How do I simulate an afterburner?

Hello everyone,

I have been trying to create a weapon that simulates an afterburner. However, I want it to be weapon, so its fired by pressing "fire" not "z"

I read in the Bible and also in ZP's recent annotated weap template that you can set recoil to a negative value and it will thrust you forward. Perhaps I am an idiot, and/or perhaps it is late and I can't think, but I tried this and it didn't work. Is there some trick to this? I read in a previous post that it doesn't work for beams, but I was using an unguided weapon.

If that fails, I was going to try to use a rear fireing weapon that blasts me forward (a reverse retro rocket of sorts). Alas, I have no clue how to make something shoot backwards. Rear turret is bad, it only fires /w a target to the rear. I read somewhere about some undocumented feature concerning negative inaccuracy, but that has confounded me also.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,
Brindy

Make a weapon with high recoil and fires with an inaccuracy of -180. It has to be -180 so that it fires only in that direction. If you set (+)180, it would be inaccurate anywhere in that arc to either side of 0 degrees (ie, it would fire in any random direction).

Matrix

what_is_the_matrix, on Sep 15 2004, 10:37 PM, said:

Make a weapon with high recoil and fires with an inaccuracy of -180.
Matrix
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Positive recoil still throws me backwards even though the weapon fires backwards. I want to be thrown forward, if possible. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

Brindy

oops, that was me by the way

Guest, on Sep 16 2004, 08:01 PM, said:

Positive recoil still throws me backwards even though the weapon fires backwards. I want to be thrown forward, if possible. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

Brindy
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One sure way to simulate the effect is to have the weapon fire backwards and give it a high impact value. Have the shot expire after a frame or two (just enough to get slightly behind you) and explode. Then the explosion will push the ship forward. Note that if you do this while right next to an AI ship, it will attack you, so you might want to have it do a few points of damage so that that makes sense (After all, having an afterburner fire right at you has to do some damage). If you do that, though, make sure you check the "shots do not damage the firing ship" flag.
Hope that helps!

PBoat

PBoat101, on Sep 16 2004, 09:56 PM, said:

Have the weapon fire backwards and give it a high impact value.
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Yes, that was my idea for Plan B. Unfortunately, it seems that even that isn't simple.

In order to get the weapon to fire backwards, you have to set accuracy to -180, right? Well, it seems this doesn't always work. Not surprising, its an undocumented feature.

It seems, according to my tests, that negative accuracy:

*does not work for freefall rockets
*ONLY works when the point its being fired from has all nonzero coordinates (x,y, and z all >= 1)

Go figure.

Any other ideas? I think I may have to resort to a double submunitioning weapon.

BTW, pboat, I think ships don't care if you fire a nondamaging weapon at them. New in Nova, methinks.

You might want to consider trying just a freefall rocket with speed zero, set to always launch from ship center.

(edit)
This will always accellerate you in the direction you're going, though, which may not be what you want. If not, make a standard unguided weapon that fires directly forwards (again, from ship center rather than any of the normal firing points), and give it a negative speed.

I doubt the AI will be able to make effective use of this thing, though, regardless of how you implement it.

This post has been edited by Wyvern : 16 September 2004 - 07:15 PM

Don't you mean a free fall bomb? That'd travel backwards. Otherwise, negative recoil, may work... I know that you can have negative impact (for tractor beams)...

Matrix

inaccuracy is how much of a random range it will fire from point 0.
Its not from the point it will now fire from.
180 just means it will now randomly fire from any angle.

Wyvern, on Sep 17 2004, 12:12 AM, said:

This will always accellerate you in the direction you're going, though, which may not be what you want.
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This is exactly what I want

what_is_the_matrix, on Sep 17 2004, 12:30 AM, said:

negative recoil may work

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negative recoil either does not work, or works only under specific situations. If its the latter, can someone offer an example plug to demonstrate it? If the former, the Bible is wrong and we should add something somewhere that notes this,

ArcAngel Counterstrike, on Sep 17 2004, 05:36 PM, said:

inaccuracy is how much of a random range it will fire from point 0.
Its not from the point it will now fire from.
180 just means it will now randomly fire from any angle.
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Ah yes, but negative 180 mean just form 180 degrees, I beleive (I could be wrong).

brindyblitz, on Sep 16 2004, 04:13 AM, said:

I read in the Bible and also in ZP's recent annotated weap template that you can set recoil to a negative value and it will thrust you forward. Perhaps I am an idiot, and/or perhaps it is late and I can't think, but I tried this and it didn't work. Is there some trick to this? I read in a previous post that it doesn't work for beams, but I was using an unguided weapon.
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As you may remark, all my info comes straight from the Bible, I didn't test at all (just checked wether features were used or not in the default scenario). By the way, just so you know, I'll post a düde, spöb and s˙st annotated template, then I'll take a break to make other things (among them testing some features unused in the default Nova scenario, but also porting some old EV(O) plugs).