And I can't get it to work. =(

Here's what I'm shooting for: when a missile or ship approaches, this weapon creates a ring of energy that keeps the ship safe. I've tried having the ring start small and get larger by means of animation and tried just having it stay a constant size. In order to get it to stay centered on the ship, it has no speed.

You can probably see where the problem lies: Even though the ring expands outward after fired (or even if it starts out huge), since it has 0 speed, the Nova AI never actually fires it since it doesn't take the expansion into its range calculations (being a PD weapon, it is subject to the whims of the programming code). I could get around this by making it a secondary, but this will make it near-useless to AI ships, and given it's not really a weapon the player will have access to until the very end of Anathema and is just there to make a particular ship nearly missile-proof, this solution really isn't too practical.

The question, then is if anybody knows a way to "trick" the AI into firing the weapon. It seems like negative speeds may work, but that seems to be pretty hit-and-miss. Giving it speed would just be odd, since it's supposed to be a ring of energy centered around the parent ship.

The most promising avenue I can think of is to have it submunition from an invisible PD weapon, but this doesn't seem to work at all. Basically, I can give the supermunition a decent speed and count along with a large prox. radius, but the submunition (the ring) doesn't actually seem to hit anything. So it appears that a submunitioned point defense weapon doesn't do anything at all. I could still make it unguided instead, but that would make it pass over missiles again.

Anybody got any hot ideas?

You've mentioned it submunitioning from an invisible PD weapon, but have you tried having it submunition to an invisible weapon?

Unless I'm mistaken, the range of any submunitions a weapon may have get calculated when the A.I. decides when to use a weapon.

Well, if you get truly desperate you could try to solve the issue of making it work for the AI separately from the issue of making it work for the player. Give the special AI ship a fancy ShieldImage "bubble" plus a functioning but invisible PD superweapon, perhaps, and then use bits to present the player with a bubble-less ship and/or a properly-functioning, ring-generating secondary weapon as needed.

Truly, though, that's a course of last resort. Try everything else first.

Make a weapon with instant reload and instant decay. Also give it no speed, and make its RLED a giant bubble around the ship. POOF.

Edit 2: OK, it kind-of works, but it's waaaaayyy too clunky and glitchy-looking to ever make it into release.

I do have a back-up plan. It's not quite as cool, but it'll get the same job done. Thanks though folks!

This post has been edited by Archon : 12 April 2008 - 11:49 PM

Tried a speed of 1? What about a separate A.I. version?

The submunition into a longer range invisible weapon should work. What's wrong with it?

Anyway, I've made this work in a slightly different way. I did this with a weap that subs into 36 parts at -10 theta. each shot sprite looked kinda like a ")" if traveling to the right. In this manner, the shots would look like an expanding ring around the ship.

@desprez, on Apr 16 2008, 01:02 AM, said in The Coolest PD Weapon EVAR!:

The submunition into a longer range invisible weapon should work. What's wrong with it?

Anyway, I've made this work in a slightly different way. I did this with a weap that subs into 36 parts at -10 theta. each shot sprite looked kinda like a ")" if traveling to the right. In this manner, the shots would look like an expanding ring around the ship.

That's kind-of what I ended up with, except makes 2 submunitions of itself 3 times with theta of 9 (and reload 0 and fire simultaneously). Since what I was going for in the first place was a "lightning field" a la Master of Orion II, this actually achieves the effect a bit better since it represents the chaotic nature of the field. I do like your idea too, however.

Side-note to Josh: technically, speed 1 works, but you basically end up either giving it low count (which necessitates that the fighter/missile be right over the exit point to fire) or a high count (which ends up invariably drifting away from the ship and going off half the screen away).

If it is turreted it doesn't have to shoot straight thus no problem on stuff having to be right in front of it to be fired? Maybe I misread...? :mellow: