Sectorgame

Vasudan Admiral wrote:(incidentally, FS can still only recognise 3 firing points per turret, so don't bother trying with more. )
And again, thanks all.

Um... have you ever looked through the old FS1 ships? The table entry for the Faustus actually has 4 slots (2 primary, 2 secondary) bound to a turret with only one firepoint. There's also the Chronos, which has actually 4 firepoints on its defence turret. I think it may work if you only have one slot in the table entry. I think FS will still use the other points, it'll just cycle between them.

Hmm, having 4 firing points may be possible then, yes. Something to look into in future.
However, i seem recall some line in the FS source that defined the maximum number of turret firing points at 3 - and most of the rest of the code assumed it was set to three. Fred's weapon assignment interface seems to suggest this also.
Long ago it took me many hours of bugtracking to find having 4 firing points to be the cause of an error in one of my really old ships, but i don't recall if i had defined 1 or 4 weapons to use in the TBL.

On the other hand, does that secondary port actually work on the faustus? i've never seen rockeyes come out of it before, yet fred seems to recognise it as having them.
If it does indeed work, it could lead to some pretty cool looking multi-function turrets in future.

Vasudan Admiral wrote:On the other hand, does that secondary port actually work on the faustus? i've never seen rockeyes come out of it before, yet fred seems to recognise it as having them.
If it does indeed work, it could lead to some pretty cool looking multi-function turrets in future.

Best way to tell is to give it a very visible missile like a Pirrahna or something. Kinda dumb to give a ship that size Rockeyes anyway...

Happy birthday!

Vasudan Admiral wrote: (incidentally, FS can still only recognise 3 firing points per turret, so don't bother trying with more. )

FS does recognize more than three firing points on a turret. (The originals Aeolus had 6 on each of its side turrets). It won’t allow more than 3 arms for the multi-part turrets.

Interesting...

Still, John, just because it's on the model doesn't mean that FS2 will use a firing point, though.

I know how to test it. Just take any model with a turret, make 6 firepoints for that turret that are noticeably apart, and then make a turret primary with a swarm of 6 and a 0 swarm delay and mount that weapon on the turret. Open FRED, place said ship, remove all weaponry from other turrets, give it a hostile object to fire on, open FSO, open mission, play, see results.

Speaking of testing, I got the chance to test out my modefications to the HTL Aeolus, and NO CRASHES! Of course, all the mission consisted was a hostile Aeolus (HTL) jumping in and firing on me, followed by me shooting out the turrets with trebs, knocking out the subsystems with my maxims, and then blowing the **** out of it. Now, it didn't have to face off against any cap-ships, or face off a determined assault by multiple enemies, but I think it's in a semi-useable state, and worthy of release. I actually found it harder to engage than a retail Aeolus, but then again I've never tried to take on one completely single handedly. Therefore...

http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel.topps/AeolusHTL.ZIP

I didn't include the textures to keep the filesize down, so you'll stll have to download VA's zip, but all I can say, is that that baby is gonna look sweet with alpha-shinemaps. When you fly in close, it almost looks bump-mapped. If you plan on useing it as a drop-in replacement for the standard, you're gonna have to change the filename to match the retail model, and possibly delete the LOD distances in the table entry, since it has no lods.

Enjoy!

lol, good to know there's no crashes. Not what i would have expected considering the early stages of the model. Well done.

Jonathan_S47: true, the side turrets did have 6 firing points each, but they cheated.
What [v] did was assign 2 turrets, each with 3 firing points, to the one turret sub-object. The result is that it can fire from all 6 points, but they act as separate turrets on the one submodel - meaning they can target and fire at separate objects simultaneously.

Well, after running some tests, i've found that FS can support a total of 4 firing points per turret - as TP suggested, you just leave it set with only one weapon in the ships tbl, and FS will cycle through the 4 firing points. However, any more than 4 will crash as soon as the turret is supposed to fire.

Hmmmmm I've never tried assigning multiple turrets to a single sub-model before, that's actually pretty handy to know for certain.....things

Your right, I just checked it out in model view. Guess that explains why the AAAf was able to fire so quickly on that ship.

Yeah... that's probably the most effective AA platform in the game.