriate, so we made an add-on pod as a secondary option. then we re-integrated the gun back into the aircraft in later fighters, yet still considered it a secondary option. guns in modern fighter jets are still considered a secondary weapon. of course then you have a jet like the a-10 where the gun is once again primary. a modern mobile artillery piece can fire guided ammo as well, the  main gun being in essence a primary weapon, say it also has a machine gun turret for defense, it would be the secondary weapon.

i dont really see any harm in blurring the lines further so long as it doesn't break anything. it would definitely ensure that we never get bored with the weapon configurations we can come up with by mixing and matching different weapon features.

[DarthWang]

Because like Descent, secondaries were explosive warheads, and there were dumbfire & homing missiles.

And the Omega and EMD were homing primaries

[Trivial Psychic]

Rather than homing primaries, I'd rather see a essentially player-primary turret capabilities.  I know that its been "improvised" for some of BP (though I have yet to play it), but I was thinking rather of a small fighter chin or rear-defense turret similar to those on the fighters from S:AAB.  It would also be useful on ships such as the TBP Whitestar, so that the main beam gun can be both player-controlled primary, and lock-targeting turret.

[General Battuta]

'Improvised'? In what way was it improvised? Turrets on player ships in BP worked perfectly. BP has ships with chin turrets and rear-defense turrets exactly like you describe, and controllable capships where you can set the targets of the turrets.

[Droid803]

Well, it has all of what he descibed except the actual ability to fire it by squeezing the trigger
(well, I'm assuming that's what he means by player-controlled)

[General Battuta]

orite. That would definitely be pretty neat. Also manual aiming, I guess, though Nuke has pulled that off.

[Nuke]

orite. That would definitely be pretty neat. Also manual aiming, I guess, though Nuke has pulled that off.

the way i figure it its more of a gameplay issue. if youre controlling the turret its difficult to also control the ship and vice versa. freelancer pulled it off with its interface pretty successfully. i have actually managed to emulate freelancer style flight in some old scripts that probably dont work anymore.

but thats not how youre supposed to play freespace. so i also tried using freelook as the aiming device, so you can aim your turrets by looking at stuff. this worked ok but was very hard to aim.

control for firing the guns is not that hard and can be accomplished in several different ways. you can check if the player has fired its primaries and call fireTurret() if it has happened.  a more intuitive way is to use a proxy weapon (a weapon that essentially does nothing) that when fired is detected and causes a specific turret to fire, this allows you to fire subsets of turrets assigned to a specific bank, so you can select turret groups by selecting your weapons. you could also come up with a from scratch fire control system.

would probably work for ships in the ultra heavy bomber class and up. for anything smaller, simply providing a fire button for the turrets is enough perhaps with some code to make it only target ships that are targeted or directly in front of you. there are situations where you might want to switch on autopilot and man the turrets. those would need to be heavily scripted missions to be good. it would work on capships though, where you really just want to set a course and after that its all turret work.