cutting beam improvement

posted on August 20th, 2007, 9:44 am

Hi there,
I wonder if command cube will be awalaible in V3? If so, I have a great suggestion for it's cutting beam. Can You guys make it slide along the hull of the targetted vessel? It cuuld even start firing aside of the hull itself and then hit the ship and slide throught it. As it would pass along the ship a small pieces of debree could fall apart from the ship 

posted on August 20th, 2007, 12:46 pm

I'd think that would be difficult to do. However if anyone can do it, the FO staff can. I'm still amazed with what they've done already 

posted on August 20th, 2007, 3:22 pm

I think it is possible because....
In Fleet Ops, the team created shuttles for stations, which, if I am not mistaken, occasionally disapear: consequently one should be able to get the same mechanic going for a ship (only invisible at first). Thus when the cutting beam hits the ship, one of these modable shuttles peals off like debri and disapears after a small amount of time. The sip, as normal, registers damage on its hull. Of course it would probably be impossible to actually take a chunk of the starship, but...
I think it would still be cool (though RAM requirements would probably go thru the roof!)

posted on August 20th, 2007, 4:45 pm

they could also make it fire like multiple beams at the same time and have them fire right next to the last one very fast so it looks like its moving and then decrease the damage but the only way i could see of putting the hull explosion replace the texture of like fire explosion with debree from the ship but you would louse the fire

posted on August 20th, 2007, 5:51 pm

It might work; I'm a little concerned about the idea of many beams firing as it may just make it seem as if the ship was being attacked by a swath of light rather than just one beam moving across. However... because we know that beams hit ships in different places each time they attack, it may be possible to incorporate this into the cutting beam idea and simply move the beam across these different places. I am just guessing here, and it seems really complicated, but who knows

posted on August 20th, 2007, 6:05 pm

actually the shuttles are apart of the station model, its actually an animation the just keeps repeating over and over and over... they are not individual chunks or models...

the only way i could really see this working would be with the weapon texture itself, have it start early at one corner on the texture and gruadually later to the other corner, the FO and textures will get wha ti mean if you ahve ever made a weapon for Armada... this means one part would hit ship first and would gradually eventually all hit, but that still has its issues...

posted on August 20th, 2007, 6:10 pm

Well, if it's an animation (ships around the stations), wouldn't it be a much simpler matter to create an animation which appears when that type of weapon is used on a ship?

posted on August 20th, 2007, 11:30 pm

if the Armada engine was that smart then yes... but an animation playing on a sod is defined by one line in a .odf and specific classlabels...

posted on August 21st, 2007, 12:09 am

we are still calling this the armada engine why??

posted on August 21st, 2007, 1:54 am

Why indeed.
But crud, I was just using my imagination and I guess.... well, your knowledge of all things coding has led to the demise of my optimism
Hopefully there is some way to get the idea to work though without excessive concentration.

posted on August 21st, 2007, 3:50 pm

we are still calling this the armada engine why??

because its the engine that powers the game, the code in Armada 2 and the code in FO is exactly the same, its never been changed and i don't think Doca Cola or Optec have decided to reverse engineer it yet to add their own code...

the frontend of FO (its own engine) does force the Armada 2 engine to do certian things but its just a trigger engien using the classlabels alreayd in existance and pressing buttons behind the scenes for you...

for instance when you Click your avatar button, it just clicks the 2nd evolution for you, you just don't see it...

its an engine running over an engine.

on a brigher note i have no doubt that Doca Cola programming abilities and modification of the engine could make all your ideas possible for the FO team are amazing people with amazing programming abilities and i fall before there might!!!!

posted on August 21st, 2007, 4:13 pm

If all that's happening is use of pre-existing class labels, then I'm curious what is meant by "programming" in this context. Obviously the FO team are very skilled, and I certainly couldn't do what they do. I'm not sure it stricly counts as programming though. Someone correct me here, but programming is writing and then organising your own code, say in C++, Java, python etc. So basically the programming has been done already, long ago by the guys at Activision/Mad Doc. And since each class is like an encapsulated box of code, all we need to do its create a new instance of a class. Programming? Not sure. Perhaps someone with greater knowledge of what the FO staff do could explain this better, so that we know what's involved exactly.

posted on August 22nd, 2007, 6:51 pm

Doca Cola programs his own frontend (the Fleetops.exe) , i believe it is writtern in Python... Don't hold me to it, i'm not a programmer...
So when you run FO you run two engines at once. one created by Doca Cola which exploits things in the Armada 2 Engine...
adding classlabels is more tricky as you have to modify the Armada engine which is ilelgal but also involves reverse engineering...
At the moment all the FO engine does is watch what the Armada 2 Engine does and at certian points when you do certian things it triggers things for you that you normally wouldn't... hence why i like to call it the Trigger Engine...

posted on August 22nd, 2007, 7:04 pm

Trigger engine, i like that!  . I suppose that whether or not it significantly alters the original source code or not, it's certainly a very clever device. Python would be a good choice because I believe it's much quicker to develop with than C, so it's well suited to large projects.