...to have a ship capable of transforming into another ship and transforming back, without creating an infinate loop that renders the ship, to all intents and purposes, immortal?
It's been ages since I posted here.
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Kind of. As far as I can tell, it depends on if the player or AI is going to use it and how heavily defended it's going to be.
Actually, come to think of it, is it even possible to mark a fighter bay as "destroys ships when fired"? My intuition says no, but I'm not sure on that one. If you can't, well, then there goes my idea.
This post has been edited by Archon : 04 August 2009 - 09:04 PM
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No, because you need to set the ammo type for fighter bays, you can't have it destroy on firing. Which is the problem. The only other way I thought of was to have an escape ship...but then, the infinite loop.
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You mean for the player or for the AI? Because if you mean for the player, I'm pretty sure Desprez did some work a while back where he got it so you could fly a carrier, and then launch a fighter, except when you do, you actually launch yourself into the fighter, and the carrier stays behind. When you're done being a fighter, then you can go back a dock at the carrier and start flying it again.
If you want the AI to be able to switch ships in mid-flight, the best I can come up with is to have a KeyCarried fighter, and all the weapons on the carrier only be fireable when KeyCarried is on board. Then, with any luck, if you can get the carrier to cloak when it doesn't have any weapons to fire, it'll appear to switch to the fighter, and then back again when the fighter docks. But the AI is not very smart, so it will probably keep the fighter launched all the time in combat. Not exactly what you're looking for.
You can make an AI switch what weapons it uses midway through a fight though (and change graphics at the same time, but retain the same level of shields and armor). Again you need KeyCarried, on this time the fighter has zero armor and 2 DeathDelay. The fighter bay weapon has a fairly long reload (however long you want the ship to stay in Mode A) and the carrier comes with two ammo for it. Thus, the first fighter is launched instantly (and it instantly dies) and the second fighter is launched sometime later (it also instantly dies, but now the carrier has no more of its KeyCarried.) So the carrier switches graphics, and can no longer fire weapons tagged Fire Only When KeyCarried Is Aboard. The trick is to make the carrier have one weapon that can only be fired with KeyCarried, and that fires exclusively. That way it fires very few weapons until it switches to Mode B, at which point it starts firing many weapons much faster. This relies on figuring out how to make the AI choose the fighter bay weapon first and the Exclusive weapon second when possible, which I don't know how to do (or if it can be done.) Or you can do it the simpler way and just make the carrier fire fewer weapons after launching the second fighter, thus becoming weaker. But switching back is not doable in this scenario.