[niffiwan]

The sentry turret weapons are just standard primaries, like the Subach HL-7 attached to this sentry gun. (i.e. X-wing / TIE Fighter style "mines")

I meant to specify a weapon that actually deploys the turrets from your craft, not the weapon the turret itself uses.

Ah - sorry, I misunderstood you.  I don't believe there's currently any builtin way for a craft to spawn a mine-style object. It would need to be done with something like scripting, or fancy SEXP work.

Another question, are cloaking devices possible in Freespace 2? It seems like they are just a special effect you can set in FRED, not an actual ability.

Again, I don't think visual cloaking (as opposed to sensor stealth) is builtin to the engine.  I know that Wing Commander Saga adding cloaking for the Kilrathi stealth fighters but I don't know what mechanism they used to achieve this.

[CKid]

Dimensional Eclipse uses visual cloaking on their Yukikaze fighters. Mjn.Mixael made the cloaking effect for it. (At least, that is what the Wiki says.)

[Axem]

Nah, we have visual cloaking these days. That's done through the ship-effect sexp, type is Cloaking. If you don't have it as a selectable thing, you might need to copy some post_processing.tbl settings from the mediavps.

[Droid803]

There's two ways to go about it.
The easy way is the post-processing effect.
The "hard" way is via change-ship-class and animated textures (which is what you did before post-processing). It takes ship slots and texture slots, but you can get some different effects without writing shaders or whatever it'd take to customize the post-processing-based cloak effect.

[UndyingNephalim]

Awesome I'll look into Cloaking then, I didn't realize the post processing effect actually caused enemy weapons to not be able to get a lock.

Another random question...

Is there a way to make it so the camera can zoom further in while in 3rd person view? It's really annoying playing as Capital ships because the camera is zoomed out so far, and while I can zoom in somewhat with the + and - keys it's not nearly enough. It's made even worse when I used afterburners, it zooms the ship out further and won't let me zoom in to the starting veiw.

[Axem]

Well the post proc effect is only visual, you'll need to set a stealth flag for the ship so weapons won't target it.

[niffiwan]

Is there a way to make it so the camera can zoom further in while in 3rd person view? It's really annoying playing as Capital ships because the camera is zoomed out so far, and while I can zoom in somewhat with the + and - keys it's not nearly enough. It's made even worse when I used afterburners, it zooms the ship out further and won't let me zoom in to the starting veiw.

Sorry, no  (I hate that I have to keep saying that)

IIRC the camera view distance is based on the model's radius value.  This can be manually changed using PCS2.  However it will have some knock-on effects with things like AI guard distance, shockwave damage, and maybe collision detection.  Anyway, the desire to manually set the view distance has been mentioned before (for capship command missions) so this would be a good candidate for a new feature to be added to FSO.  I don't imagine that It would be very hard to add either, just need to find a coder with some spare time (I'd like to have a look myself but I already have a long list of stuff to work on...)

[UndyingNephalim]

Two more playable characters and craft revealed:

[zookeeper]

It's worth noting that the cloaking effect is not a post processing effect even if the tabling entries are in post_processing.tbl. For example, one doesn't need to enable post processing to see it.

[Nyctaeus]

Do I see Protoss artillery cannon from SC2?

Great work!

[UndyingNephalim]

Some more random questions:

1) How exactly do countermeasures work? I've tried giving my craft the Type One Countermeasure but it seems to do absolutely nothing. Are the countermeasures supposed to fire on incoming missiles automatically? Does the player have to fire countermeasures themselves?

2) Is a Tractor Beam type weapon possible? I've managed to create a black hole sort of weapon that sucks ships in, but nothing that holds them in place.

EDIT
3) Does anyone know where the deploy Sentry Turret script can be found? I keep hearing about it all the time yet I can't seem to find it anywhere on these forums or the wiki.

[UndyingNephalim]

Nobody has anything? I've sort of hit a wall here. 

[Droid803]

press...x to launch countermeasures...yes you have to manually launch them

not to my knowledge i don't think you can make something pull along the beam

no clue, never heard of it

[Aardwolf]

Easiest to do with scripting. You can have a script that runs when the weapon hits the ship, and changes the hit object's velocity any way you want. (It's smarter to change the velocity than changing the position directly, since that can break collision detection.)

[z64555]

Sigh, guys. He said he already figured out the Push/Pull mechanics (It's basically a Morning Star with a negative mass value) but he's looking for something that'll lock up your flight controls for the duration the craft is in the Area of Effect.

Coincidentally, Scripting is your best bet at the moment. You might be able to concoct something that will 1. Determine that a ship has been hit with the tractor beam 2. Effectively reduce the ship's rotational and translational rates by some significant factor.

UndyingNephalim: Countermeasures in FSO are triggered manually, and act like the "Chaff" type in Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance but with a greater chance of luring warheads from a larger distance away (as opposed to disarming only the warheads that come into contact with the chaff)

There was actually some additions to the countermeasures not too long ago, the topic may be still floating around in the scp subforums.

[UndyingNephalim]

Easiest to do with scripting. You can have a script that runs when the weapon hits the ship, and changes the hit object's velocity any way you want. (It's smarter to change the velocity than changing the position directly, since that can break collision detection.)

That method seems to be working. Very nice solution.


In addition to the Sentry Turret, are there any sexp scripts that can allow me to transform a ship between two modes? I'm using change-ship-class, however if I set the Repeat or Trigger count of the event higher than 1, the ship constantly tries to transform and will not let me transform back to the previous state through another event (essentially getting stuck in an infinite look that never ends). Alternately, not setting a Repeat or Trigger Count higher than one only lets me use the transformation once. There seems to be absolutely no way to have a trigger fire off only once, set all its conditions back to false so the specific triggers have to be triggered again. Instead it seems events are either always false, or once triggered once are forever true after that and can't be reset to false. It's really annoying... is there any way around this?

[AdmiralRalwood]

Use trigger count (not repeat count; usually, the behavior you're going to expect is handled by trigger count) and have it activate when a variable is non-zero (and set it back to 0 as its first action).

[Herra Tohtori]

Would the scripting solution disrupt collision detection? I seem to recall that being the biggest disadvantage to scripted Newtonian mechanics some several years ago...


I would think using Morningstar's code as basis, you could expand it so that the velocity change imparted by the projectile would dynamically depend on the relative velocity between the craft, and self-adjust so as to always reduce the relative velocity - not just radial velocity, but angular velocity as well. I just have no idea how practical a change like this would be to code.


If it should be an area effect weapon rather than a primary point-and-shoot weapon, then... I dunno.

[UndyingNephalim]

Use trigger count (not repeat count; usually, the behavior you're going to expect is handled by trigger count) and have it activate when a variable is non-zero (and set it back to 0 as its first action).

The same problem happens, it just gets stuck in a loop forever cycling between the two modes. Here's my script in FRED2 I'm probably just doing something wrong:

Code: [Select]

---Deploy into Turret Mode---
every-time
and
    key-pressed
              Left Ctrl
            is-ship-class
              Aqua Vitae
                Fox 1
            is-primary-selected
                Fox 1
                1
            string-equals
                TurretMode(0)
                0
        key-reset
            Left Ctrl (apparently this one doesnt work in repeat or trigger events)
        change-ship-class
            Aqua Vitae Turret Mode
            Fox 1
        modify-variable
            TurretMode(0)
            1

---Pack into Ship Mode---
every-time
and
    key-pressed
              Left Ctrl
            is-ship-class
              Aqua Vitae Turret Mode
                Fox 1
            is-primary-selected
                Fox 1
                1
            string-equals
                TurretMode(0)
                1
        key-reset
            Left Ctrl
        change-ship-class
            Aqua Vitae
            Fox 1
        modify-variable
            TurretMode(0)
            0

[AdmiralRalwood]

It does work, but you may need more layers of indirection between detecting the keypress and triggering the transformation. The event logic for Her Finest Hour (from Blue Planet: War in Heaven) might help, since it relies on repeatable keypresses...