I was looking through some old ares net scenarios about now, and I noticed that in KMQ's ANSR+ the Salrilian carrier had the ability to fire it's fighters while remaining cloaked. I hencefore went and modified this attribute, and it worked with any weapon. It seemed I had a fully operational Stealth Field on my hands! But it was not so. When I tried to duplicate this unusual feat not on the Launch Bay, the weapons invariably activated the stealth field. Could someone tell me how it's done? Not only would such a thing make the Salrilians the equal of audemedons, but give SETR an interesting attribute.

Ah, I've been thinking about effective cloaking for some time. The only solution I've come up with (untested, as with most of my solutions) is as follows:
When a cloaking device is activated, it "cloaks" and Alters BaseType to an invisible object (preserve ammo). Now, also, you could have an activation create "ghost" signatures in the area to keep CPU ships from firing accurately (the main reason I theorized this). Then, all weapons cause object with a cloakin BaseFlag signature to expire, and cause the expire action to revert to the "real" object. However, it seems that weapons would not cause the ship to become visible (cause them to immediately cloak to prevent odd decloaking).

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Nice idea, I think I might pirate it. You would need to time the cloaking, and make it really really expensive in terms of energy. I wonder where KMQ is?

(In case you're wondering, that's one of the features of the Obish Enh. Escort)

Hmmm, actually, all you would have to do is add an age (20sec?) as the expire action causes it to decloak already... in terms of energy, have the "ghost" image use up, say, 2 per activation (every 1) meaning that a full 20sec would take up 8000 energy (that's enough to cripple most capships)

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I can't believe no one knows how KMQ did it! Maybe it was an accident of chance that KMQ triggered some kind of bit that let's the weapon decide not to decloak the ship.

What's the launch bay's action sequence?

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It's "playsound fighter launch" and "create object 1 fighter".
I think the order might be what did it...

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Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI

I just checked the source -- the short answer is that no object can activate its primary devices without automaticall decloaking, but any object can activate its special device without decloaking.

I may have overlooked something, but I imagine by assigning one of a ship's primary devices to be the cloak trigger, you could then place a weapon in the special device slot.

Thanks Admiral! That might be something you'd want to include in Hera 1.2 eh?

Or, in theory, you could have an "assasin" weapon that is only available when cloaked.
Alter Special along with the cloak for a new weapon.
Then, you'd need to reconfigure all of the weapons to have a Flag-specific Alter Special to revert it, but the results would be rather interesting.

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Quote

Originally posted by Fleet Admiral Darkk:
**It's "playsound fighter launch" and "create object 1 fighter".
I think the order might be what did it...
**

Is that in the plug, or normally? I was thinking that part of the one in the plug's action could be to activate special, if the special was the cloak.

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I'd assume from his comment that that was extracted from the plug.

Anyway, now that we have this useful piece of information, let's figure out the best ways to exploit it

Omnicloak - cloaks all friendlies w/in a certain radius. Then Specials can fire indiscriminately.

An interesting point here, as well. I had always assumed that using the cloak when cloaked decloaked you because it was firing the weapon. However, it seems that this is not the reason. Therefore, a Cloak action done on a cloaked ship automatically decloaks it, something else we can exploit.

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Quote

Originally posted by Pallas Athene:
**snip
An interesting point here, as well. I had always assumed that using the cloak when cloaked decloaked you because it was firing the weapon. However, it seems that this is not the reason. Therefore, a Cloak action done on a cloaked ship automatically decloaks it, something else we can exploit.

**

I'm afraid he "toggling" of the cloak state only works for the player's ship; computer controlled ships only decloak when they fire.

I suppose that's for the best, otherwise the ships would constantly be cloaking and decloaking.
However, if a weapon with the collide action Cloak (nonreflexive) hit a player ship, then would it decloak as normal or decloak and then instantly recloak it? It would be interesting to see a neutral omnicloak.

(Can you tell I like omnicloaks?)

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Quote

Originally posted by Admiral Grammaticus:
I'm afraid he "toggling" of the cloak state only works for the player's ship; computer controlled ships only decloak when they fire.

Rats!

I was thinking of CCM (Cloak CounterMeasures system) that decloaks all hostile ships within a certain radius for a certain amount of time. Shame that planet's building lists aren't infinitely long, otherwise we could make TONS of 'specialist' ships!

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An action I'd like to see is a "SelectAux" that causes the auxiliary (Control) object to be automatically selected. Then, building a ship called "Capships" could SelectAux to an invisible (CannotBeDest) invisible object in the area that allowed you to select CapShips to build. Essentially,

Planet A
Build Types:
1 Light Ships - instantly SelectAuxes to Emplacement A
2 Frigates - instantly SelectAuxes to Emplacement B
3 Capships - instantly SelectAuxes to Emplacement C
4 Specialized - instantly SelectAuxes to Emplacement D
5 Capturers - instantly SelectAuxes to Emplacement E

Emplacement A
Build Types:
100 Fighter
125 Interceptor
150 Bomber
200 Cruiser
225 Schooner
6 Back - instantly SelectAuxes to Planet A

Emplacement B
Build Types:
250 HVCruiser
300 Gunship
350 Defense Drone
400 Escort
425 Corvette
6 Back - instantly SelectAuxes to Planet A

And so on.

Of course, I don't know what reverbrations implementing such an action would have in Ares, so I'm not asking it to be implemented...yet...

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Quote

Originally posted by Pallas Athene:
snip
**
However, if a weapon with the collide action Cloak (nonreflexive) hit a player ship, then would it decloak as normal or decloak and then instantly recloak it? It would be interesting to see a neutral omnicloak.
**

In the case of applying the cloak action to the player ship, it shouldn't matter how it is applied. It should behave the same whether it's by the activation of a device, or by the collision with another object.

The limitations with the cloak action are due to the fact that the action takes no argument, and the game logic determines what the ship "means" when it tries to cloak.

Quote

Originally posted by Pallas Athene:
**An action I'd like to see is a "SelectAux" that causes the auxiliary (Control) object to be automatically selected. Then, building a ship called "Capships" could SelectAux to an invisible (CannotBeDest) invisible object in the area that allowed you to select CapShips to build. Essentially,
**
snip

Very clever/scary scheme. There's a fairly small limit on the number of bases that can build though -- I fear you'd run into it very quickly.

Is it less than 14? I'm guessing it's probably 8. It's a large enough number for flexibility, and it's a power of 2 (always seen in computer games). Plus, to go up to 16 means what I was proposing would be possible.

However, there's no reason (using 8 as the max builders) that you couldn't have:
1 Small
2 Medium
3 Large
700 Cargo Ship
800 Transport
860 AsltTrans

As that's 4/player

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Quote

Originally posted by Pallas Athene:
Is it less than 14? I'm guessing it's probably 8. It's a large enough number for flexibility, and it's a power of 2 (always seen in computer games).
snip

The magic number appears to be 12.