Commander McLane wrote:And just to clarify one issue in general: Lasers and turrets are two distinct types of weapons in Oolite. Laser = beam of light; turret = small balls of plasma.
This equivalence is contradicted in the following, also from you:
What I had in mind was a laser-armed ball turret.
won't work. Turrets are by definition plasma ball-armed.
So either a turret
is a plasma gun
or a turret is plasma-armed. Which?
Something that Oolite would recognize as a turret (and for instance turn in the direction of its target) will never fire a beam of light, but only plasma balls.
So unlike a thargoid laser then?
But this bit:
And only for this thingamajig which fires plasma balls you need the initialiseTurret-method. Never for anything that is supposed to fire beams of light.
Is the clarification - initialise-turret is for plasma turrets. The "omnidirectional laser" commented in the source code does not use this.
Personally I am using the terms a tad loosely for your comfort?
To me, a turret is the model that turns, it has a muzzle that shoots stuff. Anything which looks like that is a turret.
You have explained that initialise-turret is what makes a model orient its z-axis to a target, and arms it with a plasma cannon.
I understand that it is possible to specify forward_weapon_type="WEAPON_PLASMA_GUN"; to give a unidirectional plasma cannon... eg. not a turret.
At the mo I only have fixed laser subents pointing (1,0,0,0) and (0,0,0,1).
I don't think that (0,0,0,1) is a legal quaternion, but as long as it works, it seems to indicate that Oolite is forgiving in that respect.
Perhaps you can supply an example of a 4-vector which is clearly not a legal quaternion and I'd understand this statement. AFAIK: any 4-vector can be used to represent a quaternion.
Of course it is, it's even normalized!
As far as the appearance is concerned: Yes, you can do all kinds of things along the lines you have described. But as long as you chose to give pulse or beam lasers a bigger punch for some appearance effect, I will continue (should the case happen and I even download and install your OXP) to toast you ship from a distance too big that any appearance issues would matter.
Well of course, how you choose to play the game is up to you ... the shorter range will be something to make up for in the ship design ;)
eg. It can be very fast, or have fast escorts.
What exactly is the issue here: I take it you are not arguing that there is no point having npc ships with short range weapons? Short-range, very powerful weapons look like a nice balance to me: players have to learn to shoot accurately and move quickly.
Or in other words: as long as I kill an NPC from 20 to 25 kilometers away, the whole ship won't be bigger on my screen than a few pixels, I won't make out any details, and the ship won't even fire its lasers at all as long as I am above its laser range. You can see that with the existing ships with multiple front lasers. The closer you come the more laser beams are fired upon you, because it first uses only the military lasers, later the beam lasers, and only finally the pulse lasers as well. You can study this when attacking an Imperial Courier, or the Renegade Pirats.
Yes - that is part of what I'm talking about.
Similarly with turret ships, you stay far off and it doesn't matter that there are a dozen instakill pulse weapons on the thing. So what?
The discussion also assumes that the pc is the target. This is not always the case. Have you never sat back and watched a firefight, or been close to another ship while it is firing a weapon at someone else?
With griff-style ball+stick turrets, if you are far away you cannot see them. Does that make them a waste of time? (Though, when just in firing range, it is nice to be able to see the difference between that and a standard ballturret.)
Here's another one for appearances - but I don't think it will work.
I can make a laser turret by giving a ball-shaped subent a thargoid laser.
That should work - but the nice thing to do would be able to see the subent track a target (i.e. you, or an npc target) in the manner of griffs spacebar turrets.
So, if I start with a spacebar turret, perhaps I can also put a small laser (ball-model+thargoid laser) turret inside it. Then the turret would track the target, and the laser, if fired, would appear to come from the spacebar turret.
May not work - since weapons in subents may not actually fire from inside other models. Though, I can change the spacebar model to have a long hole down the middle so the coordinate of the laser is exposed.
This still has the problem of what to do with the plasma balls which the turret will still fire. Maybe I can script the turret not to fire, only to track?
Maybe I can set the weapon energy to zero. Will that make zero-strength balls of light? Or will the firing stop completely, a la WEAPON_NONE? Is it possible to make the plasma balls transparent as well?
(I don't think you can do that, since 1.71(?) lasers have to be bright enough to be seen... and I don't see Ahruman allowing alpha=0 colors for weapons.)
Another method - probably won't work:
If, however, lasers on subents can fire through mother ents, it gets more interesting. I can create the appearance of a cluster of lasers firing one at a time by putting one laser on a rotating subent inside. The beam emerges from different locations in the facing panel.
Or maybe I can do the same by reversing the normals on the subent and just sticking the needed part out of the hull?
If I use more than one of these with different spin rates I have the effect of a larger cluster firing in pairs, or triples, but different pairs etc. each time.
Now in practical terms - you still get fired on at the same rate.
But, in practical terms, all the ships can be equal size and color tetradedrons.
The reason I suspect it wont work is that it may not be possible to rotate a laser-bearing subent and have the laser follow the rotation.
The keen one would be to have a fighter with wingtip-mounted, or otherwise distinguishable, guns. One where the guns fire alternately.
In can, reportedly, be done in the case of external missile models - when a missile is fired the model gets swapped for one with that missile missing.
For that matter, can npc subents get missiles? This paves the way for missile batteries.... multiple missile launch locations.
Anyway, I started this whole thing to discuss hacking the lasers to create different effects.
Short of recompiling, I cannot remake the existing lasers.
So anything I try has to come from some legal combination of existing devices - and it will not be available to the player.
Lets be creative.
. The laser sub-ent doesn't need to be initialised or anything like that, only the ball (plasma) turret needs that.
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