Player spawned NPC's
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The idea is making a “Mine Layer” for capital ships. Only instead of dropping mines, it scrambles fighters. Hence making ships like the Bretonia Carrier and the Liberty Carrier from other mods, well, actual carriers. Even so much as making “Drone Fighters” for ships like Frigates or Capital Ships.
We had thought of making it a simple mine, but with a gun, like a Justice MK1 or a Drail. Something to just be a minor annoyance as a low level thing. Then we began to think a little deeper. How do we tell the mine to define Friend from Foe. Well, it would have to have predefined Faction ID, like an NPC ship. From there, we determined that the ships should be specifically defined “Ammunition”. Functionally being that you would need to have very high rep with that faction, so you wouldn’t, oh, let’s say, have Corsair bombers pouring out of your carrier that just happens to be Bretonia Naval Guard.
I’m sure, that right now it’s impossible. But it’s like they always say. It’s only impossible cause no-one has done it yet. I’m not saying I have, but I’m trying to work towards that goal. If anyone could share their sagely advice, or even the know-how to pull this off, be it through a work around instead of a direct route, it would be much appreciated.
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I assume your running Discovery, based off the bits about ‘faction ID’, ‘Corsair Bombers’, ‘Bretonia Naval Guard’ (It’s Bretonian Armed Forces Guard :P)…
First of all, have you got Igiss’ permission?
Second…
I guess you could do this with FLHook… But I don’t know about it’s NPC capabilities… Try the FLHook forums. -
Thanks for the correction. Got the Bretonian Armed Forces mixed up with one of the other house factions. Kusari I think. As far as Discovery does, yes, they have a Carrier, but SW:WT has the Bretonian Carrier. I was merely using them as a point of reference. The carrier function of being able to scramble Fighters/Bombers, would be interesting in a mini mod that I’m toying around with. That said, if we get it working, it’ll be interesting to see on mods like Discovery, SW:WT, Freeworlds and the like.
I’m almost wondering if 88Flak might have touched on this function unintentionally. I’ll have to ask them and look through their scripts. Given that they don’t have a problem with that.
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it has been tryed… the “weapon” way at least… it failed (obviously…)
BUT!. … it may be possible, of sorts, via hooking or hacking… not my field of expertise but Flak’s hook can now switch “off” NPC’s in a system… or on… so “that” part is semi in play… but having them come from a carrier… hmm, sounds like a job for Fox’s wingmen but how you’d get them to spawn “from” the carrier… that i draw a blank…
So it may be a possibility, but its “tech” is still very early stage… instead of trying to work out 88flack’s codebase… go join the 88flack forum & ask around a bit… It’ll help… Fox’s code & mod structure is… a tad different than most mods.
Good luck, If you get it working I’d be interested in such a thing myself
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It certainly is theoretically possible, however, the key function in FL for actually spawning the ships (pub::SpaceObj::Create) hasn’t been completely reversed yet. Once that’s done it should be fairly easy to make them spawn when a gun or whatever is fired.
As for Flak’s FLHook’s NPC spawning switching, I simply made an existing FLHook feature able to be set dynamically via an admin command (the disable NPC spawns feature has been available via INI configuration for a long time).
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I had a thought, and I’m not sure how it worked in that mod, I never did get it or try it out, and I can’t think of it off the top of my head either. I didn’t search for it before posting this thought either, but I do know that everyone else here is probably familiar with it.
A while back, I remember alot of talk about “player-dockable” ships. As I mentioned, I don’t know how it works, but could that be a means of having the ships “spawn” from the carrier when the weapon/function were to be used? It only makes sense that you would also be able to dock at a carrier or capital ship too, if you can see NPC’s launching from a fighter bay.
