Player use of Turrets

The Falcon has gun turrets and some ships like the B-wing and Y-wing have a Disruptor gun (Ion Canon).
The disruptor cannon funftionality is a cludge in itself because it will only work on ships that have no other ammo based weapons or missiles. (Otherwise pog can't tell when the ship has fired the disruptor)

The only way I could figure out how to implement this is add a cludge to the cludge: use a completly separate ship!

The turret ship is created dynamically on the server and passed to all clients. It's set hidden so it can't be seen and can't be targeted. It also has an AI pilot who has orders to follow the player around.
When the player presses the keybind to switch to his turret position, the turret ship is docked to the player ship (docking is instantanous)and he gets a rem connection to it so he can fire weapons.
For now it's just set up so the player can steer his ship (via the engines of the docked on turret ship) while in the rem conection.

I think it would be better to have the player ship continue moving and only let the player be able to swivel the turret for a limited arc of fire. But, there are 2 hardcoded reasons that keep us from doing this:
A docked ship can only fire weapons if it has a higher docking priority than the object it is docked to.
The ship with the lower docking priority can't even budge the other ship. (so you can't have the player ship go straight or have the autopilot take over while the turret is active.)

We can/could mod the turret ship so it has great turning capability (yaw) but only reacts slowly to pitch and roll?

The other issue is: by creating a completly new ship we load the server and the bandwidth because you have more ships in the game. i.e 4 Falcons would mean we have 8 ships in the game (even though you don't see half of them them)

What do you guys think?
Is the whole turret idea just too much of a cludge and we should abandon it?
Or go ahead and do the best we can with what we have?

Any alternative suggestions for the whole turret concept itself?

Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

Yeeesh! That is a problem. I don't like any of the solutions, but I don't think it should be abandoned. If it could be done so that the ship flys on ai while the player mans the guns, that would be worth it! And, the mod would become even more famous!

I will continue trying to think of alternatives to suggest.

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I don't like it either so lets start brainstorming:

What if we don't use a second ship and just switch the player to the WEP station (F2)? Then it would be possible to put the player ship under AI control.

The issues here are:

a)To put the player ship under Ai Control you have to give it an explicit target. The MP game is very dynamic, it can easily happen that the player being followed by your Ai pilot will get shot by someone else within a few seconds after you've targeted it. The result: your Ai suddenly has no target and stops dead (at which point you will get shot)
This could possibly be rescripted but would require an additional polling task (I doubt that would load the server more than an additional ship does though)

b) The WEP station (F2) ain't too cool! Its hard to learn to use it and would probably scare newbies to the I-War universe right off the map.
Maybe we could work around that by temporarily creating a different hud view? Thats one for you moddeling guys!

c) Now the tough part: To make the disruptor gun cludge work it would be necessary to remove all the other ammo based weapons temporarily. Thats possible, but when they are put back on the ship (as he switches back to the ship) they will be fully armed at max magazine capacity. i.e if the player wanted to reload his missile magazine all he would need to do is switch to the turret. That won't work!
I have not found a way to query (and thus manipulate) the amount of ammo (left) in a magazine. That would be the key here.


Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

First I need to be educated about this F2 WEP station. The only function I'm aware of for F2 is to cycle the tactical views of the HUD.

If this is what you're talking about, how could it work? The F2 view follows the target anywhere it goes, reguardless of weapon arcs (plus, it also shows the player ship). I assume the WEP station does something else.

I like your idea of creating a new view. Is it possible to create a stationary view (like the pilot view) for weapons with a limited firing arc, and a rotating view for turrets? The reason I ask about the first view is, turrets like the falcon has require the player view to be stationary and have a HUD target that moves around the screen and tells the gun where to fire (instead of the gun always firing at the center of the screen and moving the view).

If these could be done it could mean a whole new dimension for coop MP. A single large ship with multiple gunners, each covering a limited area of the ship. It could be the beginning of crewed ships. But that's for another discussion .

What's involved in creating a new HUD view? It should be easy to get camera position and orientation directly from the weapon null. And it would be cake to whip up a gunners "window view" model.

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Sorry I meant the first toggle of F2 which reminds me of the old I-War1 WEP station, and yes you're right, it follows the target anywhere. so it's not usable in this case.

What's involved in creating a new HUD view? It should be easy to get camera position and orientation directly from the weapon null. And it would be cake to whip up a gunners "window view" model.

Yes, camera position/orientation/focal length can be adjusted as needed. I think the trick is to get the "window view" model to show only when you want it so it doesn't replace the standard hud view at all times (because IIRC you can't switch the hud model).
You might find an answer if you study Ericmans approach over in the "cool pog tricks" thread. I don't understand what he wrote there (at least the first couple of times I've read it).

On creating the new view: Perhaps we could use a "Real" turret like the ones on the destroyers that are animated and then parent the "window view" model to the turret position as it tracks a target? (if we don't give the turret a bolt it wouldn't fire and would just track the current target) Could you do a setup scene for something like that?

Remember this is just brainstorming and all total theory, none of it is tested or has even been tried (as far as I know)




Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

Well, I could do a setup scene, but would the camera track with the turret? And really, why not just have the gunner position use the same model as the pilot? That model is really more suited to a gun position anyway, and if I'm going to do a new model I'd rather do a better pilot view.

I thought eric had showed how you could switch the hud model? Is that what you're talking about in the Pog Tricks section? I'll have to go read it again.

Say, is it possible to parent the window view to the actual firing turret? I could tell you which part of the turret it needs to be parented to if you can.

What about the hud model movement like the for the pilot, would this view be able to retain that?

If all else fails, screw using a new model. Just make the view empty, except for the hud display info. Can that be done?

One last thing, are you familiar with how the turret model is set up? It's pretty simple if you're not. But you probably are.

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