Shane: maybe old mystery solved

Originally posted by Second Chance

Wow, that's pretty strange. I guess I'll straighten out the launchers and see about fixing that docking null on the A-Wing today.

I did that (I think) with an editor and it's not the whole problem. There is still seems to be a vague, inexplicable dependency on the input file.

Also it is not only the rotation of the missiles nulls.

I think with some carefull pog stuff I can prevent it from happening. lemme test some more before you do some possibly uncesessary work.

Oh yeah. They manually launched fine; no problems there. It's keeping them from launching at whatever you're autopiloting to that's the hard part. The autopilot type doesn't seem to matter either... autodock, auto-approach, etc., all acted the same.

Thanks Shane, same is happening with me.

I meant though, did you check to see which direction the missile avatar was actually pointing in, when you launched one.

(I've got two theories on this oddity and one of them is based on the thought that the missile will always point in the direction of the ships Z+ at the moment it's launched(i.e. when the missile is initially placed by the engine).

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I meant though, did you check to see which direction the missile avatar was actually pointing in, when you launched one.

Sure did. The missile avatar is aligned correctly with the magazine. It's firing the right way. For instance, if the magazine points 'sideways', the missile launches sideways.... if up, missile launches up.

I could never find anything wrong with with missiles or magazines. They operate fine. It's something about the autopilot which is launching them... some function being called for some ungodly reason.

Some more info:

It doesn't matter what weapon is selected.

The launched missiles are recorded in the ship magazine totals. If three seekers launch, three are missing from the totals just like the player had fired them.

REM's, mines, LDSi missiles, etc. have never exhibited this behavior... only dog-fighting missiles.

I believe this happens in the single-player game also. During free-form mode five Marauder corvettes will exit an L-point. If you watch, sometimes they launch missiles at their destination before LDS-ing out. (However, their launchers are oriented on the Z+ axis.)

In the regular game you'll sometimes see the same behavior when merc corvettes exit an L-point. There's no reason for them to launch, especially at what appears to be their destination. It's the autopilot giving the order.

Is it the same behavior? If so, why just these ships?

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Thanks Shane,
sorry about asking so explicitly twice, but I wanted to be sure.
Thanks to your information we can now safely go ahead and follow "plan B" blindly

Yes the the effect is the same including the missiles ammo count depletion.
Unbelievably, within primary weapon range, the docking autopilot can switch between PBCs and fire them even faster than I can
while simultanously launching missiles , *shock* even though the target is my own faction! *eek*
The same goes for the approach and format Autopilot. Man talk about twitch kids !

I can control the anomolly rather easily by activating the X-Wings Sfoils. (although it still only happens 1 out of 4 or 5 times) Thanks to MP where I can control nearly everything that happens in the game, maybe we can figure it out.
I know it isn't a script issue (cause I've rolled back over 2 years of MP script development, meanwhile).
It does have something to do with null rotation and if the input (joystick) isn't right it happens more often. Now I'm testing to see if the weapon fire arc is involved in the anomally too.

If we can't pinpoint it, there is always "Plan C":
Since you can't fire the weapons on the X-Wing when the Sfoils are closed anyhow, we can simply place the nulls for the weapons where the open wing position is and not rotate them with the wings.



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...we can simply place the nulls for the weapons where the open wing position is and not rotate them with the wings.

Umm, actually, that's already how it is. I didn't bother experimenting with animation in the weapon layout setup scene, so all the gun nulls are positioned at the open-wing position. And I'm pretty sure the missile nulls (for the X-Wing) aren't rotated out of normal alignment. I think I only rotated the A-Wing missile nulls.

I should realy go back and fix up these scenes anyway, since the idea of a single 360 degree shield didn't work out.

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Hmmm, I didn't really notice that because the script is already set with the weapons locked down when the wings are closed.

That sheds new light and leaves 2 possibilities:
Since the anomally happens repeatably more often after opening the wings:

a) It has something to do with the avatar rotation
(which I doubt)

b) It has something to do with the call: iShip.WeaponsTargetFromContactList

which (as I was once told on a query), is used to unlock the weapons after calling iShip.LockDownWeapons
However, the notes in the pog SDK are a bit different and would also explain Shanes observations with the marauder ships too. (maybe the AI piloted ships got the order to unlock their locked weapons before they jumped?)

So how the heck would I correctly unlock weapons? Perhaps with a call like this:

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Fixed it!

They'll never know the difference

the problem no longer exists in the MP game!

You'll probably never be able to fix the occurances in the SP game.



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