I’ve found that ships that are not in the player’s view seem to have different behavior than those that the player can see. My goal is to force enemy NPC’s to be correctly limited by their ships’ capabilities when chasing the player (not in formation, etc) This seems to me to be an AI processing issue.

Case in point: when the player’s camera is pointed away from NPC ships, those ships stay within weapons range, even when player should be traveling faster (via engine kill and a superior thruster speed than the NPCs). However, the instant the following ships are looked at with a camera (Rear View, Turret, or by turning the ship), the NPCs fall away.

This behavior also appears for me when entering tradelanes: NPC ships show up in the contact list at a certain distance behind the player ship, but when looking back, they fall away.

It seems to me that this is tied to the AI for following or trailing, but I’m unsure. The second instance, in tradelanes, suggests that AI operates differently when the player can’t see the NPC.

Looking through [[Limit Breaking 101]], I see that TrailOP behavior can be replaced with FollowOP behavior, but I’m not confident that it will solve the issue, since ships in tradelanes, who should not be attempting to follow the player, exhibit similar behavior.

Am I missing something? Is there already a ‘fix’ for this, or knowledge that it’s either possible or impossible?

Thanks.

This is from a post of mine on TLR in Warzog’s Privateer mod thread. From '05, I think. I was trying and eventually succeeded in making non-revolute guns. There was concern as to the utility, and NPC’s were likely to have issues firing, so it was not used.

“…I did it by changing the ‘min’ and ‘max’ of the ‘hp_connect’ rotating Hp in the gun’s .cmp file to 0 {EDIT Actually, as long as your orientation is correct for all hp’s in the .cmp file, you can use ‘Fixed’ hardpoints so its easier./EDIT}, turning the ‘force_gun_ori = false’ to ‘= true’, and then making the turn rate = 0…”

At the time, I used HardCMP for this, but the new UTF editor works nicely :). The edit (from the old thread) was because if you want completely stationary guns on a ship, [d]you can just edit the ship’s hardpoints to be fixed rather than revolute, and then the[/d] (edit2: I just rediscovered that for forward firing guns, you don’t even have to edit the models! Try it It’s really easy if you want stationary guns) ‘force_gun_ori = true’ and ‘turn_rate = 0’ keep it pointed in one direction.

The ‘force_gun_ori’ and ‘Turn Rate’ are from the munition and Gun sections of the Weapons.ini file. (edit3: force_gun_ori makes the munition only fire the way the weapon is pointing, turn rate is how fast the gun can turn. Changing the 1st makes guns that only fire where they’re pointing, and changing the 2nd makes guns that turn slower, faster or not at all. Last edit I promise)

One benefit/side effect is that the gun fires (forward) even when pointed away from the camera, such as in turret view.

Just another option

(edit1: The cockpit targeting reticle would be useful, and is the only thing that I could think of to show your center of fire. The targeting reticles in front of other craft should still be accurate, to my way of thinking. Perhaps I’m missing something.)

Is there some way to port the multiple ships per game or character from SP to MP? Using it as an FLHook plugin would be really nice, especially on RP Servers.

I have, and I will. I wonder why it, FLModelTool, works occasionally for some folks SUR files, but not others…

I guess I should have said “The reason it freezes upon loading some SUR files is that it can only handle a SUR file 64k or less.” (65535 anyone? :))

Thanks for all the tools and plugins adoxa; they’re really helpful.

The FLModelTool seems to have a usable .SUR file size limit of 64k. Any larger, and for me at least, it develops a memory leak trying to export the SUR to the TXT file. It stops and repeats the last line it had before reaching the size limit. I’ve let the file get to over 8GB before killing the precess and deleting the file.

This is just an FYI; I have no knowledge of how to fix the issue, nor do I expect anyone to do so. I presume that it stems from a limitation of file table info (or whatever) set during programming.

Happy Modding!

(Sorry to double post.) Schmackbolzen, as a group splicer this tool works excellently. Your suggestion of making convex shapes in place of the actual model shapes works well. When using the convex shapes, there’s very few issues with passing through ship geometry.

If (or when) you get around to having the converter generate hardpoint shapes, perhaps you could have an option to either use standard FL hardpoint geometry or to make specially named shapes in your model. That way if a ship has set weapon geometry, for example, you can have the weapons hittable properly rather than using FL weapon shapes only. If this is even possible, that is.

Anyway thanks again!

Hey Schmackbolzen, thanks a lot for the tool; it makes complex .sur creation really easy!

Edit number 2: The rest of what I had had to say was even less useful than that, and I removed it. I’ll be thrilled to see the finished product. That is all.