[Nightmare]

So I guess that the perception of up and down is mostly up to the presence of background objects and the orientation of major capital ships.

I think that we also need to consider turret coverage when it comes to full 3D battlespace. For example, I think that most FS2 capships have got holes in AAA coverage in their horizontal planes, which kinda streamlines the gameplay. But on the other hand, many ships tend to have large zones with no anti-cap weapons underneath them, like Deimos and Sobek.

Most ships in FS2 have their main weapons aligned on a certain axis, so there are holes that could be used for tactical strikes.

Hell, the fact that most ships in FS have minute+ life times, doing some kind of GOAP (FEAR AI) or other planning approach could actually be viable.

So far you've got to make everything with bare SEXP hands.

[Firesteel]

So far you've got to make everything with bare SEXP hands.

As an AI researcher, I might be able to convince someone in my department that this is somehow related to the things I'm currently doing so I can try and add some more modern AI code in there. Since mission files are plain text, I think doing something creative with the events for controlling ship behavior is actually pretty feasible, even if it starts out as loading them all into a data structure and then giving them some kind of dynamically weighted priority on execution.

[General Battuta]

The big issue with any kind of advanced capship behavior is preventing them from running into each other. Unscripted, 'twitchy' capship movement can also look really goofy.

[Mito [PL]]

I mostly meant capital ship movements in regard to other capital ships. Something like Deimos corvettes are doing in Delenda Est, roll when they lose main beams one of their sides. I feel like capital ships in Freespace generally move too slow relative to fighters to really be able to make a visible difference. And in many instances the proper movements can be at least vaguely recreated with not so complex systems of SEXPs.

On the other hand, a really improved AI code would grant us the capability to make faster ships move better.

[Firesteel]

Not having looked at the current state of the AI code, I don't know how ships follow orders, but a more robust order system and better behavior based on orders is probably something useful to try and deal with.

[General Battuta]

You'd think so, but I honestly believe the best way to get better capship fights is to expand the sexp/scripting tools available to mission designers, not the warship AI. You generally do not want to let warships do anything under their own control except for fire anti-fighter weapons. Everything else should be scripted.

The exception, I guess, is capship command missions. Even there I try to have enemy ships moving on waypoints relative to the player ship. This can get complicated and irritating in a few specific cases which I am currently too dumb to remember and explain.

[General Battuta]

One of my dream goals for BP2 Act 4 is to have a fully consistent set of 'advanced' warship behaviors, unifying their jump charge, turret ROF, armor class, ECM state, and damage control into one coherent model that players can interact with and learn, rather than doing it on an ad-hoc basis per mission.

[Firesteel]

That last post was more about fighters and bombers rather than cap ships since the fighters and bombers in FS have at least semi-coherent behavior when it comes to telling them to attack or guard something (outside of the FSPort tutorial about giving orders, ironically)

Looking back at the many years ago attempts I made at Fredding, yeah the baseline capship behaviors are really bad.

Is there an orient ship axis to another ship axis SEXP at all?

[Firesteel]

I guess another question (since I'm not that familiar with the codebase) is, is that more of an additional engine functionality thing you'd ideally want, a lua scripting thing, or something else. Cause off hand that sounds like a reasonably sized class that would be fairly easy to hook into things (or as easy as C++ ever lets anything be).

[Admiral MS]

For RTS games proper intuitive controls for 3D space are not so simple and to actually understand how ships are positioned relative to each other a reference plane is more or less required. Then naturally everything ends up somehow oriented towards the reference plane, just to make it easier for the creator and user. In addition, Freespace movement/AI code seemed to try to orient ships along the X-Z plane in some cases.

If you just want capships to be able to move-attack something in 3D space without bouncing into each other (approximate ships as spheres or blocks) and orient themself in such a way that they get most firepower on the target (also big guns shooting only at specified target and no friendly fire on other caps in the way), then lua scripting using the current codebase is good enough. I had a mostly working version of that 5 years ago or so, but never got around to make it standalone from the other Freespace RTS mod stuff. It also had its own order management system so the original orders won't interfere with the scripted actions but still get tracked.

In the end lua scripting/sexps can get you the information you need and also provide the tools to make capships do any type of movement or shooting. Half of it can probably done with SEXPs alone nowadays. I think the lua interface is also able to load external modules so maybe new AI code can be integrated without changing the original AI code. That code is a mess, unless someone completely reworked that stuff within the last 6-7 years since I last added some AI features and made it even worse.

[0rph3u5]

If there is one thing I have learned from going back to the FS1 era recently, it is that you actually gain something for leaving the "overactive" capital ships and their role in FS2 and BP behind. In order to create spaces for player performance, reducing the role capital ship play in a mission might acutally a good thing.

Granted the follow-through is not always that easy. The sound and fury of the FS2 capital ships really is impressive, and therefor a hard tool to surrender, after all. (Not to mention approriate in some cases).

EDIT: added 2nd paragraph

[X3N0-Life-Form]

I can understand both sentiment. I feel the effort spent in FS2 to make them feel like something more than a big target to destroy or defend was well spent - I could spend the day listing all the positives that came with it, but it did cut into the amount of time spent on pure old-school dogfighting. Personally, I tend to lean more in favor of using capships. Outside their awesome factor, I feel that they are easier to build around than most other potential Targets of Interest - non-combattants are usually fragile, big space stations or disabled warships should probably be comparatively rare.

In the end though, capships are only one tool in the mission designer's toolbox, and FS2 itself tread rather carefully around them, and didn't hesitate to tweak them as the mission required. The Aeolus famously never makes an appearance at full power; there's quite a few TerSlash that get replaced by the weaker GreenBeam; the Rakshasa rarely appears with all three SReds; the Lilith only appears once; the Ravana, Sathanas and Hatshepsut are so powerful that most of their fights are thoroughly scripted to either wipe out their target instantly or to make sure that they don't.

You generally do not want to let warships do anything under their own control except for fire anti-fighter weapons. Everything else should be scripted.

I'm usually fine with them firing their big guns at will, but I certainly would recommend mission designers to not hesitate to beam/turret-lock them and go manual at dramatic moment, eg. simulate lucky shots/critical hits, decreasing performance as damage piles up, perform alpha strikes, or even script every shot in a given battle if necessary.

One of my dream goals for BP2 Act 4 is to have a fully consistent set of 'advanced' warship behaviors, unifying their jump charge, turret ROF, armor class, ECM state, and damage control into one coherent model that players can interact with and learn, rather than doing it on an ad-hoc basis per mission.

I think quite a few of us have had that dream
It was one of my underlying goals back when I started working on an ability manager many years ago, I wanted to be able to have all ships of certain types/variants be able to use BP-style abilities in any given mission if I wanted to, so that all that stuff would be somewhat consistent from mission to mission.

[Colt]

The Aeolus famously never makes an appearance at full power;

Huh. Was it originally to have different weapons?

I'm usually fine with them firing their big guns at will, but I certainly would recommend mission designers to not hesitate to beam/turret-lock them and go manual at dramatic moment, eg. simulate lucky shots/critical hits, decreasing performance as damage piles up, perform alpha strikes, or even script every shot in a given battle if necessary.

So much this.

[Nightmare]

I'm usually fine with them firing their big guns at will, but I certainly would recommend mission designers to not hesitate to beam/turret-lock them and go manual at dramatic moment, eg. simulate lucky shots/critical hits, decreasing performance as damage piles up, perform alpha strikes, or even script every shot in a given battle if necessary.

So much this.

Try making cutscenes

[Colt]

I'm usually fine with them firing their big guns at will, but I certainly would recommend mission designers to not hesitate to beam/turret-lock them and go manual at dramatic moment, eg. simulate lucky shots/critical hits, decreasing performance as damage piles up, perform alpha strikes, or even script every shot in a given battle if necessary.

So much this.

Try making cutscenes

Already a step ahead on that 

[Nightmare]

Details?

[Colt]

Details?

Soon™.

[Nightmare]

Soon

Good. I'm fine with that.

™

[X3N0-Life-Form]

The Aeolus famously never makes an appearance at full power;

Huh. Was it originally to have different weapons?

Honestly, I think either : A) they just didn't expect it to be a flak gun murder beast when they defined its default loadout, then tweaked it case by case when balancing out each individual mission, or B) flak guns weren't that powerful at the beginning, got buffed along the way, then playtesters pointed out that these things were killing everything.

[General Battuta]

Plus retail AI had a random refire delay for turrets which made standard flak slightly less of a constant hose. Slightly.