Rapid-fire rockets for CH Products pilots

Momaw · Post by **Momaw** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:10 pm

Just downloaded the game the other day. After a bit of flight time, I was kind of thinking that "special-missile" mounts were a pure waste of time. Most everything you can buy for them are unguided rockets, which shoot really really fast and will break your Enter key from the frenzied hammering to get them to fire at anything like their actual cyclic rate.

Sooo...

If you're a CH Products user, you're in luck, because you can use the solution I worked out. I'm a Windows user: If you're a Linux person, I have no idea if any of ths relevant to you.

Here's my map files:
http://momaw.kikaimegami.com/vegastrike.cms
http://momaw.kikaimegami.com/vegastrike.map

If those don't work for you for some reason, here's the manual method.

Fire up the CH Control Manager. You start with a borig expanse of nothing. Click the "Add" button on the toolbar, and choose your toys. All I've got is a Flightstick (

), so I click on Flightstick and OK. After you've added the toys on your desk, add the "CMS Controls" device.

Mess around with the joystick buttons and axes however you like; a full discussion of that is beyond the scope of this topic. If you've never used the CH Control Manager before, it's high time you learned how!

The control that most interests us is whatever button you'd like to use as your missile launch button. Turn off "DirectX mode" for the button you've chosen. If you know what button number that is, great. If not, you'll have to trek to the Gaming Controllers section of the Windows Control Panel; nestled in there under Properties -> Calibrate, you can see what the button number is; it will flash red when you press the control.

Go to the "CMS Controls" tab of the Control Manager. Click the upper-left little gray oval: a tooltip displays "B1". Disable DirectX mode for this virtual button. Assuming your missile launch key is still Enter, in the dialogue box "Normal action: Press", type:

Code: Select all

NULL ENT

On the toolbar, click the button "Script Editor". Between the Script/Endscript lines, paste this:

Code: Select all

   SEQUENCE
      WHILE( JS1.B4 );
      CMS.B1 = TRUE;
      DELAY( 1 );
      CMS.B1 = FALSE;
      DELAY( 1 );
   ENDSEQUENCE

Pay attention to the part that says JS1.B4. This means, Joystick 1, Button 4. The joysticks are assigned a number based on their tab order in the Control manager, from left to right starting with 1. The buttons start at 1 and (theoretically) go up to 40. Change the numbers as needed to match your hardware.

Finally, on the Program Settings tab, increase the Character Rate: The number is the number of milliseconds to pause between sequential keystrokes sent. The default is 50, I've found 25 to work nicely for this particular purpose.

And now you save your map. Don't forget to click Download on the toolbar to send the map down to the driver level of the dungeon, and make sure that the device mode is set to Mapped (not Off, not Direct).

Load up Vega Strike, hold down your missile key, and enjoy your new rapid-fire rocket pods.

On my computer, I can almost keep two Swarm pods firing as fast as they can go. The top rack ends up firing about 10% faster, you can tell by the number of rounds remaining. You can adjust the Character Rate in the Control Manager to try and get more performance out of the things.

All in all, the Progeny is looking a whole lot more interesting....

Post by **loki1950** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 2:30 pm

Welcome Momaw your right about it being useless under Linux

but nice for windows users hope you have lots of memory though as the game it's self is something of a memory hog

Enjoy the Choice

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:15 pm

Yeah. This came up last week i think. we need a real (non hacking windoze prefs) way to fix this problem. Otherwise Rockets are pretty much useless. I think it is some problem about how SDL handles keypresses but I'm not sure.

javier · Post by **javier** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 11:14 pm

Special missiles are more like bolts than missiles, but finite. Shouldn't make more sense to attach them to the weapons fire key instead the missile key?

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 11:39 pm

Yeah. Or to make the missile key repeat if held down, as it does in Wing Commander.

Alternatively, you can fill up your Special-Missile slots with Stormfire guns, which are linked to the gun key, and don't use up any power. I'd be happier if Hail ammo worked, but at least Stormfire does for now.

(Meanwhile, making the missile key repeat - or something similar - really should be priority; having an entire class of weapons that are useless due to a simple thing like that is really stupid.)

Momaw · Post by **Momaw** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:12 am

Personally I think it would make more sense to just have the missile-launch key cycle, as my tweak does. Tying your rockets to your guns is less desirable because your rockets are very ammo-limited next to cannon-based ammo feeders. You would also have to write in new functionality that allows the player to select "nothing" as their current missile, so they can choose when to use rockets and when not on ships that only have rockets mounted.

I've found them to be most useful in short-range slides, where you almost can't miss. Having upgraded to a Franklin from my Llama, I actually miss my rockets even though quad heavy beams of doom is more tactically effective.

Hmmm... "Upgrade: Weapon: Mount enhancements: Universal missile bay"...

Post by **ace123** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:22 am

The problem is that repeating would be bad for missiles that you do not have a lot of... it would be nice to have the option to refire dumbfires quickly by tapping the button, but pressing the key too long and having 2 or 3 dumbfires fire might be really bad.

Maybe all the missiles that might need to be rapid fire could be labeled with something, perhaps setting some low refire rate?

Momaw · Post by **Momaw** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:26 am

Do you mean on ships with large total salvoes? Like if you had 4 Dumbfire tubes, you wouldn't necessarily want to send off 4 Dumbfires in a wave. As far as preventing repeat firings on each individual tube, the fastest-cycling missile I've seen so far other than the Hail/Swarm/Kiillerbee rocket pods is the Cluster missile, at 0.89 seconds, so that's not exactly a problem you'll run into with a "lazy trigger finger"

But you're right as far as preventing rapid-fire across multiple tubes. Hmm.

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 8:02 am

ace123 wrote:The problem is that repeating would be bad for missiles that you do not have a lot of... it would be nice to have the option to refire dumbfires quickly by tapping the button, but pressing the key too long and having 2 or 3 dumbfires fire might be really bad.

Maybe all the missiles that might need to be rapid fire could be labeled with something, perhaps setting some low refire rate?

Or just linked to the gun key. IMHO that would be best, since they're basically designed to supplement the guns' firepower.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 8:33 pm

Either solution is better than current imho. You could also make swarms etc guns that you mount at the hardpoint i.e. guns that attach to special-missile mounts and act like guns with ammo in other respects. Until then, Time to find some stormfires

Momaw · Post by **Momaw** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 1:32 pm

What about a tangential compromise... "Bursting" rocket pods. That is, you fire the weapon and it rapidly cycles itself for an internal burst quantity. Say 6 or 8 rockets, varying from 0.05 to 0.2 seconds between each, depending on type. You press the button once, and get a nice little cloud of outgoing.

I am very, very much NOT in favor of going the "rockets == guns" route. Their ammo is just too precious to leave them engaged all the time, and it's a pain reaching for the weapon select keys every time you pass into and out of their effective range, or lock up a different type of target.

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 5:16 pm

Make them guns and not engaged by default? Or can that not be done?

If possible, the best thing to do would be to have the missile key start cycling if it's held down for more than a certain length of time - something like 0.3 seconds might be a good default, though it should be configurable.

(And if that is not possible, then you ought to use something other than SDL...)

Edit: Or use a separate key. I'm not looking at the keybindings at the moment but I think it might be possible to free up Ctrl. Unless SDL also doesn't like that being used for stuff.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:37 pm

I think ctrl is used as a modifier sometimes and can't be used for a command. Not sure tho.

Post by **loki1950** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:45 pm

I think ctrl is used as a modifier sometimes and can't be used for a command.

along with "alt"and "shift"

and for better or worse we are stuck with Simple Device Layer as there is no other Open Source library that i am aware of with all it's functionality(it also handles the display,joystick and mouse)

Enjoy the Choice