ALL of that you said I have never seen, nor think you can do.

These ideas came to me on something I wanted. I started to work on them, but haven't had any luck, so I decided to ask the community.

I don't think you can do it, but I only been modding for a little while. It would be cool to see.

1.)would be possible as a player flown ship,very little hitpoints & an explosion arch with damage would do it
2.)it would be a miracle if equipping a scanner to a mine worked,but thats the only way outside of an exe hack i can think of
3.)no
4.)no
5.)no
6.)possibly
7.)a ship with no sur should work - i was thinking of making one to use for spectator mode

@Cold_Void

1)Please go into more detail.
2)I'll try it.
3)Why?
4)Why?
5)Why?
6)Any ideas?
7)I've already tried that, but that only allows weapon's fire to go through them making them invincible, not a "ghost".

1) He means you make a ship that looks like a missile, and has no shields and 1 hull, so when you hit something, you blow up (assuming you have collision damage). Then you just give it a good fuse and make it blow up. Voila.
2) Very very doubtful.
3) Absolutly, totally impossible. Weapons can NOT be influenced by outside forces, only blown off. Thats just how the FL engine works.
4) It just doesn't work that way. FL's Engine won't allow it.
5) hmmm.... actually, it MIGHT be possible, except in a different way. Only way i can think of is make it have hull, and when that hull reaches 0 you cannot dock with it. Its impossible to make a specialized disruptor for it though.
6) That seems impossible to me, however if you took a cruise disruptor and edited its explosion... The disrupting effect might go with the explosion.
7) Any player ship that is a ghost will be invincible. Why? Because when you make it so that a ship can fly though planets, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make it ignore zones, and thus you have to give it infinite HP so that a planet's death zone doesn't kill it. Why? Cause the engine works that way.

Cruise Missile
I suspect that the only real way to make this work is by having players fly a "missile" that has no shield and an explosive Fuse. I'm pretty sure that there aren't any other ways to do this- FL doesn't seem to offer "Missile View" like many games of this kind do, let alone give you control.

Probe
I'm pretty sure if you attach a sensor to a missile, it won't work. But what about attaching weapons to a missile, with auto-turret enabled?

Weapon Disrupter
Well, first off, such a thing is already in FL. Any weapon that does Energy damage will suck Energy out've ships once their Shields are down. I dunno why most players don't get how important that design choice was...

Secondly... you could basically do this with Missiles... but the disruption would be permanent (heh). You could give weapons low hitpoints, and then have Missiles that had wide area effects but low damage. So if people lost Shields and then got hit... voila... they're disarmed. Which could be very funny in PvP


Engine Disrupter
Well, you could do a varient on the whole Weapon disruptor thing, above... but ... I'm not sure the FL game engine would be happy if a Ship lost its Engine.

Jumpgate Disrupter
I dunno why nobody seems to have investigated what the TLR_shield does, but it might be worth a shot. At any rate, you can give things a Fuse that makes them appear to be destroyed pretty easily. Or just use a different CMP/SUR that might make it more practical to defend the Jumpgates. Or...

Basically this one has to get solved indirectly, I think. Unless TLR_Shield works. I don't have time to investigate that right now, nor to get into serious detail- you need to go investigate the Trade Lane Rings, which have some funny Hardpoints, funny scripting, and funny equipment. I'm pretty sure that some of that stuff will have interesting and useful effects elsewhere.

Disrupter Field Generator
This one's super-easy. Just make a Missile that has a gigantic detection radius, set it up as a totally harmless Cruise disruptor that just knocks out Cruise, and then attach it to a ship. Player fires Missile, Missile detects Player's ship (yes, players can set off their own missiles) or anything else in the area... goes off... no more Cruise.

The problem here is that such a thing will very likely cause massive lag in MP.

”Ghost“ Ships

Set phantom_physics = true. I see no reason why this couldn't apply to ships as well as Solars, but I've never tried it. This sort've thing is controlled by the server, not the client, I think, so it's useless as a cheat.

Don't mess about with the SUR, or the ship will not render properly.

About the Field Generator:

I would like to point out that what I meant by that. What I meant was like an object (example: weapon platform) has the continuel effect so that everybody within a certain range is unable to cruise, nothing like the missile thing. I wanted it so theeffect was always there, and didn't require a missle or any ammo.

Missiles don't have to use ammo. That's just an INI setting. And as for the rest... it's quite possible to write an invisible, silent Missile. And you can make a Faction that hates everybody else... and then equip a given Solar with this device. No biggie.

IOW... doing some of the things you want involves faking things. It doesn't matter to players *how* you fake it- players just care about the effects on gameplay. So be creative, and think about your ends before worrying about means

Edited by - Argh on 9/17/2005 12:20:33 AM

Argh, you mentioned attaching weapons/auto turrets to missiles. Is this possible?

I didn't think it was but if it is I'd really like to know how. I agree sensors is pointless as it can't send data back to you. I've had an idea for a while of adding attack drones but pretty much ruled it out as impossible.

What if you make a really big missile that looks like a small fighter and doesn't have a fuse, could it act like a fighter? Just think about carriers and stations launching swarms of these things. While rare, shooting missiles works fine so on a larger scale dog fighting with drones wouldn't be an issue.

Only problem is they'd shoot at everything including the ship that launched them if you weren't careful. What, if any, effect would countermeasures have? Would they blow up or just destroy the countermeasure and continue shooting at their target?

How would this work?

On another note, what about nav beacons? Or mines/countermeasures that show up in the target list box for a long period of time (~5-10min), I think I saw this some where but I can't remember where and I can't get it to work (searching didn't help).

alfa_astrix, good ideas. Good luck with it, sorry I don't have anything to add.


-MegaBurn


"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato

Every Missile has a [Good entry. Like any [Good, you can attach things to them. As Missiles can have Hardpoints added to them, it stands to reason that one could attach guns to those Hardpoints.

Now, whether the Missile will fire the guns is going to have to be tested. I'm guessing that even if the guns are set to auto_turret = true, that they won't fire, but somebody's going to have to code a Missile with guns on it up before we know for sure. It'd be really neat if it worked, because we could set them up with a detect radius of 0.000000, and they'd be kind've like very dumb fighters that would always try to run into other ships, while firing their guns. Whether they'd fire at anybody in range... I dunno. Missiles appear to be Hostile towards everybody once their Seeker is active, so it's quite possible that they might fire at anything in range. If they fire at all. Which they probably won't... but you'll never know unless this is tested- more than half of the things I've found over the last ten months (sheesh, have I been actively modding here this long?) have been things that nobody had bothered to actually test out. FL's engine is very, very flexible, and has a surprisingly large number of options that actually work...

Well I can test it out. I'm working on a major Evolutions expansion for my clan. Attack drones would fit in nicely if they work. I'm adding volume and power based balancing too.

I'm up to my knees in planning but I'm still looking for new ideas. If you know of anything unused, underused, or untested please post it.

Thanks,
-Burn


"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato

For a good example of armor / volume / mass / manueverability / power gen /power reserve / etc. balance formulas, please check out the formulas included in the XML Toolkit Mod, 1.2. These pretty closely match the original FL formulas, but are balanced and can be used for a very wide variety of ship configurations.

1.3 will feature another system that I'm still working out and will be explaining in detail as I get it hammered out a bit more, where designers will be able to work with ship Classes and then trade Mass and Manueverability for various factors, including multiple Shields, weapon Hardpoints, and other factors. In short, it'll be a lot more nuanced, but it will allow designers to make very specific designs within a game-balanced concept.