Targ Collective's Autotracking Turrets Pack - Release-Ready!

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Just quick replies, gotta go to work this am...

@Targ:
You're welcome. Those are xyz values. They should correspond exactly when used in units.csv, ***except*** that sometimes Y and Z values are swapped and you may need to change the sign of Z figures after swapping. This is because obj format has a standard that is different from Blender's standard and the importer and exporter have a button for rotate, but I never seem to get it right. so, if everything shows wrong try swapping Y and Z.

As for the weakening of turrets:
In the other thread I was suggesting the light-medium-heavy steppings to go by powers of four. So, if we make a meium turret gun == light fwd gun, and a heavy turret gun == a medium fwd gun, they'll be 1/4 of the power; BUT, as you remark, turrets are double barrelled, so we end up with half; which seems to me just about right.

@Dilloh:
I think they had tons of capships from the other games; they just wanted to make Privateer fit in a finite number of floppies, methinks. But yes, the only capships that should have (powerful) forward guns are corvettes and cruisers. Destroyers should have tons of turrets, for offensive purposes, against bombers and corvettes primarily. Carriers should have only turrets for defensive purposes --except "strike carriers". Frigates should have turrets for defensive purposes but have gazillions of missiles and torps.
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

Wait, wait, wait. 25% is way too much of a nerf, surely? I agree that turrets should be weaker than main guns, but they should draw some excess power from ship subsystems; that would boost them closer to optimal performance. Just because the current standard in turret sizes is double-barreled doesn't mean it can't be changed - single-shot ordnance would be half 50% - 25% damage. You're not telling me that's right.

I'd rather we extend the turret system, reserve single-barreled turrets for everything up to the Orion, maybe as far back as the Galaxy, then use the mediums and reserve heavies and super-heavies for true capships like Khameks and Paradigms, allowing smaller vessels like the Drayman maybe one or two heavies max. Personally I think the DraymanCVL should be using two heavies on the flanks to the prow, with the current heavy slots converted to mediums. ("With two heavy turrets, nine medium turrets...")
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I think we should stay with double-barrel as the standard turret, and later add singles and triples. Tell you why: Privateer canon (or was it cannon?... I've lost it); anyways, the repairs screen pic shows a cuppola and two barrels, and I intend to make a model that closely resembles that, for the light versions.
So, with 1/4 of the power times 2 barrels we get 50% power. I think this is exactly right. Tell you why: Typically you have more turrets than forward guns in most ships that support turrets; and a) you don't want the turrets to play the game for you, and b) you don't want them to draw all your generator's power budget. And c) with autotracking, turrets are deadly accurate, and shoot multiple times in a row with a high hit probability, so all these are reasons to bring them down in power.
Furthermore, they should be considerably shorter range, so emphasize their defensive (for the most part) role.

WRT Draymans; the Drayman is smaller than a corvette; it couldn't even fit a heavy turret, the way I think of a heavy turret; let alone power one. I'd, at the most, put a medium ("corvette sized") turret and two light ones on it.
I intend to make the sizes of the light, medium and heavy turrets reflect their power: Light turrets would be about 4 meters diameter I think, off the top of my head. Medium (corvette) would be about 8 meters, and heavy ones 16 meters. Just rough figures for now, but you get my drift... A 16 meter diameter turret would look cancerously huge on an 80 meter long ship.
BTW, rotational speeds and accels for the 3 turret sizes should go down roughly by powers of two, IMO.
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

Then scale the guns on our double-barreled turrets to 1/4 size in line with those changes. I'll implement the new turret weapons into weapons.xml shortly. I expect the game to play very differently though - it's already too easy to take out a Corvette-class ship; if we blunt the claws that far they'll be sitting ducks.

EDIT: The Autotracking was only ever intended for the very very rich. I can see the shaped magnetic charges trackers use degrading damage performance... Shall we compromise? Nerf the autotrackers?
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

No, we shouldn't nerf the autotrackers; in fact, one of the biggest complaints about the original game was that using the turrets was narly impossible. Without autotracking, turrets make almost no sense.
As I said in some other thread, prices are a poor way (pun intended) of balancing a game: the constraint of price is only *temporary* in nature, and should only be used when considering player progress timing issues. Power draw probably should be the main balancing tool to use for guns and turrets.

EDIT:
And yes, you're right that without autotracking the turrets will be useless but that's how they were in the original game, so we serve the canon by making them optional, and give them usefulness by making autotracking available, so it's a win-win, anyhow.
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

You misunderstand me. In any case we're not really doing this right yet.

We should be looking at damage/time as our base. What you seem to be suggesting is short-range fighter-screen style turrets with forward mounted heavy guns, and I completely agree with that concept. But cutting the ranges is a bad idea - add autotracking; give it a high refire rate; don't cut the range - we want to outrange fighters, weapon ranges for fighters should be shortened to compensate or our terms of reference lengthened to think in terms of capshipland. Unless your point of reference is fixed at the forward-mounted main guns rather than the current default values? Turrets are there to harrass and thin out fighter screens; if they are too weak to do that our balance is wrong. Fighters which have turrets (a pretty novel concept from the outset) fit your 'small arms' concept very well.

Ever flown a pre-autotracking Galaxy Gunship?... Non-auto turrets can work very well. So to cut the advantage of having autotracking to something a little more sane I can see room for a nerf there. If we were to replace non-autotracking turrets completely (you do me much honour suggesting this!) then widening the tracking ranges to 165 - 170 degrees would balance out a lot of damage reduction. I'm not too worried about canoninity - GG kept it; PR bent it; logical extension: PU twists it into a Moebius Loop.

What would be great is focused and free forms of fire control - when surrounded by a fighter screen giving all turrets independent fire control to spread fire then focus it at will. What would be even better is capacity for targeting lead points rather than the ships themselves. That relies on Dev attention though.

It is vitally important that we get the balance right. That's the crux of this matter.

EDIT: If something's useless it needs fixing, not worsening. If we make a bad thing worse that's not a win/win - that's a bad rebalance for everyone involved.

Gameplay has to take precedence over everything - canoninity, how much sense something makes, everything. That's my philosophy. The objective is always to make things as fun as possible. Having just that raw priority makes a mediocre game though - the real challenge for balancing matters is balancing them and having them make sense. If something works as it logically should, fitting into its niche well and performing as you want it to and it's fun too then you can pat yourself on the back.

If both those criteria are met but the canon disagrees then it is the canon which is at fault and should be changed. The folks who wrote the Privateer canon were not necessarily building a stats table for balanced gameplay - and as sure as blazes they did not have the Vegastrike engine to test their calculations on. So the canon should have control over the story, personalities and factions; not the gameplay.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

You convinced me, Targ. Very well argued. I'll have a second read of your post when I get home and see if I can put numbers to it.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

targ collective wrote:We should be looking at damage/time as our base. What you seem to be suggesting is short-range fighter-screen style turrets with forward mounted heavy guns, and I completely agree with that concept. But cutting the ranges is a bad idea - add autotracking; give it a high refire rate; don't cut the range - we want to outrange fighters,
Point well taken.
Ever flown a pre-autotracking Galaxy Gunship?... Non-auto turrets can work very well.
I just don't have the reflexes to switch turrets, fight, and steer the ship, all at the same time; and I totally suck in a turret. I was never able to use them, at all, in the original game. Wasted money for me. Autotracking changed that, though, and with PR and WCU I was able to enjoy owning a Galaxy, for the first time. But I'm probably not a "typical" player, in this regard; I'm the type that wouldn't mind at all having an uber ship where I can fly safely :D
So to cut the advantage of having autotracking to something a little more sane I can see room for a nerf there. If we were to replace non-autotracking turrets completely (you do me much honour suggesting this!) then widening the tracking ranges to 165 - 170 degrees would balance out a lot of damage reduction.
Not sure I follow.
I'm not too worried about canoninity - GG kept it; PR bent it; logical extension: PU twists it into a Moebius Loop.
Very true; I'll try to keep canonicity concerns as secondary, at least in terms of weapon stats. We ARE changing them, so might as well go all the way. My only worry is about Priv 0 and WC 0 (and Priv 3), which, unlike PU, ARE projects meant to splice in smoothly with the rest of WC.
What would be great is focused and free forms of fire control - when surrounded by a fighter screen giving all turrets independent fire control to spread fire then focus it at will. What would be even better is capacity for targeting lead points rather than the ships themselves. That relies on Dev attention though.
Targetting lead points you get with ITTS, already.
EDIT: If something's useless it needs fixing, not worsening. If we make a bad thing worse that's not a win/win - that's a bad rebalance for everyone involved.
Point well taken.
Gameplay has to take precedence over everything - canoninity, how much sense something makes, everything. That's my philosophy. The objective is always to make things as fun as possible. Having just that raw priority makes a mediocre game though - the real challenge for balancing matters is balancing them and having them make sense. If something works as it logically should, fitting into its niche well and performing as you want it to and it's fun too then you can pat yourself on the back.
I totally agree; and the big rift between us and our current enemies (I like calling a rose a "rose") began with a stupid fight over whether to put turrets on the drayman. Our enemies, whom I called "the Retros" believed that nothing in canon should be changed, at all; so if the Draymans could not survive without a few turrets, so be it. And then they tried to take over WCU completely, with an absurd vote...
I'm totally with you.
But I do want to speak a word of caution, not necessarily applicable to PU, but definitely applicable to WCU: WCU was intended as platform, not as a game; a platform for other developers to make WC-universe games on. We don't know in advance what games will be done within the WCU framework. Some may be totally new games; some may be remakes of old games. It would therefore kind of mess up things if we were to go through units.csv and just change everything however we feel like. Then, someone wanting to make a remake would have to fix everything. We'd end up with a bazillion versions and revisions of units.csv. However, if we create NEW weapon types, such as your heavy turrets/guns/autotrackers, that's a different story.
Having said all that, I have a nagging suspicion that there's a big kink in the carpet, and that if we push it away from one place it will pop up in another; and this kink is the absence of consideration of ship size in damage formulas. And the lack of distinction between explosive and piercing damage in WC in general. I think this problem is fundamental, and that no amount of weapon rebalancing is ever going to be able to solve it. And the beauty of fixing that would be that it'd be contained in a piece of code somewhere, and whoever doesn't want it could just turn it off.
If both those criteria are met but the canon disagrees then it is the canon which is at fault and should be changed. The folks who wrote the Privateer canon were not necessarily building a stats table for balanced gameplay - and as sure as blazes they did not have the Vegastrike engine to test their calculations on. So the canon should have control over the story, personalities and factions; not the gameplay.
Very well put; I think I'll print this paragraph and frame it ;-)
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

chuck_starchaser wrote:And the lack of distinction between explosive and piercing damage in WC in general.
. . . and where do you plan to deal with armour piercing AND explosive damage like flashpak (WC4) or exocet missiles (cf: Sheffield -- yet again)
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Where? In the same piece of code, I suppose :D
Good point. Maybe we need a range of warhead types. I don't think most WC missiles are fast enough to pierce AND then explode; but there might be high penetration warheads, like the ones on those antitank missiles, what's their names now? But we'd have to think about ship structure too, like, okay, you get through the armor, but do you also pierce the hull? And are the hulls double hulls or single? And are all areas inside a ship pressurized? And what happens when there's depressurization? Not to utter the big question: What the hell ARE "shields" anyways?

I guess what I was driving at is that the size of a ship should matter. I don't think a fighter pelting a carrier for 11 months should be able to make a dent on it. But where "piercing damage" comes in is that a well placed torpedo or high power blast should do enough damage to a carrier, --even if just "localized damage"--, to at least temporarily put it "out of comission".
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

New release, now at V4. I'm glad everyone has such a high opinion of my views - it's nice to have people agreeing with you.

EDIT: Got more time to post now. Ship scaling as a damage control is not such a good idea, Chuck. Arbritrary values that control sustainable damage on each facing are what we have now, and they work out a lot better than any scaling-based systems - we can have two ships, each the same size, but one very heavily armed and the other very heavily armoured. Add scaling into damage calcs and we need to worry about how size multiplies the values, a headache I, for one, could do without.

Rather than embed such calculations into the engine we should do them ourselves, and with complete control over the results. Ship size as a damage multiplier is a workable concept, but we should also consider how many sections a ship can lose on a facing before going critical.

One thing that really is worrying me is just how to implement your suggested changes to balance. I disagree that a small fighter should not be able to take out a (lightly armoured) carrier, although maybe your carrier concept is a bit bigger than I'm imagining it. I can see no problem with a small group of Talons taking out a Drayman, for example - the Drayman is a lightly armoured cargo ship.

Seeing one Centurion take out a Kamekh or the Tiger's Claw, or a Paradigm, well, that's another matter. Seeing a large group of them do it without heavy losses would be odd. Yet if you have through some means acquired one of these capital class vessels the game must still be challenging.

The solution, as I see it, is to increase the capital-class population and get enough ships for our first capital tier. Then we can think about just how much punishment a capital should be able to take - say enough to withstand continuous fire from fifteen Centurions for around three minutes before taking hull damage, then a further ten minutes before going critical.

Forward-mounted weapons in cap vs cap fights would need maybe a minute to disable an enemy cap? I'm just pulling these figures out of - well, let's just say I'm making them up as I go along. No idea how this will feel in gameplay. The universe needs to get bigger, we need to get our first capship tier online and we need missions (bounty and cleansweep) for the first capship tier. Then we can think about expanding further.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

targ collective wrote: One thing that really is worrying me is just how to implement your suggested changes to balance. I disagree that a small fighter should not be able to take out a (lightly armoured) carrier, although maybe your carrier concept is a bit bigger than I'm imagining it. I can see no problem with a small group of Talons taking out a Drayman, for example - the Drayman is a lightly armoured cargo ship.
AND small. Compare 80 meters for a Drayman with 800 meters for a carrier... Surface area increases with the square of linear scaling, so 100 times more armor mass than a Drayman, at equal armor thickness...
Though you could *pierce* with the same effort. Anyways, can't talk right now ;-)
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

There is one feature, already implemented but not currently in use in PR for better defending very large ships.

The data file for a ship allows for 8 facings each for armour & shields. Currently, PR uses only 4 facings for each. If you leave the correct four facings empty (the four "bottom" entries), the code covers those facings with the first four. (For the record, two facing shields work using the same degeneracy rule -- if you leave bottom & right empty, the code treats you as having just front/back shielding.)

To use this feature, all that we need to do is provide non-zero data for the other 4 fields and you suddenly have a ship with (front/back) * (left/right) * (top/bottom) ratings. I would think it quite reasonable for a Paradigm or bigger to have 8-facing shields & armour. We can debate the Kameh if you wish.

The next logical step in increasing target surfaces would be to split (front/back) --> (front/middle/back), which would increase the number of surfaces from 8 to 27 distinct target areas. Although this would be quite reasonable for starbases & the occasional space monstrosity, it would require additional coding (especially in the physics engine, to calculate which facing was being hit). If you seriously want this, start thinking up good bribes for the appropriate developers.
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Great stuff, Shissui! THAT is the solution. But I'd say it should be tied to size of ship only, like say 2 for a fighter, 4 for a corvette size ship, like a Drayman or a Khamek, 6 for a destroyer, like the Paradigm, and 8 for a carrier or cruiser or dreadnaught. This doesn't mean the 8 of a carrier can't be much weaker than the 4 of a Khamek, though; all it means is that, relative to the armor/shield strength, there's more work to do for a large ship; unless the work is painstakingly concentrated in one spot.
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

At the moment, we have only the options of :
• 2 faces (front back)
• 4 faces (front, back, left, right))
• 8 faces (top-front, top-back, top-left, top-right, bot-front, bot-back, bot-left, bot-right)
However, we are not committed to making the same choice for both shields & armour.

Any other options would require changes to the core engine, and thus well applied friendly bribes.
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

So that's all you wanted? Sure, I can do that. And at that scale, yes, a fighter would never take that carrier down - but there are no ships at that scale in PU.

I think there is room for rescaling those ships... There needs to be a strong difference between a fighter, a corvette and a capship. For the corvette class we already have the bounty-hunter/trader representatives, in the form of the Drayman and DraymanCVL. I'm using the terms as applied in Homeworld, because Homeworld groups ships by size.

The Drayman and CVL are already very nicely scaled, although the CVL needs around triple sustainable damage. A speed cut to factor in the extra armour mass. (And upgrades scaled to it.)

The Paradigm and Kamehk need scaling up a ways - they are what I'll loosely class as light-capships - to around twice the size of the Drayman. A CVL against either will die very fast. The light-caps should have around four times the sustainable damage of the CVL, but a quarter of the speed.

We need destroyable bases outside those the plot demands remain unharmed. We need medium and heavy capships who have missions of their own in the BBS which focus on destroying these bases.

Finally (probably player unpilotable) we need super-capital class vessels which act as mobile starbases. All of these things should be spawned in a system randomly; saved; and regenerated when stocks get depleted, possibly with a news item (Construction has started on a new foo-class foo in the foo system...)

If we all work really hard and sacrifice everything else in our lives for this, we could get in done in maybe a year. Realistically implementing and balancing all that will likely take ten bearing in mind we all do this in our spare time...

So we should start with the Corvette-class tier, then move on to the light-caps. The real difficulty will lie in getting the game to see what class of ship the player is flying and generate the missions accordingly. It will also need to regenrate every time the player switches ships.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

@Shissui:
Thanks for the info, and the idea. So if stagger the increments, we could have 5 strengts:
2 armors 2 shields
2 armors 4 shields
4 armors 4 shields
4 armors 8 shields
8 armors 8 shields
So, we could assign those 5 combos to sizes, and, rather than ship classes, we could actually base it on official ship lengths, to be more scientific.
How about...

Code: Select all

up to: 33.3m: 2 armors 2 shields
up to 100m: 2 armors 4 shields
up to 300m: 4 armors 4 shields
up to 900m: 4 armors 8 shields
above 900m: 8 armors 8 shields
Which gives us a separate category for dreadnaughts and stations, above that of carriers and cruisers. Or, actually, we could also have, say,
8 armors and 4 shields, which I'm not sure how it compares to 4 armors and 8 shields, but might be worth considering for further differenciating ships in the same size range but with different roles. Say, destroyers are supposed to be rather light for their size, to be able to chase after corvettes, so they could favor shields over armor. And so corvettes could have 4 armors and 2 shields, rather than 2 armors and 4 shields, as Draymans might use, say.

Speaking of the devil...

Image

Cleaned the mesh up a bit, smoothed it a bit, did a new, more efficient UV mapping, and the texture on it is just a collage of reference material on the Drayman which I will use as a tracing background for texturing.
targ collective wrote:So that's all you wanted? Sure, I can do that. And at that scale, yes, a fighter would never take that carrier down - but there are no ships at that scale in PU.
It's actually better than what I wanted, because admittedly, what I wanted would have changed the gameplay too much relative to the original games. And I wasn't even sure how to do all that concussive, explosive, piercing damage computations; but this solution actually pretty much does it all: Concentrated fire gets you through, but without concentrated fire it gets a lot more difficult. And it's easier to implement, it gives a use to a feature that is sitting there, etceteras.
I think there is room for rescaling those ships... There needs to be a strong difference between a fighter, a corvette and a capship. For the corvette class we already have the bounty-hunter/trader representatives, in the form of the Drayman and DraymanCVL. I'm using the terms as applied in Homeworld, because Homeworld groups ships by size.
Absolutely! Let's do it. Separate thread maybe. Everythin, right now, is scaled by eye; what we need to do is use math. I can go through the meshes and measure length in the mesh, for each unit; then you look up the official length and adjust the scaling factor in units.csv. How about it?
The Paradigm and Kamehk need scaling up a ways - they are what I'll loosely class as light-capships - to around twice the size of the Drayman. A CVL against either will die very fast. The light-caps should have around four times the sustainable damage of the CVL, but a quarter of the speed.
The Drayman is 83 meters long I think; and the Khamek 135 or so.
We need destroyable bases outside those the plot demands remain unharmed. We need medium and heavy capships who have missions of their own in the BBS which focus on destroying these bases.
Not sure... Are the bases going to be reconstructed? We might end up baseless otherwise...
LOL, I remember when Spiritplumber threw in Nephilim and marine shuttles in WCU, and the Neph AI started using marines to consistently attack New Cons; and there was no way of saving NC, because the nephs were landing marines on it and the marines crawled under the armor or something; there was no way of killing them without damaging NC itself. Nightmare scenario... :D
Finally (probably player unpilotable) we need super-capital class vessels which act as mobile starbases. All of these things should be spawned in a system randomly; saved; and regenerated when stocks get depleted, possibly with a news item (Construction has started on a new foo-class foo in the foo system...)
I'll make that movie kat dreadnaught when I get around to it; and I think we have a Confederation class model.
If we all work really hard and sacrifice everything else in our lives for this, we could get in done in maybe a year. Realistically implementing and balancing all that will likely take ten bearing in mind we all do this in our spare time...
The ship resizing should take us one evening or two.
So we should start with the Corvette-class tier, then move on to the light-caps. The real difficulty will lie in getting the game to see what class of ship the player is flying and generate the missions accordingly. It will also need to regenrate every time the player switches ships.
That's stuff Spiritplumber would be best at; she knows Python well and is the only person that knows the AI well. She should be back in the next week or two.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Fri May 18, 2007 2:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

chuck_starchaser wrote:2 armors 2 shields
You are NOT going to strip half the armour off my Demon. They are hard enough to fly as it is !
Strike that line & recompute.

Aditionally, it has been tradition to step the armour up before the shields; although this tradition is not set in stone (umm. isometal?). All the cap-ships in VS have 4-face shields & 8-face armour. The only real logic in favour of this is that armour surface area probably correlates better with ship volume than shield generators.
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Shissui; this is totally unrelated to strengths, though. It's the "number of pieces of" armor or shields. The range of armor thicknesses and materials spans far more than a 3:1 ratio. The idea is simply that, to destroy an Orion takes a lot more firepower than to destroy a Talon; but that the hits don't need to be any more *concentrated* than they have to be for a Talon. A carrier may be no stronger than a corvette, but you have to apply all your hits to one spot in order to get through. That's all it means, in a nutshell.
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Shissui; this is totally unrelated to strengths
Ahh, but it *is* related to strengths -- were you planning to redesign a Tungsten armour upgrade so that it gave 2x the protection to a Stileto or a Demon than to a Centurion ?
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Shissui; this is totally unrelated to strengths
Ahh, but it *is* related to strengths -- were you planning to redesign a Tungsten armour upgrade so that it gave 2x the protection to a Stileto or a Demon than to a Centurion ?
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

It already does. Well, I'm not sure about the particulars you cite, but tungsten is the *material*; it doesn't specify thickness. Tungsten on an Orion gives you more strength than Tungsten on a Tarsus, because the Orion's armor is *thicker*. What we may have to do is readjust thicknesses, to partially compensate for the change in numbers of pieces.
targ collective
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm

Post by targ collective »

I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that armour increases your sustainable damage to a set value, rather than multiplies a base value. If it did work on base values, though, that would be great! And if shield systems did the same that would be even better.

As for scaling those ships, I've never tried to do that before. So I can't guarantee getting things right.

I will have a go, however, and I usually learn quite fast.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

The way it works, or should work, is that each ship has a cm armor figure, in units.csv, then when you switch armor material, each material has a multiplying factor relative to durasteel. Durasteel was the pre-war armor material and became the standard for measuring armor strength, so a ship may have a 100 cm armor, but that's "cm durasteel equivalent", which may be 30 cm actual thickness of plasteel, or something along the lines.

For ship sizes: Mesh sizes are abitrary. A Tarsus might be 77 units long in the mesh. The Drayman has a mesh length of 1; I just made it 10 for my own purposes.
So, then there's a Scaling column in units.csv. All we have to do is find out how long the ship is supposed to be, officially, and fix that scaling. The Drayman I thinks is 83 meters long. 83/10 is 8.3, so the Scaling should be 8.3. If we do that for everything, we'll have all units be proportioned exactly what they are supposed to be. Which may not exactly agree with the sizes used in-game, originally, because Origin tweaked ship sizes a lot; but the official sizes of ships make a lot more sense than the in-game sizes, and if we need to do some final adjustments afterwards, we will; but at least we'll have achieved a more rational way to go about it than just scaling ship by eyeball, which is what has been done so far. So I'll do the mesh measurements and I'll leave you the official length research and editing of the scaling. My job is a lot heavier, in that there are several meshes for each ship in the WCU shippack, and I need to find out for each of them which one is presently used.
Shissui
ISO Party Member
ISO Party Member
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:27 pm

Post by Shissui »

chuck_starchaser wrote:The way it works, or should work, is that each ship has a cm armor figure, in units.csv, then when you switch armor material, each material has a multiplying factor relative to durasteel.
Nope. If you put a *Tungsten* upgrade on a ship, it replaces your existing armour with a new value on each face. This value is the same regardless of the ship, be it a Demon or a Paradigm. However, in practice, you cannot install Tungsten armour on a Paradigm at all because it's base armour is already better.
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
Post Reply