Weapon Energy

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:47 pm

I'm just having a play with creating a player/NPC Combat Drone for my next trick (well why should we Thargoid's have all the fun with such things?), and have come across a rather irritating little issue. I was going to have it based on a ECM-hardened missile but with a laser (cue Dr Evil jokes) for some target-blasting first.

However it seems that both the laser damage and the missile yield are controlled by the "weapon_energy" shiplist entry. So I either get a missile-strength laser blast or a laser-strength warhead, which rather makes the thing either far too deadly or too weak. I know I could probably get around it via spawning a missile just before impact, but that seems rather a clunky work-around.

So I was wondering if it would be possible to have different weapon_energy keys for different uses, and indeed perhaps for the different gun mounts too (e.g. have weapon_energy_fore, _aft, _port, _starboard and _missile for example)?

Post by **Cmdr James** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 6:05 pm

I think you can do this by putting the laser, or the warhead on different subentities.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:54 am

As you can't change weapon_energy on the fly, Cmdr James' solution seems the best (if you don't want to re-spawn). Although I am by no means sure that it actually would work. I think you just have to try.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:21 am

I've had the same suggestion from a couple of sources, and it does sound like it would work. I've got the drone code almost there, so a trial is imminent. I'll then throw it open to people to look at, as I'm not convinced the AI is as tuned as it might be.

Editted to add - trial for AI advice is detailed here.