Untargeted Gun Focal Point
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Here’s a difficult question.
First some background. I feel a solid understanding of the underlying fundamentals of gun aiming is necessary so that everyone is on the same page about the subject matter. However I know some aren’t patient enough to read all of this so heres a TL;DR. If you’re not sure what I mean in my question, then please read the rest of this post. Even if you aren’t sure, I recommend reading it anyway.
TL;DR How can I move the untargeted gun focal point out much further than it already is?
When you have a ship targeted, you are presented with a lead crosshair to shoot at. When you mouse over the lead crosshair, your cursor changes and the guns then focus on the lead crosshair. The result is that if you fire a steady stream of bullets, all the bullets will cross each other at that point, creating many intersecting lines. This is standard behavior for when shooting at an assigned target. From now on I’ll call the point where the bullet paths intersect the focal point.
What happens when you shoot into empty space with no target?
When you do not have something targeted the guns still need something to converge upon, a sort of default focal point when shooting off into empty space. I think this focal point is placed on a plane perpendicular to the camera at about 1km in front of the camera’s position. It’s tough to prove, but after messing around I think this is what happens.
This behavior is perfectly fine for pretty much everything that happens in vanilla Freelancer. After all, 1km in front of the camera is almost always somewhere in the vague direction you are trying to shoot at. Meaning, if you miss a target’s lead crosshair, then the 1km focal point is generally close enough to the lead crosshair that a gun has to make only minor adjustments when the cursor misses the lead crosshair and it starts using the default focal point.
With all that said, here is where my problem starts.
What happens if that 1km plane for the default focal point is not in the direction of your target? What if it was in the complete opposite direction of the ship you are trying to hit? The result is that when your cursor misses the lead crosshair, the guns use the camera’s default focal point. This causes the guns to want to swivel 180 degrees around because the new focal point is now in the other direction. Once you get the cursor back on the lead crosshair, the guns then have to swivel 180 degrees around to shoot at the new focal point. This causes the guns to spend all their time swiveling with unneeded motion.
This is not something that would ever come up in vanilla Freelancer. The only time this becomes an issue is if the camera is set a long ways away from the player ship. Usually when this happens, it is because the player is flying a large capital ship. For example, the Rheinland Battleship suffers from this. It is a very large ship, so its turret camera must be set far away so as to be able to view the entire ship.
What happens in a Rheinland Battleship is that the camera is so far away that the plane in which the default focal point gets placed is not always on the opposite side of the ship that the camera is sitting.
I need to figure out some way to push that focal plane, and consequently the default focal point, much further out. Doing so would avoid this issue entirely. The consequences for this action against other ships would be negligible, but the benefit for large capital ships or ships with a distant camera is great. So to ask again…
How can I move the untargeted gun focal point out much further than it already is?
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for what i figured out, there is no default focal point. it depends on the weapons maximal distance, where they fire. the low-range guns follow the focus of the high-range guns. to clear the dilemma, where all the canons fire: they always aim the cursor on the highest distance they can fire while this distance is calculated away off the camera.
this is, too, only a hypothesis (and a pretty weakly explained, i agree). a modding team i have been helping out followed this theory though, increased the bullet lifetime of the highest-range weapon and all cannons in fact appeared to fire away from the camera and not towards it (we’re talking about battleships with up to approx 1.8 km in length).
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Nicely understood and addressed, Gist.
I had also experienced this problem and on initial thinking about it, I decided to replace most cannons with missile turrets on the largest battleships.
Then I decided to re-address it because it (all missiles) was unrealistic and I am a fan for realism. I did resolve it to a reasonably satisfactory degree by creating new battleship sized weapons to complement the vanilla ones, for which I also increased the range.
It was fun toying around this.
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ye i noticed it more in turret mode having to wait on the turrets turning before they can fire
and when you miss they try to turn around again
you totaly notice it more if you go try mining a astroid field
its like they try returning to there default posion
thing is if you disable focus they just go straight
and not have a focus point but it would be more relistic
thats where flac turrets would be nice -
Flak turrets would be very good, but I couldn’t find a way to make them look “realistic” where the explosion would not keep moving at the rate of the ammo - it looks odd. I think someone was looking into this recently, to make the explosion static if possible?
I haven’t tried a very slow-moving projectile with a high gun muzzle velocity, that might work?
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no, it wouldn’t, ST. but its a matter of ALE. i remember, recently someone said, there is a variable you could define, that the particle would have world coordinates and not relative to the projectile the emitter would be mount to. missile trails appear to have that, too (the tiny clouds don’t move, they stay where they are created).
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The emitter would still carry on, Gisteron. The only way around it is to only spawn particles at the very first instant the explosion happens and make these unlinked with the emitter’s momentum. It’s far from ideal, though.
I asked about this but never received a reply.
