How do I make NPC pilots able to fly ships with my new ship

Sat Oct 07, 2006 10:53 pm by erkolos

What I have done to my ships is that I have removed any linear_drag on engine, ship and thruster to make them float endlessly in space.

I have also removed angular_drag from the ships, making them spin endlessly. This isn't very lucrative if you dont have the Roll baby Roll mod with auto-lvling deactivated, and if you crash your ship you are very likely to get disoriented for a long time.

But I want to keep it that way, but npc ships seem to not be able to pilot the ships then. Its just about impossible to them to travel a route correctly in formation when the linear_drag is off. And if I remove the angular drag npcs begins to spin, not being able to manuever the ships.

I want to have the pilots being able to maneuver the ships, and the fly-toward and formation scripts to work correctly. Or else I have to add the angular drag back to the ships again, and maybe have a seperate player-version of them with no angular drag.

Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:00 am by BlasterUK

just add another entry in shiparch.ini of the same ship with diferent nickname and for the players they use that one, with those settings off. The NPCs can use the original entry. This should work.

Blaster

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Sun Oct 08, 2006 3:35 am by Mace_166

I tried playing around with something similar a while ago. I was trying to re-create the frontier-style-real-space behaviour of ships. But, i found that it didn't really work. I could say go to a distant base and the ship would accelerate (very high, i had changed that too), but it didn't know how to slow down. Even when i manually turned around and slowed myself down it wasn't possible to dock at a space station. The autopilot was screwed and couldn't finish off the last bit.
I hope you have better luck getting this working than me, i think it would be a great addition.

Sun Oct 08, 2006 5:27 am by erkolos

I have made a separate version of the ships. The playerships have no linear and angular drag. The npc ones have still angular drag.

There are some work-arounds for these supposingly realistic ship physics, like having the docking spheres bigger.

But I want to know if someone are able to adjust the auto-pilot and npc-pilots to be able to fly with no linear drag. Because a dog-fight with no linear_drag is a "Need for Speed" experience which is also kind of realistic.

Angular drag is not that important to npcs as with adjusted piloting it still doesn't make the fight-style much different, but linear-drag does.

Edited by - erkolos on 10/8/2006 6:28:31 AM

Sun Oct 08, 2006 6:08 am by Cold_Void

what's the problem with the NPCs exactly? do they overshoot and otherwise have a hard time following you? i've never gotten great with pilots_pop but it seems most of it should need tweaking to work with this

[EngineKillBlock
nickname = engine_kill_fighter_test
engine_kill_search_time = 1<-i don't know what it is, but increase it

engine_kill_face_time = 2 <-likewise?
engine_kill_use_afterburner = False
engine_kill_afterburner_time = 0
engine_kill_max_target_distance = 500 <-increase/decrease?

also, maybe you should disallow formations if the NPC's can't maintain them - i don't know whether pilots_pop applies to patrol formations or not, but i'd guess yes ...

Sun Oct 08, 2006 11:38 pm by erkolos

Thx Void, I will check that out.

The problem with NPCs with no linear drag on their engines and ships is that they always get too far from you, I guess they are using their engines too much yeah.

Edited by - erkolos on 10/9/2006 10:26:47 AM

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