Oolite Bulletins

Re-design Twin Plasma Cannon:
The twin plasma cannon is effectively worthless at the moment as a weapon. Could the weapons range be adjusted to that of a pulse laser, the speed to that of a plasma bolt from a turret? And maybe the damage could be equal to pulse/beam lasers, or even equal to a mil laser?

The Twin Plasma Cannon was always meant to be a NPC only weapon - your suggestion would make it too good a weapon - it's supposed to be a Capital Ship close-in Broadside type weapon - personally I think it should stay as much...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

The Twin Plasma Cannon was always meant to be a NPC only weapon - your suggestion would make it too good a weapon - it's supposed to be a Capital Ship close-in Broadside type weapon - personally I think it should stay as much...

Not quite. That's the Plasma Turrets, and I agree 100% with you.

The Twin Plasma Cannon, however, cannot have been meant to be an NPC-only broadside weapon. For starters, NPCs can't mount side weapons, and never could.

Personally I think that the Twin Plasma Cannon perhaps saw the light of day as sort of a downgraded player version of the NPC-only Plasma Turrets ("Hey, these guys can fire cool plasma balls; I wanna do that too!"), and it was heavily downgraded at that. You have to sacrifice one of your lasers for it, you have to point it, its projectiles are slower (and less damaging?). The only plus side is that it doesn't need a selected target. It was probably only ever meant to be mounted at the rear position as a defense weapon against missiles while you run away from them. And even at that, it didn't exactly become an instant success.

D'oh! Always getting those two mixed up! I really should play more often! However, it would be nice if NPCs could mount the Twin Plasma Cannon on the side ports - that would shake up Player/NPC combat a bit! (of course the significant AI rewrite to utilise said Cannons.... hmm....)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

D'oh! Always getting those two mixed up! I really should play more often! However, it would be nice if NPCs could mount the Twin Plasma Cannon on the side ports - that would shake up Player/NPC combat a bit! (of course the significant AI rewrite to utilise said Cannons.... hmm....)

I don't know if there was an AI rewrite needed. NPCs are perfectly capable of using Twin Plasma Cannons instead of lasers (although I don't know any NPC with Twin Plasma Cannons off the top of my head).

Re: side ports: NPCs don't have side ports, period.

My AI rewrite was aimed at the fact that if NPCs were given the same opportunities as Players and therefore had access to side mounted cannons this would require a rewrite of the AI, since at the moment, as you pointed out (and which I already knew - once you reminded me of it again) that NPCs do not currently have access to side mounted weapons.

So the argument goes: Should NPCs have side-mounted weapons including Plasma Cannon -> if "yes" then -> code rewrite required -> modifications to AI to accommodate new weapon position also required...

Or have I missed something?

(Of course this completely gets away from the original question - but if we're trying to stop the game from once again becoming Player-centric (without destroying the "fun" element) - then what's available to the player should be available to the NPC and I would argue that this should include side mounted weapons - so if the player gets a better Plasma Cannon then the NPCs should have a better Plasma Cannon too...)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

So the argument goes: Should NPCs have side-mounted weapons including Plasma Cannon -> if "yes" then -> code rewrite required -> modifications to AI to accommodate new weapon position also required...

Yes, I think that's more or less it.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Or have I missed something?

Other than that Twin Plasma Cannons suck no matter what, you mean? No, I think not. (I just installed one on my rear mount and tried it. And what can I tell you: boy, it sucks! )

Yes it does have low damage, correction ultra-low damage. According the wiki it does six damage. A pulse or beam laser does 15 damage and a mil laser does 23. See here.
It's too slow to hit even a shuttle and has almost no range. And by all means allow it to the npcs, I don't care who has it; I just want a usable version of it. I think the some of renegade pirates have it already, sort of, except it is really two turrets that only fire forward.

Commander Wilmot wrote:

I think the some of renegade pirates have it already, sort of, except it is really two turrets that only fire forward.

Yes, I think in case of the renegades it's turrets, not cannon.

Commander McLane wrote:

Personally I think that the Twin Plasma Cannon perhaps saw the light of day as sort of a downgraded player version of the NPC-only Plasma Turrets

The TPC was introduced long before the turrets – in fact, I think it was withdrawn from sale before turrets were added. The equipment.plist entry that it was a test item – note past tense; it’s there for backwards-compatibility with old saved games, and making it available to the player is effectively an OXP bug.

I think it might work, if it was tweaked a little, but I realize that it would very low in the priorities list (at the absolute bottom, in fact), if it was even up for consideration.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Personally I think that the Twin Plasma Cannon perhaps saw the light of day as sort of a downgraded player version of the NPC-only Plasma Turrets

The TPC was introduced long before the turrets – in fact, I think it was withdrawn from sale before turrets were added. The equipment.plist entry that it was a test item – note past tense; it’s there for backwards-compatibility with old saved games, and making it available to the player is effectively an OXP bug.

That's the problem with plist-editors auto-deleting comments. I wasn't aware of the comment to the entry. I just had to open equipment.plist with TextEdit in order to even see it.

I seriously doubt that many save games from the days before there were plasma turrets still exist. And if they do, I doubt that they contain the cannon. There are probably more save games from the era of RS and its successors, which I would guess contains the OXP bug.

Of course that's a general issue in a game as modable as Oolite: wherever old code corpses are kept lying around visibly, sooner or later some careless OXPer will stumble across them and dig them out, ignoring the intentions of the developer who buried them in the first place.