Why is cloak_passive false by default?

[CaptSolo]

I just recently acquired the cloaking device. Funny thing was the first opportunity to scoop one I had no room for it. Works great against hardheads, but won't change the way I play the game otherwise.

By the way, the ship in Elite - at least the version I had - was not cloaked. I called it the "Stealth Ship" since it was visible except on the scanner.

[Commander McLane]

Got the device, I had to read the spoiler alert on the wiki. Worth it. The viper never saw it coming, and I'm still clean because they still don't know it's me!

The downside is that the Elite Federation also don't know it's you. Therefore you're not credited with the kill (meaning that your kill count doesn't go up). Nor, if you happen to kill a criminal, do you get their bounty.

[m4r35n357]

Well, like the energy bomb & the docking computer, the cloak is undeniably part of the game we all love, so much so that it makes a deliberate point of awarding one to the player gratis. So it is clearly there to be used.

Perhaps a better question might be "why are there so few NPC ships with cloaks"? To answer this, I added the facility to a test furball, and (in the brief time before I died) recalled the battle in which I "won" mine. It's REALLY good fun!

Come on, let's cloak more NPC pirates

[Smivs]

The problem here is the difficulty of controlling the cloak in NPCs. Basically it will switch on when the NPC is attacked and then not switch off again unless the NPC's energy gets too low. It (still) cannot be controlled by AI, and scripting control is difficult and complicated.
The case for AI commands "switch_cloak_on" and "switch_cloak_off" is compelling, but we're in a feature freeze, so.......

[m4r35n357]

The problem here is the difficulty of controlling the cloak in NPCs. Basically it will switch on when the NPC is attacked and then not switch off again unless the NPC's energy gets too low. It (still) cannot be controlled by AI, and scripting control is difficult and complicated.
The case for AI commands "switch_cloak_on" and "switch_cloak_off" is compelling, but we're in a feature freeze, so.......

hmm, I assumed that was what cloakAutomatic is for . . . well I'm finding out for myself anyway now

[Commander McLane]

The problem here is the difficulty of controlling the cloak in NPCs. Basically it will switch on when the NPC is attacked and then not switch off again unless the NPC's energy gets too low. It (still) cannot be controlled by AI, and scripting control is difficult and complicated.
The case for AI commands "switch_cloak_on" and "switch_cloak_off" is compelling, but we're in a feature freeze, so.......

Currently the only way around it is the cloak_passive key, which is however false by default.

And by this we have gone full-circle, and have arrived at the starting point of this thread again.

[m4r35n357]

Currently experimenting with cloaked pirates in Furball (not all of them, otherwise they can't find each other!). Works very nicely actually

[Eric Walch]

The problem here is the difficulty of controlling the cloak in NPCs. Basically it will switch on when the NPC is attacked and then not switch off again unless the NPC's energy gets too low........

hmm, I assumed that was what cloakAutomatic is for . . . well I'm finding out for myself anyway now

Yes, that is the reason that cloakAutomatic was added. No automatic on-switching of the npc cloak. When not-automatic, the cloak behaves like with the player. You only can activate it by script when a minimum amount of energy is available and it still switches of by itself when energy is almost exhausted.

[Smivs]

Looks like things have moved on. I was not aware of cloak_automatic. It'll help, for sure.

[CaptSolo]

Thanks to the author of this thread I have added this line of code to my current shipdata.plist. I'm at the age where I may forget to turn the device off and I certainly do not want to destroy a pirate and not receive the obvious game bonus.