So, uh... about those capship shields...

Mon May 09, 2005 8:04 pm by Argh

I read the other day that somebody thought mounting working Shields on the "stock" Capships wasn't possible for some reason.

Well, I've been tooling around with adding all of the ships that you can see into the game, and I've built a Liberty Cruiser that is... well... it's a Liberty Cruiser that has Shields, players can fly it- and I've attached it to the Liberty Navy Faction so that I don't have to use Encounter workarounds and keep everything XML. It's kind've scary to see a pair of Cruisers with 4 Freighter Shields and a Liberty VHF show up... pirates are just going to love these Encounters, heh...

And it works. I didn't have to do anything fancy, either- I omitted the [simple groups and collision groups, dropped the Fuses... and made the explosion extra-fancy-schmancy- it spits out a lot've junk, for those who require their FPS to drop to zero when Something Important Happens

This is meant to confuse people about the fact that they won't see this gigantic remainder sitting around afterwards... seems OK to me.

I got a Dreadnought working too, but those darn things cannot even exit a Docking Ring... so I'm going to worry about that if I feel like replacing the Docking Rings with something that works better.

After doing this, I see no obstacle to just making the entire collection of FL ships available to whoever wants to buy/fly them... other than making suitably-large areas for them to land and docking problems. Which are issues, don't get me wrong- but issues we already have solutions for.

Oh yeah, and I got the main death Fuse working just fine, too. Looks great.

Edited by - Argh on 5/9/2005 9:11:32 PM

Mon May 09, 2005 9:00 pm by Cold_Void

actually Evolutions 1.28 has capital class shields for collision damage protection - they are as weak as a mark 3 LF shield but that it's possible has been demonstrated

Mon May 09, 2005 9:11 pm by Argh

Well, maybe I was mistaken then... but I swear I'd read somewhere that somebody thought that wasn't possible

At any rate, I'm having a good ol' time running around in a Bretonian Destroyer (yet another "lost" ship)

Mon May 09, 2005 9:29 pm by Alcander

Argh, I believe you are talking about Chip's post in a topic you conversed with him in. The topic was "Strange shield problem"

Chips said:

Hmm, intersting Argh - I have never come across it... and we know of some issues - like shields on large ships not being damaged by missiles/torps... but that was about it. I will turn a blind eye and claim ignorance until I see it in Evo (in other words, I haven't found this yet - so I am not going to go searching until I hear of it... as it could take some time )

Still not solved that either (shields on capships), moved shield mounts to external parts - nothing, moved shield mounts to the aft of the ship - still no damage to them at all... moved shield mounts to the HpMount - nothing. All I found is that missiles do not tend towards the HpMount at all, but to the center of the ship (or so it appears).

Strangely enough, where-ever you put them, it didn't seem to matter... nothing affected the shields.

If anyone works that one out, or has a solution - then please let us know, as I no longer have time to carry out investigations etc - got too much work to do . By the way, if the solution involves blast radii over 16m - then its not a solution! That is unacceptable.

I'm not sure what specific configuration Chips is using but hopefully your information can help him.

Edited by - Alcander on 5/9/2005 10:30:30 PM

Mon May 09, 2005 9:46 pm by Argh

I'll check it out. I'll have to set up a test case. As for the blast radii... yeah, that's probably what's going on... it'll be interesting to see if that's also effecting a ship that's not using sub-parts...

Bah! I'm a dummy, and I didn't read the above carefully enough. Sure enough, Missiles don't effect Shields on something this big. Missiles work fine against the Hull though. Can't say that I find that really upsetting- it's not economical to knock down Shields with Missiles in the current play-balance, unless you're using a shieldbuster Missile anyhow. I'll up the radii on those to 50 or so and see what transpires.

Now, this is interesting- not necessarily useful but interesting. Even shieldbuster missiles with huge area effects and energy_damage don't have much of an effect on the Shields of large ships. Must be something funky about their SURs. Ah well... minor problem, at least in my current play-balance. Hull-destroying missiles work just fine, so I really can't say I'm all that peeved with the results.

Didn't solve that problem, though, and can't think why it's happening, either

I'll have to take a look at what happens with Torpedos next...

Edited by - Argh on 5/9/2005 11:21:39 PM

Tue May 10, 2005 6:26 am by Thaddeus

@Argh

been thinking about this today, each of the original fl ships has its own separate shield.sur file alocated to it by the shield link in the arch.

for instance

shield_link = l_fighter_shield01, HpMount, HpShield01

I suppose that tells it the shape of the shield and where to start it from.
Most mods I have seen (evo for instance) use the rhinos shield link and therfore its shield sur. While the rhino is pretty big its shield sur is still going to be mostly encased by the hull of the cap ship. As you say the only way to affect the shield with a pulse missile would be to increase the blast radius - mainly because the missile is impacting the hull sur before it reachs the shield..

My assumption maybe wrong but..

What we really need to do is make a large custom shield sur for each of the capships, or resize the smaller ones. Tried FLmodeltool but it doesnt seem to work on the shield.3db files.

Tue May 10, 2005 9:24 pm by harrier

@Thaddeus,

Correct me if I'm wrong

, but my understanding is, the three components that a model needs to work properly is a mesh (.cmp), an skin (.mat) and an outer shield bubble (.sur).. without the .sur the ship wont take damage, and my understanding is that the .sur file is 'shown' around the ship, as a shimmer when you hit a meteorite or debris, or when weapons fire hits the ship. If the rhino .sur fits entirely within the ship then the outer skin may not be showing the fire because the outer skin of the ship (.mat) is blocking the display? Is the Rhino .sur file the largest ship .sur in the game? Or the Hermes maybe? Is it not possible currently to resize an existing .sur file to suit, so that one 'envelope' can be used instead of multiples.

I dont have the answer to this as we took capships out of our mod, but I am very curious if there is an answer..

Harrier

Tue May 10, 2005 10:47 pm by Chips

The shields work fine if you collide with them - or if you shoot them.
They only fail to be damaged if you use an explosive device - which doesn't do any damage to the shield unless you pump up the radius to some stupid level. Unfort, it then affects nearly every component on the ship if the shields are down. That is why we had such pathetic collision shields. We did have stronger ones (actually - we had an X2 the Threat setup - with up to 7 shields on Liberty dreadnought - so the amount of guns it mounts is offset by the amount of shields it can mount) - with each shield having a max value to go with it (so 7 would make 140,000 shield... whereas a Rheinland battleship - having MANY more guns, would only have 60,000 or so...)

Same for gunboats/destroyers. However, when you can only take down huge shields with guns... it means single players fighters will have no chance against the capships. Hence why we wanted an explosive to work. After failing to find a solution (already tried changing shield links - not the problem), and with time marching onwards - we ditched the shields to return (and remain true to) the original game style. However, we have now made repairs alot cheaper to compensate for constant damage to capships etc.

So if the shields can be taken down by normal torps and missiles - that would be ideal and perfect

Edited by - Chips on 5/10/2005 11:47:50 PM

Wed May 11, 2005 4:27 am by burnout

On the Free Worlds mod we have very large capital ships with 4 shields each. I had to separate the shields and spread them around the ship to keep them all from being destroyed by a single torpedo. If you target the outer shields, you can still destroy them. I am not an expert at modding like you guys and I have no Idea why my shields are able to be destroyed.

We've secretly replaced their dilithium crystals with new Folgers crystals. Now let's watch them go to warp.

Wed May 11, 2005 5:33 am by Accushot

Depends on the blast radius of the torpedo. The missiles/torps only seem to do damage to shields when they damage the origin (0,0,0), regardless of the shield size and position. Is the blast radius of the torpedo you're using large enough to affect the origin point of the ship?

Wed May 11, 2005 7:08 am by harrier

No I think you miss my point.. the ship files within freelancer are encapsulated, and the .sur provides the shield outline, effects being detirmined by the type of shield.. why use 4 (or 7)?, if you can resize one to suit..????

Now I may be a mug.. but I feel therein lies the question.. and the answer... It sorta explains the need for big blast radii too

No offence...

Harrier

Edited by - harrier on 5/11/2005 8:10:14 AM

Wed May 11, 2005 8:26 am by Chips

I think my rather sleepy head may have missed something here... doh!

Will give it a whorl.

Edited by - Chips on 5/11/2005 9:27:49 AM

Mon May 16, 2005 5:33 pm by Argh

I have done some extensive research, and here are my results:

1. Using a small ship with an integrated Shield SUR attached to the main SUR = fully-functional capship. No more problems with missile hits.

Therefore, the issue has nothing to do with the shield_link. As I suspected, shield_link is there for visual purposes, and appears to be legacy code.

2. The only problem with this approach is that now the ship's collision hitboxes are wrong.

The only way around this is to make a custom SUR that includes both collision hitboxes that are right for the mesh... with an integrated shield SUR. It would require a working SUR exporter, in short. Unfortunately, we don't have one... yet.

Fri May 20, 2005 4:49 am by burnout

I heard from Alexandus of the Tides of War mod that his developer Dev and Colon have a SUR file exporter. I do not know if it is true or not, but I hope that it is.

We've secretly replaced their dilithium crystals with new Folgers crystals. Now let's watch them go to warp.

Tue May 24, 2005 2:44 am by Coolbeano

Dev has made a SUR editor via C++. I was the first to test it and *gasp* already find a bug

. SUR exporter however.. not sure.

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