Star Trek Mods
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The main reason nobody’s done one is that Freelancer can’t handle proper beam weapons for shit, and Star Trek is basically defined by beam weapons.
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FriendlyFire is right. FL can’t handle beam weapons. However, with an insanly high refire rate, it could be made to look like beam weapons. Some examples can be seen on Nightstalkers mod.
But with the low player numbers these days, would a modder really want to tackle a project like this? I would go with the SSM mod or Nightstalkers to be honest. -
Don’t forget that.
We can make a sort of burst that can define the number of projectiles launched in the interval of time when the FX is running. But I don’t really think it can be done in Freelancer engine. If Adoxa can make a plugin for that, it could be cool.
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The hack using the fire effect means the beams are always of a fixed length, even if they hit something closer. It looks really bad.
Using high refire rate means the beam curves when you aim and you can see the individual shots then. It’s also a major server performance issue.
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If you combine the 2 method you can get the best result.
I don’t know if FL can handle long muzzle flash (Iron 118’s Beams) and “beamed” projectile FX together, I can try. -
Yep, it’s sadly the truth. But I noticed in Nexus TJI that beams are the same as FL and there is a Star Trek mod.
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Nexus has properly implemented beam weapons, so I’m not sure what your point is.
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My point is that Nexus’ beams are one shot one hit.
It is one sound = one damage, just like in FL. But FX are stopped by the mesh in Nexus, not in FL with Iron118’s beams.
And look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K95ygPi76cs especialy at 2 min 38 sec.
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I’m building something that may be called a vanilla Trek-ification but its on deep hiatus currently and it isn’t in any way designed to be a Trek based mod, apart from visuals (which has its balancing challenges). As for beam weapons… well, you gotta compromise there, that’s true. But that’s the advantage one can have when not building something that resembles canon Star Trek and thus rationalising away all the issues. I suppose they could be implemented but that would totally ruin the spirit of fighting the limitations of an outdated game for its own sake
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Actually SSM does have beam weapons ( a perfect example is the trade lane weapons). It is possible to make them in FL simply by stretching a single beam into a really long beam. The only problem I was unable to fix was the speed limit of weapons fire (how fast it travels towards the target). I played with firing really fast but as mentioned above, it causes a severe lag spike for anyone near it.
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And it all depends on the era. TMP era Trek uses pulsed beam weapons for phasers. TNG-series Trek has the beams last a second or two unless being used as a tool. DS9+ has phasers that last only a second, and pulse the beam several times over per volley (not talking about the Defiant’s Pulse Phaser Cannons). Doing a convincing phaser shot is doable in TMP and DS9+, it just has to be done right.