Player use of Turrets

[MajorTom]

The Falcon has gun turrets and some ships like the B-wing and Y-wing have a Disruptor gun (Ion Canon).
The disruptor cannon funftionality is a cludge in itself because it will only work on ships that have no other ammo based weapons or missiles. (Otherwise pog can’t tell when the ship has fired the disruptor)

The only way I could figure out how to implement this is add a cludge to the cludge: use a completly separate ship!

The turret ship is created dynamically on the server and passed to all clients. It’s set hidden so it can’t be seen and can’t be targeted. It also has an AI pilot who has orders to follow the player around.
When the player presses the keybind to switch to his turret position, the turret ship is docked to the player ship (docking is instantanous)and he gets a rem connection to it so he can fire weapons.
For now it’s just set up so the player can steer his ship (via the engines of the docked on turret ship) while in the rem conection.

I think it would be better to have the player ship continue moving and only let the player be able to swivel the turret for a limited arc of fire. But, there are 2 hardcoded reasons that keep us from doing this:
A docked ship can only fire weapons if it has a higher docking priority than the object it is docked to.
The ship with the lower docking priority can’t even budge the other ship. (so you can’t have the player ship go straight or have the autopilot take over while the turret is active.)

We can/could mod the turret ship so it has great turning capability (yaw) but only reacts slowly to pitch and roll?

The other issue is: by creating a completly new ship we load the server and the bandwidth because you have more ships in the game. i.e 4 Falcons would mean we have 8 ships in the game (even though you don’t see half of them them)

What do you guys think?
Is the whole turret idea just too much of a cludge and we should abandon it?
Or go ahead and do the best we can with what we have?

Any alternative suggestions for the whole turret concept itself?

Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

---

[url=”http://webpages.charter.net/mjrtom/index.html”]Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site[/url]
[img]http://webpages.charter.net/mjrtom/BANNER11.jpg[/img]

[Author]

Posts