Cloaking and missiles: in lieu of an expansion pack

[UK_Eliter]

Dear all

In the current stable version of Oolite (1.82), and unlike older versions (starting at I-am-not-sure-which-version) cloaking has little or no effect upon missiles targeting the cloaked vessel.

However, this will be changed, in the nightly versions of Oolite and in the next stable release, to this behaviour: when the target of a missile (at least a missile from the core game as against expansion packs) cloaks, the missile will stop homing in on its target (and instead will continue on its current course).

If you do not want to wait until this behaviour is implemented in the version of the game you have, you can achieve it already by following the instructions in 'Edit #2' in this post by another_commander. Once you've followed those instructions, restart the game - you may need to hold shift whilst you restart, so as to clear the cache - and that should be that.

Cheers.

PS: I entitle this post 'in lieu of an expansion pack' because I was going to try to write an OXP to implement this behaviour/patch; but it is simpler all round, or at least for me (!), if you do the above.

EDITED to add the PS and, er, to complete some text in my first paragraph.

[ffutures]

Do they revert to following the target if it decloaks?

[UK_Eliter]

Yes, I think so. Give it ago.

I did write an expansion pack - with the help of another_commander - that made missiles, most often (and at least if they are core game missiles) detonate when the target cloaks. I could make that expansion pack available, perhaps. However, as it stands, it works only for missiles targeting the player. To get it to work for missiles targeting other ships would take more work (and indeed research).