Make cloaks more, er, cloak-y in Oolite 1.82?

[UK_Eliter]

I asked somewhere on the boards about how cloaking works in the new version of the game (but I can't find the post; sorry) and cim told me something like: other ships will find it harder, though not impossible, to hit you, when you are cloaked. Now, this is indeed the case. However, I not find that other ships have much trouble hitting me, or, indeed, noticing me when I fly into their scanner range in the first place (or at least this last clause is true of police).

I submit that, for the sake of getting value of a cloaking device, for player sanity, and for realism, the accuracy penalty for ships fighting cloaked ships be considerably increased, and that it be make much harder to ships to first notice cloaked ships (although proximity should play some roll in this last consideration, I feel).

[another_commander]

I am running a test on this as I am posting and right now I am sitting in the middle of a pack of wolves while cloaked and they are not reacting. The trick is that they have not gotten a chance to target me yet. As soon as they appeared on the scanner I cloaked and that has helped a lot. However, if I cut the cloak, then they see me, target me and from that point on they know I'm there and I do need some maneuvering to be able to escape them, just like the Asp in the cloak mission had to do (but failed to, since you managed to get the cloak ).

I don't know if the reactions of the NPCs against a cloaked player need to be further numbed, there is always the possibility of further experimentation with it, but at least as far as the getting noticed part is concerned, I think it works as intended. The test with me finding a pack of pirates and cruising cloaked by them was repeated a few times, always with the same result.

[Cody]

I am running a test on this as I am posting and right now I am sitting in the middle of a pack of wolves while cloaked and they are not reacting. The trick is that they have not gotten a chance to target me yet. As soon as they appeared on the scanner I cloaked and that has helped a lot. However, if I cut the cloak, then they see me, target me and from that point on they know I'm there and I do need some maneuvering to be able to escape them...

That has been my experience in-game too - and I've been using the cloak a fair bit lately.
If memory serves, previously bandits would lose contact if you recloaked - it's better now.

[UK_Eliter]

Cody, Another Commander: thanks for testing.

I have just now done testing myself - have tested more properly than I did before - and I see that, in fact, the noticing does seem to work as intended / as makes sense, i.e. if a ship has never seen you uncloaked, it won't notice you unless and until you decloak.

However, I do think that the 'numbing' could do with upping a bit, perhaps especially for ships with standard or low 'accuracy' values.

[another_commander]

However, I do think that the 'numbing' could do with upping a bit, perhaps especially for ships with standard or low 'accuracy' values.

I haven't tested this, but looking at the code, the calculation of how off the shots against a cloaked ship will fall seems to depend on a few factors, most of which are not directly contollable (or practical to control), except for one: the ship's reaction time. This is changeable via the JS ship property reactionTime. So, changing this value to something higher than the default of 1.5 when player is cloaked, should in theory simulate a slower reaction to whatever movements the player is doing. So, without having tried anything yet, I imagine that the experimentation can already take place and an OXP that adjusts this behaviour to pre-1.82 status should be possible.

[UK_Eliter]

However, I do think that the 'numbing' could do with upping a bit, perhaps especially for ships with standard or low 'accuracy' values.

I haven't tested this, but looking at the code, the calculation of how off the shots against a cloaked ship will fall seems to depend on a few factors, most of which are not directly contollable (or practical to control), except for one: the ship's reaction time. This is changeable via the JS ship property reactionTime. So, changing this value to something higher than the default of 1.5 when player is cloaked, should in theory simulate a slower reaction to whatever movements the player is doing. So, without having tried anything yet, I imagine that the experimentation can already take place and an OXP that adjusts this behaviour to pre-1.82 status should be possible.

It seems to me - am I right? - that such an OXP would have to use a crude, time-expensive hack, in that it would have to intercept every ship spawn event and modify the spawned ship's reactionTime. Or perhaps a script could fiddle with that value when NPCs receive ship-cloaked notifications. Surely better than any such thing, at least if the devs (and I lose track of who they are, except for cim) would be happy with it, would be to adjust reactionTime in the core code. Indeed, if the change is being implemented at the level of the game code itself, perhaps some other adjustment would be possible.

[cim]

At the moment inaccuracy-against-cloaked is done by adding a random element to the position used to track reactions. (The faster you go, the larger this random element is)

If you go slowly then it's probably not large enough to help much
If you go in a straight line the random elements mostly cancel out
Doing high-speed turns in a Cobra III, I basically found that they couldn't hit me at all while I was cloaked, even at close range.

What sort of ship are you flying? The combat algorithms - not just here - are fairly sensitive to both speed and hull size, but tend to be balanced assuming a Cobra III or thereabouts.

[UK_Eliter]

Cim: thanks.

I'm flying a Fer-de-Lance 3G+(t), which is a fair bit bigger than a Cobra III (but, hey, my ship is black, though I imagine that makes no difference!). EDIT: the ship's dimensions are 49.5 (w) × 22 (h) × 93.5 (l).

As to high speed turns: I have just discovered that that does indeed prevent me being hit; but, after about a second (perhaps less) of returning to straight lines (even with moderate or high speed). . bam, i.e. I start getting hits. Still, this testing was against some fairly high grade police ships.

Also: I have considerable trouble getting a bean on cloaked ships, as soon as their flickering shapes move off my viewscreen (and my combat rating is Elite, although admittedly I am rusty at present).

[jh145]

Also: I have considerable trouble getting a bean on cloaked ships, as soon as their flickering shapes move off my viewscreen (and my combat rating is Elite, although admittedly I am rusty at present).

It would be nice to see that human behaviour better mimicked by NPCs.

For example:

• When cloaked and tailing an otherwise-unaware NPC, the NPC gets a chance every ten seconds or so to spot you when casually checking its aft view.
• When cloaked in the presence of a chasing NPC, you have a chance to lose your pursuer if you drop out its front view. (The NPC could drop from "visual lock-on" mode to, "here's out there somewhere" mode to, eventually, "casually checking each viewport" mode.)
• Being able to reacquire visual lock-on depends in part on human factors like the distance of the cloaked ship, whether it's flying towards or away from the pursuer, maybe even how many distractions are present nearby.

Wouldn't it be cool if a viable escape tactic (once your cover is blown) was to fly into an asteroid field and switch off the engines?

[UK_Eliter]

I second the sentiments of jh145, and add that, at the least, cloaking should have more of an effect upon incoming missiles than it does at the moment.

If necessary, I might make an expansion pack that does these things. However, I'd like the core game to do it. Perhaps - if the devs are not yet inclined to make the changes - we could have a poll?