AI auto-aim support

[CactusPungente]

Shooting at distant target has always been a problem.. at least manually

can we have, aiming manually a ship, a little help from all the technologically advanced equipement in our ships?

Like a little dot that represents the relative position of the CoM (center of mass) of the ship, knowing of it's speed, in the time your bullets travels all the distance between being fired and the targeted ship itself

if you don't know what I mean look at one big brothers of Space Sim

Spoiler: X-Series

as you see the selected ship (second on the left) have a little red dot that represent where to shoot if you want to hit it

This aiming device should work only in weapon's firing range obviously, and not at further distance.

 

[TheFloorMatt]

Interesting idea, my only problem with this is the only things affected are cannons and dumbfire missiles. (Though I would really love to see dumbfire missiles be useful in ship-ship combat) I just feel giving only one weapon type the ability to essentially give a free lock-on effect a little off. I very much like the idea of being able to tell the enemy ship's speed, if that's any possible help to aiming or any other use.

If you personally are having issues hitting ships at long range, consider what the problem might be. Are your cameras poorly placed? Are your weapon outputs mounted in a less than optimal fashion? Are you using the ideal weapon for this long range combat?

 

[Parameter]

Yes, but...

There should be a cost associated with it. Presumably part of the beam vs. cannon balancing act is that cannons are harder to hit with than beams. Throwing in auto-aim kind of messes with that.

I would be in favor of a Bobby AI turret set to "track" instead of shoot. Then, the player could still add the turret's weapon to the hotbar and fire it at will. This gives you tracking gimbaled weapons, but you have to make them and they are limited by the constraints of the turret size.

I don't like the idea of a titan's fixed planet-destroying laser having autoaim. It's bad enough that they have such a large firing arc.