Weapon Fire Control/Weapon Switching

[ShadowOblivion]

I was thinking that there should be a way for a player to control when a weapon fires relative to other installed weapons and to give the player greater freedom in the choices of weapon switching.

Weapon Fire Control:
The current "normal" configuration acts on the assumption that a player wants to fire all weapons as soon as the weapons' energy/reload time requirements are satisfied. However, some players may want to choose whether they want their weapons to all at the same time(normal configuration), or more continuously(using this new feature). This feature would enable this to happen by using either presets or manual player calculation to set a time for when a particular weapon fires based on how much time has passed since the first weapon fired.

For example: lets look at the Heavy Beam Microwave Laser, which has a 4.00s long beam and a 4.00s cool down, and it does X J/second damage. Now lets say that our ship is a Derivative with two of these beams mounted. In the normal configuration both of these beams fire at the same time to deliver 2X damage. However, the long cool-down makes this configuration clumsy in some cases where a player may want a faster-shooting option. With this configuration, the player would be able to use the first beam as a benchmark and input a starting delay for the second beam at 4.00s. If the player fires "both" weapons, only one of them will activate first, while the second one waits for 4.00s(and fires normally afterward), which in this case is the amount of time until the second beam stops firing, thus ensuring that 1X damage is done constantly, so when one beam is firing the other is resting.

Weapon Switching Interface:
I also think that a player should be able to choose what weapon sets a player can switch between, using a drag-and-drop interface. Usually the game cycles through a very large number of weapon combinations, only a few of which I personally have found useful. Let's say a player travels with a weapon load that looks like this: 2HEAVYBEAM 2MEDIUMBEAM 2TRACTOR. If their missions usually require killing and tractoring whatever is left, a combination that utilizes all of these is fairly useless, as are any that split the offensive weapons. Thus the game should allow the player to drag and drop different weapons into switching "slots", allowing much greater freedom in what comes up. For example, the aforementioned player wants to only either use weapons or the tractor beams, and therefore drags and drops the offensive beams into one slot, and the tractors into another, so then when they switch between weapons only those two combinations are available.

Thoughts, comments?

[loki1950]

The interface infrastructure is very primitive ATM but that will change with our move to Orge3d which uses CEGUI which does support more interface widgets than the current Python sprite based one and energy management is defiantly one area where it should be applied there are currently a few C++ hooks for shield management that are not used by VS but are by a few of the Mods.Weapon selection is another candidate for change.

Enjoy the Choice

[CLoneWolf]

@ShadowOblivion:

Whenever fighting is an option, I tend to use heavily (and variously) armed ships, so I see your point and kinda wished the same: your idea of preset combos would be a great time saver when switching.
I just beg to differ on one detail: uselessness of splitting weapons.
Actually, firing all weapons when half of 'em can't reach the target is a waste of energy: a long range only preset could be an energy saver while you close up, then you switch to full firepower with another preset.
...or alternatively, intelligent weapons NOT firing if the target is outside their range... hmmmm.....

[ShadowOblivion]

@CLone Wolf:

Yes, CLone Wolf, you're right. I just made a generalization in my previous post. In the current 0.5.0 release, it's just that I found most weapons don't put a very large drain on the reactor, and that upgrading the reactor past the energy requirements is fairly easy(or I'm just lazy), hence I personally don't bother using just one set of weapons(unless ammo is a factor), I just open up. For different players and releases this is, of course, different. I remember energy being a much larger issue in the 0.4.3 release and weapon selection was more necessary.


@loki1950

Ah, I see!