Trying to make ships never attack the player

even when the player attacks them

I'm designing a pair of simultaneous missions. One has a ship that doesn't move, with the player's goal being to protect it. Easy enough. The other has ships that ONLY attack the ship from the first mission, with the player's goal being to destroy them. I want the ships from the second mission to continue trying to destroy the ship from the first mission even when the player is killing them. Sort of a "race" to kill them before they kill it.

I can't get the ships from the second mission to ignore the player attacking them. Assistance please?

Have you tried setting the strength level of the ships in the second mission up to an extremely high level? I seem to recall having ships not attack me when I was, say, a shuttle, even though I was being a general nuisance to the warships I was attacking. Look around in the govt resource for those ships as well; if memory serves me correctly there's a field concerning combat odds that'll help out here.

Edit: clarification.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 24 February 2008 - 05:23 PM

Invisible ränk? Use the "ships of this gövt don't attack player" flag.

Mind you, I'm sure you've thought of that already and it doesn't work, but one never knows.

Q, could you tell us what you've tried?

- ränk
- gövt
- düde

All three have special flags, and I seem to recall that for Spaceball, I tried messing around with these to get the best possible outcome (though the aim was slightly different here, as I was trying to make it such that the other spaceball playing ships don't get blasted out of the heavens too fast). And I know it took some testing to find the perfect behaviour, because not all is as it seems.

The govt and dude flags also state that players shots won't hit the ships. The rank flag simply states that ships won't automatically attack the player. If JacaByte's suggestion doesn't work you may be out of luck.

Aye for what is stated about those flags, but they don't work exactly that way. Trust me, I was surprised by some of the results of those flags

Make the ship untargetable. Since a "friendly" ship will only return the player's fire if they're targetting it when they shoot it, that might work.

Of course, it has the side effect of preventing the player from using turrets and homing weapons...

You could try giving the stationary ship an invisible turreted beam weapon that does no damage that keeps firing at the enemy ships, keeping them hostile towards the stationary ship or returning them to hostile as soon as the player fires on them.

Except that it would need as many beam weapons as enemy ships, or those not being targeted would hostile the player.

I thought of that, but something along those lines might work. A weapon that fires in 360 degrees? If it hit the player, the player wouldn't notice due to the lack of damage.

Except that then any neutral ships in the area (traders and the like) would be hit by said 360-degree beam weapon, and seem to become hostile towards the immobile ship for no reason.

Thats why you use a turreted beam, or many turreted beams that can fire simultaneously. The only problem is performance issues. When you have too many beams on screen, things slow WAY down. I know this from experience.

Indeed.

You might be out of luck, Qaanol.

@lnsu, on Feb 27 2008, 01:37 AM, said in Trying to make ships never attack the player:

Thats why you use a turreted beam, or many turreted beams that can fire simultaneously. The only problem is performance issues. When you have too many beams on screen, things slow WAY down. I know this from experience.

The problem is that all the beams are going to target the same enemy.

The govt and dude flags also make the ship immune to the player.
I think the only other way to do this is with a rapid fire, instantly exploding, large large large blast radius, that hits everything for 0 damage.
You'll have to keep neutral ships out of the area, or make them all wimpy traders, so they run instead of fighting back.

Now, I'm not sure how well untargeted 0 damage blasts will hold aggro off the player, but it might be worth a try.

Hmmm. What about making them friendly with a high crime tolerance and no govt penalty for attacking/destroying them?

This post has been edited by Desprez : 27 February 2008 - 11:32 PM

That means that the others might not attack, but the one that the player attacks will.

@desprez, on Feb 27 2008, 01:09 PM, said in Trying to make ships never attack the player:

The problem is that all the beams are going to target the same enemy.

PD Beams. Although we've already ruled this out due to the performance reducing issues.

Are we sure that invisible beams reduce performance?

@lnsu, on Feb 28 2008, 07:32 PM, said in Trying to make ships never attack the player:

PD Beams. Although we've already ruled this out due to the performance reducing issues.

I'm pretty sure PD beams all hit the same target too.

Yes, but they switch targets faster.