New modder, questions about the game

[Armanant]

Hi everyone, I've just recently gotten my hands on SotS and I must say, WOW what a game. I've been poking around for a while for a game to make a Halo space combat mod for, and SotS seems ideal!

I've had a brief look at the modding resources and dipped my toes modifying a weapon or two, however a few questions have come up, which I haven't been able to find answers to in the wiki or the forums, though my search-fu may be lacking.

Do planets have a gravity well in combat? by that i mean, do ships accelerate faster towards them and slower away. If not, can this be added, and if yes, can this be modified?

I tried creating a basic missile pod (eventually archer missile pod) weapon, which would fire 20 homing missiles in quick succession. I ran into a problem getting each of the missiles to fire from a different position though (so it's not a big line of missiles slugging on forwards, which looks lame). Is there a way to accomplish such an effect?

volley_deviation doesn't seem to have any effect on missiles, or at least I haven't been able to get it to work. Is this meant to work, and if so are there any weapons with it in action that I could learn from?

How modifyable is the AI? is it possible to get it to do something in response to incoming fire? For example, I would want to add manuverability thrusters (massive shaped charges on the side of the ship, when detonated push it in a direction) which I could see being implemented as a weapon with a say 1hr cooldown in it's own slot, with a real large kickback and just an explosion effect. Could the AI trigger these when they see an incoming heavy weapon to 'dodge' it?

That's my first batch of questions that I can think of off the top of my head XD i'll have more soon probably, but I'll post em as I think of em.

Thanks heaps all!

Edit : I seem to have posted this in the wrong forum Could a mod move it to the Modding forum if possible?

[Darloth]

I think moving an entire thread is the same as moving one post, so I'll reply here.


As far as I'm aware, planets have no tactical gravity well. If they do, it's not particularly noticable. Liir vessels do move noticably slower in tactical combat around a planet, but as far as I know (again, I haven't tested this) it's the same slowdown no matter how far away from the planet they are.

I doubt you could fix this without some seriously odd modding... However, if you DO want to fix it, I would suggest you look at the gravity effects used by various weapons, and converting a planetmissile type to spawn those weapons at a constant rate inside the planet - if you make the radius of the gravity effect huge enough, this might do what you're looking for.

If the missiles don't deviate naturally, perhaps you could look at multi-warhead missiles, you might be able to use what is essentially a warhead that instantly splits into 1 other warhead, to give some spin or deviation to them that way - I'm not certain if this is random, but it's where I'd look, I remember playing around with multiwarhead data files and it was fun. Firing from multiple points doesn't seem to be possible since weapons on ship plans are specified as nodes, rather than individual barrels, then you just stick a turret to those nodes... but I don't actually know what happens if you design a turret with more barrels on it. I suspect you could maybe get a massive volley of missiles firing simultaneously that way, but a nice staggered ripple, I am unsure.

Edit: Doh, I am silly. Playing another game of ACM, I am reminded that you can animate weapon firing points. If you build the missile launchers into the actual ship model itself (and presumably force that mount to be missiles only, which is easily done), then you can animate the firing node and set it to hide the turret. With carefully timed animations and firing delays, this can make it look as if a spray of missiles is coming from various places, and should look pretty cool.

The AI is not very modifyable in terms of if-then behavior in combat. It seems to adapt nicely to various versions of the weapon classes it already knows about, but I seriously doubt you could make it choose to use a defensive system like that.