In-flight shield booster

I am trying to create a weapon that can cause a shield boost in-flight. I can handle one of three options, any of them will work fine. The first option, that would be pretty cool to do, would be a grenade that creates a field of shield-recharging that works on any ship that flies into it, including enemy ships. If that's not possible, a weapon that boosted shields at the expense of fuel would be cool, or finally a shield, somewhat like the force shield idea in Acheron, that created an temporary, completely impenetrable field for a short period of time.

I have a fourth concept on this that I'm going to try, but if anyone can figure out a way to pull one of these things off, that'd be pretty cool.

I could have sworn that Qaanol once did something like this, but I can't find it.

I'm glad you asked. First of all, temporary but rapid shield recharge in flight: I've done this before in two ways. When the booster is engaged it starts a mission that makes a ship with zero armor jump in, and has the goal be to destroy it. The ship dies right away since it has zero armor, and it disappears after DeathDelay frames. At that point the mission aborts, and when it does it removes the booster. So you were recharging for the time it took the mission ship to jump in and then explode.

First way:

@qaanol, on Dec 27 2006, 01:09 PM, said in LNSU's challenge:

Buy a booster in the outfitter. It doesn't do anything as an outfit, but OnPurchase it Sxxx's a mission.

The mission doesn't do anything, but you can abort it.

Aborting the mission Gxxx's a recharger-type outfit, Dxxx's the booster, and Syyy's a different mission.

The new mission makes a ship jump in, with the goal being to destroy it.

That ship has zero armor and takes a certain amount of time to explode. This DeathDelay specifies how long the recharger operates.

When the new mission completes it Dxxx's the recharger.

Second way:

@qaanol, on Jan 3 2007, 02:16 PM, said in LNSU's challenge:

You select "Booster" from your secondary weapons, press the secondary fire key, and your shields and energy start recovering very fast.
<snip>
(The weapon named "Booster") deals 1 shield-bypassing mass damage over a 32767-pixel radius, killing the 1-armor but 32767-shields/shield-recharge mission ship, setting off the whole deal. (The "whole deal" is similar to the above, in that a second mission is started with a 0-armor ship.)
<snip>

Click the little red arrow next to the time of the quote to go to the original post. There's a lot of stuff there.

@qaanol, on Jan 8 2007, 01:24 PM, said in LNSU's challenge:

Here's my original Booster plugin: Booster.zip
<snip>

The above uses the "Fire a weapon" method.

@qaanol, on Jan 10 2007, 12:24 PM, said in LNSU's challenge:

<snip>
Here's Abilities.sit.zip, containing Inflight Abilities, which gives I think 5 abilities to choose from, and you can have as many as you want.
<snip>
Abilities.sit.zip

EDIT:

Okay, the bugs I found.

A weapon with reload 0 will fire every frame even if it has a long count and "one shot at a time" is flagged. Setting reload to 1 or higher lets the flag work properly.
<snip>

The above uses the "Abort a mission" method. It also includes a weapon called "Sanctuary" that acts like an impenetrable field for a time. (It can only be penetrated by weapons that both have a target and do not have the flag "Proximity detonator is triggered by ships other than the target".) Although I have that set up as one of the "special abilities" that can only be used for a time, it need not be so. There are multiple ways to implement it. One is as a static "Fortress", on is as a "Bubble" around you, and there are more. In any case, simply giving it appropriate reload or burst reload will make it so you can't use it all the time.

Side note: If you have continuous time-progression then you can use the "Abort a mission" method and just Sxxx a mission with a time limit that Dxxx's the booster OnAbort.

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am trying to create a weapon that can cause a shield boost in-flight. I can handle one of three options, any of them will work fine. The first option, that would be pretty cool to do, would be a grenade that creates a field of shield-recharging that works on any ship that flies into it, including enemy ships.

I've been juggling around the same idea. Though this idea needs to be tested , theoretically it should work.

A weapon that lasted 1 count and had no speed or graphic and does negative damage and has a huge blast area. Make sure that the player can be hit by the blast.

However, you may need to do several test, because the weapon might not listen to the maximum shield stat and continue to boost shields.

Unless I'm much mistaken, negative damage doesn't work.

Thanks Qaanol. I'll look into getting this functioning.

As for the "sanctuary" idea; I already am using something really similar (and from what I gather, implemented in the same way). It's a great tactical outfit.

This whole thing would indeed be a lot easier if negative damage worked.

I'm afraid I can't get this working. I can get the shield generator to activate, but I can't get the first mission to abort itself and begin the second mission, causing the shield generator to make the second ship appear (and become destroyed).

Edit: Never mind! Something about giving up and making a post allowed it to work.

Edit2: Works well, except for in the instance of hypergates. After exiting a hypergate, I can't get the special ship from the first mission to appear, rendering the outfit ineffective after a hypergate jump. Is there a way around this?

This post has been edited by Crusader Alpha : 08 November 2008 - 10:46 PM

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Unless I'm much mistaken, negative damage doesn't work.

Ah well, you win some you lose some.

@crusader-alpha, on Nov 8 2008, 10:26 PM, said in In-flight shield booster:

I'm afraid I can't get this working. I can get the shield generator to activate, but I can't get the first mission to abort itself and begin the second mission, causing the shield generator to make the second ship appear (and become destroyed).

Edit: Never mind! Something about giving up and making a post allowed it to work.

Edit2: Works well, except for in the instance of hypergates. After exiting a hypergate, I can't get the special ship from the first mission to appear, rendering the outfit ineffective after a hypergate jump. Is there a way around this?

Set the invisible ship system to follow the player (in system: follow player).

Already set. It will follow you from system to system and appear after you've used a hypergate and then made a hyperjump, but not after exiting the hypergate. I suppose that I could always mention in the description that hypergate travel renders the shield boosters ineffective for 24 hours or something, but then I'd like to get a way to deactivate the boosters so that they can't be fired/activated if the ship isn't present. Is there a way to do this, perhaps?

@crusader-alpha, on Nov 8 2008, 10:26 PM, said in In-flight shield booster:

Works well, except for in the instance of hypergates. After exiting a hypergate, I can't get the special ship from the first mission to appear, rendering the outfit ineffective after a hypergate jump. Is there a way around this?

Good call, you thought of something I hadn't tried before. I confirm the behavior your describe.

@lnsu, on Nov 8 2008, 11:13 PM, said in In-flight shield booster:

Set the invisible ship system to follow the player (in system: follow player).

I do not confirm. In fact, even making a second mission with special ship that appears in the system rather than jumping in, and follows the player, does not work. I see no easy way to get around the hypergate-makes-temporary-ability-permanent-until-the-time-limit-of-one-day-runs-out issue.

Two more notes:

1. After loading a pilot, the player must leave the system for this outfit to become active.
2. If a system is set to have an average of one ship, this outfit will cause ships to keep from entering the system. The easy fix to this is to make sure every system has an average of at least two ships.

Could you make the goal be to escort the ship and set bits OnFail?

Solves pilot loading problem, still doesn't solve hypergate problem. Of course, that still makes it significantly more useful.

Edit: Never mind. I got it to work properly once but now it won't work properly from a loaded pilot again. This inconsistency might be related to the nature of the second mission. I'll try some things.

Edit 2: I think my observation was just wrong. I can't replicate the "no pilot-loading" fix.

Edit 3: Again, I have the "no-pilot-loading" fix working. However, when the first mission is set to escort the ship, it is ineffective (it doesn't reload the shields, restart itself, or start the second mission) unless it is set to be shown in the "I" key dialogue. The very first time that I changed the mission type from "destroy" to "escort", the behavior worked without changing this setting. In order to implement changes I must first sell and then re-buy the shield booster item (or items). That won't be a problem once the game is played, because hopefully little editing will be taking place on the resources after they're implemented.

This post has been edited by Crusader Alpha : 09 November 2008 - 10:43 AM

If the mission is to escort, can the ship then follow the player and work?

I still have "follow the player" set. The problem I'm running into now is that the shield boost seems to only be working once, whereas I could get it to work multiple times before.

Edit: works multiple times when mission goal is set to "Destroy". Making this mission visible eliminates completely the pilot loading error.

This post has been edited by Crusader Alpha : 09 November 2008 - 11:13 AM

@crusader-alpha, on Nov 9 2008, 11:09 AM, said in In-flight shield booster:

I still have "follow the player" set. The problem I'm running into now is that the shield boost seems to only be working once, whereas I could get it to work multiple times before.

Edit: works multiple times when mission goal is set to "Destroy". Making this mission visible eliminates completely the pilot loading error.

I don't have time to test and see exactly what's going on, but assuming that making the mission visible solves it, the natural consequence it to name the hitherto-invisible mission something like "Shield Boost In Action" and give it a QuickBrief of "The booster you used is working at capacity, and will last about 30 seconds."

Edit: Wait, you keep talking about "Multiple times". What do you mean? Do you have the first mission (the one that you abort to use the booster) set to start itself OnAbort? Because unless I'm mistaken you then have no way to end the loop. I can't remember whether Fxxx triggers OnAbort though.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 09 November 2008 - 11:44 AM

It will start itself OnAbort, but is only doing so if the mission goal is set to "Destroy". When the mission goal is set to "Escort", the effect cannot be duplicated. However, the first mission (if set this way) will still appear in the with the "I" key, except that it has a circle in front of it (like the circular bullet type in word).

In any case, I've decided to use the quickbrief to act as if there is a malfunction (Error: Shield Boost computation. Fail OnFire. Ignore)... something like that. The description for the outfit lists it as causing minor ship computer malfunction on displays, which explains all inconsistencies, including the ship on the radar (even with a cloaking device it still blinks) and the "Mission Failed" note when the weapon is fired. The description also lists the weapon as only operating within certain time limits of hyperspace jump and hypergate jump. It's working quite well, actually, and given the usefulness of the weapon, the limits help to balance things a little.

The bullet indicates a failed mission and if that mission is still present then it can't be run again. Try Axxx'ing the mission OnFail to see if that removes it.

That's the thing - the first command in the OnFail was A151 (151 being the mission ID in this case). It does abort itself the first time, it just doesn't work again. This is without modifying the second mission in any way from the "Destroy" goal system. The same happens when I make the second mission's goal "Escort".

I have this working pretty much the way I like it at the moment. I'm not sure of the cause of some of this behavior, though, and it might be useful to know at some point.