Oolite Bulletins

Ganelon wrote:

I find it particularly satisfying to stitch a moving opponent all down their length with a line of laser fire in the middle of a fight.

Yeah, a nice way to gut a Python... close-quarters dogfights are what it’s all about, in my immersed state.
As Ganelon says, when you can see the fine details and decals on the ship(s) that you’re attacking, the reticle isn't needed.

Ganelon wrote:

On the not so good part, I doubt the game AI actually fires unless it has you right in it's sights. It doesn't shoot wild. As such, even with only being allowed to hit you a certain percentage of the time, their weapons aren't overheating as much as a player who may be panic firing and hoping part of a spray gets lucky.

AI weapons don’t overheat in the same way players’ do, they just get randomly disabled from time to time. (Technically, their next shot delay is randomly set higher than it “should” be for whatever weapon they’re using.)

Ganelon wrote:

They also track better than most players, because logically the game AI always knows right where you are and is turning to get you dead in it's 12.

They always know exactly where you are – until you drop out of scanner range and they instantly forget you exist – but they aren’t very clever (let alone creative) about using that information. You don’t have to be a very good player to beat the AI in a fair fight.

Ganelon wrote:

if you're close enough to make out details or even do a positive visual ID of the ship type, you aren't likely to miss whether you watch the colour of the reticle or not.

El Viejo wrote:

close-quarters dogfights are what it’s all about

You'll both like this, then...

You gotta get closer... in the danger zone:

El Viejo wrote:

You gotta get closer... in the danger zone:

Is this close enough for you?

Yeah, that’s more like it… ‘whites of the eyes’ stuff.

Yeah, great screenshots! That's how I get most of my kills. Oh, I die a lot by the way...

I've been trying to parse the source code to figure out how targeting works - the main idea being to allow more than one fwd laser for players ... I've sort-of worked out the mechanics... how the shipdata.plist and huds need to change for eg while still keeping backward compatability.

As a side effect, this would mean being able to set the crosshairs position according to the relative position of the gun with the viewpoint. I've had some frustration with this before, for eg: the neolite Cobra Rapier has its fwd laser above the view position ... but that was hard to set up so it worked. Below the view position was fine... There was als some player feedback that some of the view positions shifted the target-spot too far off the crosshairs.

Calculating the new crosshair position shouldn't be too bad ... the lasers have a finite range.

It has occurred to me, while I'm making a wish list, that I should be able to get the game to draw a small wire-frame of the target-locked ship in a plist specifiable part of the HUD ... the wireframe could rotate as ship previews do or show relative orientation, but I dont know what would be involved doing that. It may even be possible to script it.

The actual request IMO should be to "correct" the trig in the game so the FOR is to the ship xyz not the POV xyz... to see wat I mean, put the forward view well off-axis and then look forward while you roll. The center of rotation is the center of the POV, and it shouldn't be.