PD not firing

So I've come up with an interesting idea. You're only the pilot of your ship. Other people fire everything else. So you fly, and the AI of your ship shoots. It's completely impractical for actual scenarios and battles, but is a really fun idea. This is sort of complicated. I've made separate weapons files for all of the weapons on the Rebel IDA Frigate. These are all PD weapons, and have a lifetime of one frame, after which they submunition into the original weapon. This was so a Heavy Blaster Turret wouldn't hit missiles randomly. It works fine about one quarter of the time, and looks really cool when it does. But the rest of the time, it has severe problems. It either doesn't fire at all, or it fires backwards (from the perspective of the Frigate. Always straight back.) There are no missiles around, and my enemy can be targeted by PD. There are some other issues, namely that it wastes missiles at a ferocious rate, so I'll probably make those player controlled, but those are fairly easy to deal with. Basically I just need some major debugging help. File's up.

Attached File(s)

• Pilot_experiment.zip (36.09K)
  Number of downloads: 2

I've encountered a similar problem. It seems that PD weapons don't fire at Xenophobic govt's. For the firing backwards part, this will happen if your charging at a fast ship. Try increasing the speed of the shots, or just slow down before you engage.

PD weapons only fire at ships that are trying to attack you. If they are trying to retreat (traders, warships when their shields drop below 25%) then the PD weapons will not fire, even if the enemy is still attacking you (they need to get beyond a certain range of you before they'll actually retreat).

@it-000, on Sep 6 2008, 06:07 PM, said in I need a bit of help here:

I've encountered a similar problem. It seems that PD weapons don't fire at Xenophobic govt's. For the firing backwards part, this will happen if your charging at a fast ship. Try increasing the speed of the shots, or just slow down before you engage.

That is quite weird, but it doesn't fit the circumstances. I'm facing standard Federation military ships. They aren't xenophobic, and I'm completely stationary.

@guy, on Sep 6 2008, 06:57 PM, said in I need a bit of help here:

PD weapons only fire at ships that are trying to attack you. If they are trying to retreat (traders, warships when their shields drop below 25%) then the PD weapons will not fire, even if the enemy is still attacking you (they need to get beyond a certain range of you before they'll actually retreat).

I didn't actually know that, but considering that I'm fighting Federation Patrol Boats that are seriously, seriously pissed at me, I don't think it applies.

Do you have another PD weapon onboard?
I run into a problem as I had bought two different PD systems. Two PD weapons seem to interfere with each other and both wouldn't fire.

If that's the problem, then this idea is screwed. I've got five different PD weapons on board.

I believe fully-turreted PD doesn't stack, but you can make 4 each-quadrant-only PD guns.

@0101181920, on Sep 7 2008, 07:20 PM, said in I need a bit of help here:

I didn't actually know that, but considering that I'm fighting Federation Patrol Boats that are seriously, seriously pissed at me, I don't think it applies.

It doesn't matter how pissed they are, if the govt is set to retreat when shields drop below 25% then that's what they'll do.

@lnsu, on Sep 7 2008, 07:14 AM, said in I need a bit of help here:

I believe fully-turreted PD doesn't stack, but you can make 4 each-quadrant-only PD guns.

This doesn't work out so well in my experience. The thing is even if something moves out of one PD weapon's quadrant, it still will be "tracked" by that turret and that turret won't fire at anything else, and other PD turrets won't fire at the thing being tracked by that one. At least that's how it seemed to work when I tried it.

@guy, on Sep 7 2008, 07:33 AM, said in I need a bit of help here:

It doesn't matter how pissed they are, if the govt is set to retreat when shields drop below 25% then that's what they'll do.

What I mean is that they are at full shields, attacking me full out, close range, and my PD still doesn't fire. If that's the way this works, then maybe I'll just have to dump this idea.

yeah, better to just make them fully-turreted non-PD weapons, or better yet, make them all primaries and then the player only has to go through the hassle of holding down the spacebar.

@lnsu, on Sep 7 2008, 02:14 PM, said in I need a bit of help here:

I believe fully-turreted PD doesn't stack, but you can make 4 each-quadrant-only PD guns.

Just FYI, when I played Polycon, there was a PD called the Beam Tube. You could buy four of them maximum and they DID stack.

I thought when I played Arpia2 there were these front and back lasers. I can't remember If they were PD turrets or not, but it's possible. I seem to remember that they took up a lot of space so you really needed a big ship to test the One Turret for Each Socket theory

The thing about that is that you can have multiple of the same PD weapon. Apparently the problem is when you have different ones.

@0101181920, on Sep 8 2008, 12:26 AM, said in I need a bit of help here:

The thing about that is that you can have multiple of the same PD weapon. Apparently the problem is when you have different ones.

I believe I've encountered this problem before. I was attempting to have a PD weapon act as an extra layer of shielding by making all weapons sub into a guided-type (with 0 turning) weapon. The goal was to have different quadrants of shielding (front, sides, back) to give a realistic "weak spot" effect to some otherwise tough ships. Unfortunately, the PD-shield only worked for the front quadrant, even on ships equipped with the three different PD-shield "weapons". That lead me to believe that different PD weapons didn't play all that nice with each other. I tried experimenting with changing the ranges of the PD-shield weapons and their positioning on the ships themselves, thinking that maybe the problem was that the frontal-arc PD though it was firing at the projectiles coming from the rear, but unfortunately that had no affect. I really think that Nova just picks the first PD (lowest ID) it comes across in the ship's inventory when it decides it is going to use a PD.

Now, I didn't try using PD beams at all. Perhaps that might work?

Werhner

beams can't submunition. Therefore, PD beams would only be useful for such things as the Ion Cannon, TBRL, etc.

Yeah. The idea of this was that you fly the ship, subordinates shoot. Oh, well, doesn't seem like it'll work. Too bad.