Updating Gunnery Crews script, need some info

[Reven]

I haven't even finished the scripted missions, but I'm feeling the pain of not having my gunnery crews turret script installed. I can't believe Egosoft still ahs turrets shooting at a fixed rate of fire no matter what weapon is installed.

Anyway, as I mentioned I haven't played very far, and I don't intend to put in the extensive time playing that I did before originally writing the gunnery crews script for X². So, I'm hoping I can prey upon someone's patience to help me find some resources I need. Namely, I need for X³ the same info as is in this X² weapon spreadsheet. This is obviously from a spreadsheet, and some of the columns are derived values that I can make myself (namely the Damage over Time ones). The colums that are very important to me are: shield dmg, hull dmg, shoot speed, range, shot life, energy usage, refire delay, and slew rate. Something that notes any special shot effects would also be nice too - like flak, concussion, etc.

[DarkWrath]

I will see if we have one already done for Xtended , it would save you some time.

http://www.4shared.com/dir/1282771/50d2 ... aring.html

Check the file and download it.

[Diogo Marzo]

Reven, before you set gunnery crew plz check out Xtended mod. It really is what X games should be all about. They've rebalanced weops and flack sounds (so they don't destroy the speakers on your comp). It really is worth a looking at... just ask cycrow. X3 xtended mod + gunnery crew has been what I've been dreaming about for ages. The game won't get much better than that. C 4 Urself .

[tofuflash]

yea...Extended with Gunnery would be awsome

[Reven]

Traditionally I've not been a fan of entire rebalance mods. My understanding of XTENDED is that it adds new enemies, and I'm not sure I'm really interested in that. That all being said, I will say that I've been dissappointed enough with stock X³ to consider more... global solutions.

In any case, whatever my feelings on the mod are, once the actual port to X³ is done it shouldn't be difficult to adjust the logic for the XTENDED weapons.

That way, perhaps the gunnery crews can be incorporated into the mod.

BTW, why the name XTENDED? I find I have a doubletake every time I see it, since that's also the name of the X-series game after XBTF. I think ³XTENDED would have been cool. But, anyway, that's just my $0.02.

[Reven]

Sorry for the double post, I have a question on the spreadsheet. In X², speeds were given as a number that only meant something to the internal game engine. You had to divide it by 222 to get m/s. Is this the same in X³? If so, what is the divisor, and where can I get the raw numbers?

[Cycrow]

u can use the X3 editor to view TShips, it will display the speeds in both values, m/s and the internal game values.

u'll also get all the other stats you need from there too

[DarkWrath]

In the file I've uploaded , the values are the final ones i.e meters/second

[Reven]

Thanks for the info - especially the tip on the X³ Editor. The X² editor wasn't around back when I was in the scene, which meant unpacking everything to look at stuff - a pain.

I put the weapon info into my own spreadsheet format. It has both X² and X³ weapon stats in it. I'm mentioning this because I want to let people know not to get their hopes up about how good the gunnery crews will be in X³. All the weapons that made my turret code good were ruthlessly gutted. Gamma PSG is half as powerful and all PSGs are about half range. MASSD was cut down by a third in all areas - range, speed, and damage. IOND was especially raped - 1/6th the output and 2/3rds the range. I got pretty depressed as I updated my spreadsheet.

The big advantage of the gunnery crews was weapon swapping - use one weapon to take down shields, switch to another for hull. It looks like Egosoft was pretty careful in removing most weapons that stood out in any one area. Now all the weapons are pretty much vanilla "bigger is better". About the only thing the gunnery crews script will do is fire the weapons at full rate. And with the new way weapon energy is handled now, that might be actually a negative thing.

If this XTENDED mod people are mentioning puts the flavour back in the weapons, I'm all for it. Can someone point me to a TLaser and TBullets for it so I can build a spreadsheet with its stats?

[Mad Hatter]

It's my understanding that the weapons in Xtended are going back to normal in the upcoming version.

While the current changes they made were fantastic IS (even gained fps), the OOS calculations completely exploded and game balance went to hell.

[xalien]

Now all the weapons are pretty much vanilla "bigger is better".

That's not actually the case, not at all. Bigger weapons are more powerfull, yes. But their bullets are also slower and have higher spread - trying to hit fighters with PPC is an exercise in futility and frustration. The sight of M2 "helper" on a XI mission doing that is one of the the most digusting things in this game. On the other hand IRE's are so fast that even M5's have trouble evading them.

So basically all weapons from AIRE's to GPPC's have a fair share of usefulness in the game - something that I cannot say about X2.

[Diogo Marzo]

Before you make full switch, plz check out the rs turrets script as the energy concervation part of it is actually pretty good and may be useful. PS, don't sell yourself short. Part of usefulness of gunnery crew was usings area effect weops w/out hitting friendly/neutral ships/stations... Perhaps a way to keep ppcs from firing at anything bellow or at m6 would be hefty useful (if possible).

[Reven]

Yes, I can see the differences in the weapons, and no, they are not all plain vanilla - but in X², there were definite specialty weapons that X³ just sort of... wrecked. I guess I just find it a little sad to see some of the things that I thought made X² really cool get trashed.

In lighter news, from a scripting standpoint, plugging in the script to the game is going to be dead easy. The commands in the retail X³ were reserved for my gunnery crews script. The same slots that were used for the signed X² gunnery crews download actually made it into X³. I was pleasantly surprised - it looks like at some point the powers that be were considering including the gunnery crews script in the boxed game.

So, unless anyone has an objection, I'm using turret commands 900 and 901, and ship commands 1207 and 1208. These are numerically in a zone usually reserved for Egosoft, but titled with my old script commands.

EDIT: Wow, the entire 2498 text which had all the strings for my scripts (with my name on it too) was included in the game. I never did make it into the credits for X³ like I wanted at the time, but at least I made it into the game.

[jlehtone]

Somebody at the German forum has been working on X3 version of AEGIS. Might be worth a check?

The NPC turrets of vanilla game do swap guns, so they seem to run some variation of Crew-logic. I have seen that mainly on the Xenon J's. They go PPC->HEPT->PAC->FAA as I get closer. Seems to be range-based.

[Red Spot]

Hi Reven ..


Have used your Aegis script in X2 and enjoyed it a lot, better said its prob. part of the reason I invested so much time on fire/combat-coding ..

Anyway, and no offence here, but I can tell you that in X3;
-NPCs already switch weapons
-script commands make manually swapping the "B-approach"
-energy settings makes firing a lot of weapons something that has to be "balanced"

what Im trying to say is is that althou Aegis is a great script in X2 it simply will not work efficiently in X3 ... at least not how it was coded for X2 ..
(and I know as I made several Aegis-like scripts already ... and removed them as these so called advanced scripts could not even match up against the vanilla advanced scripts simply cause they can out of energy in seconds ...)



G

[jlehtone]

To add to Red Spot's points, the ratio of weapon power and shield strenght has changed. While in X2 one preferably had three turrets, ie 9 guns on Capital target, the X3 8-gun turret does about the same. Actually, most ships being long, means that the side turrets will not even get in range for a while, and they tend to get distracted by "wrong" targets, even though one would set them on "Attack my target".

Thus, one can quite happily deal destruction with just the front turret and leave everything else on anti-fighter duty. Myself, I have manually swapped the front turret between PPC and FAA, depending on if there is a big fish to fry. There are simple scripts for that swap, arent there?

So if there is a need for 'smart', it is mostly on the target selection and possibly on anti-fighter weapon swapping. Range is more important factor than rate of fire or firepower. There is nothing quite as frustrating than to point ones ship towards a big target and see no outgoing stream of PPC, because bad settings on other turrets have drained all the gun energy.


X2 Gunnery Crews changed my X2 Dragon from helpless novice into lethal assassin. Was almost too good on Oddy too, unless some targets bailed and turned PSGs off. Thank you.

[xalien]

One "smart" thing that would be highly welcome is "don't fire the friggin PPC if there's a big station or friendly capship behind your target you moron!!! Unless it's a capship that is very close (impossible to miss) and is about to kill you that is"

[jlehtone]

One "smart" thing that would be highly welcome is "don't fire the friggin PPC if there's a big station or friendly capship behind your target you moron!!! Unless it's a capship that is very close (impossible to miss) and is about to kill you that is"

I was close to West gate of BHS with my X2 Oddy and happily PSG'ed at the gate. After a search on the AEGIS thread I found a piece of text:
"It is the duty of the captain of a large combat vessel to steer clear of static objects, such as Gates, Stations, etc. They do not count as friends."

I think the same applies here.

[Reven]

I wasn't aware of the weapon switching the game already did - that's funny. They actually made a scripting command for it: select and switch lasers for target <target> in turret <turretid>: scan for friends <friendlytargets>

Why make a turret script like mine when they could hardcode it. Funny. They ripped me off.

And yes, I've run into energy constraints. It's a pain, but can be worked around. I don't know who else has written turret scripts or what ones you've run into, but I'm pretty sure that I can outperform anything in the game. The script already has multi-gun target selection logic - it's not a stretch to work in energy usage into that as well, so that the turrets altogether don't exceed the ship's generation capacity. Higher priority targets can requisition more energy than lower ones. I've looked at the "advanced" scripts, and they are really nothing more than the hardcoded weapon selection command tied into normal shooting routines. No target prioritization, no refire rate optimization, no turret slew rate improvements. I'm not trying to put it down or anything, just indicate that if nothing else, there is still room for improvement.

[LV]

I'd reccomend you have Race Response Fleets installed as your plugin may have some side effects (cargo space for one)