Oolite Bulletins

BuggyBY wrote:

Also I noticed that NPC Mantas and DTT Mk1s seem to always have front and aft lasers installed (usually I don't run into any ships with such configuration outside the like of Random Hits missions). Is that the default for the player version as well?

There are a lot of (OXP) ships outside of Random Hits which feature aft lasers, so this shouldn't be so unusual, but of course depends on which OXPs you have installed.

cim wrote:

It's probably also worth noting that you can theoretically simulate multiple player forward lasers - though I've not tried this so I don't know how well it would work in practice - using 1.77's OXP scripting support.

For one, there's this clever OXP by Okti. I can also imagine that the player's front laser could be moved between two positions once per frame via a frame callback, giving the appearance of two lasers. Of course the two lasers would actually only be one, firing alternately from the left and right side. It would also overheat just like a normal single laser, and wouldn't allow for multiple hits at the same time. But appearance alone goes a long way in selling something…

Commander McLane wrote:

For one, there's this clever OXP by Okti. I can also imagine that the player's front laser could be moved between two positions once per frame via a frame callback, giving the appearance of two lasers. Of course the two lasers would actually only be one, firing alternately from the left and right side. It would also overheat just like a normal single laser, and wouldn't allow for multiple hits at the same time. But appearance alone goes a long way in selling something…

Now that is an absolutely brilliant idea! Please, someone of the code monkey persuasion investigate this idea further!

Paradox wrote:

Ok, will have to re-read the guide to frangibility...

I missed this bit earlier: the default state is on. If you want subentities to not be frangible, you need frangible = "no"; in the shipdata entry for the main entity.