Read by Council Callibrate your guns (aiming angles)

[NeonSturm]

Spoiler: I have a post that received one like at the time of writing

If turrets hit the mother-ship, they shouldn't fire in the first place.

Perhaps when leaving the shipyard, you should be able to "calibrate" your guns. Each square on the bounding box then has info about which turrets can aim at it without hitting the mother-ship.

Then you would just have to cast a shadow of the targets boundary box on your ships boundary box and know which turrets can hit it and where.

If you like this post, I make a suggestion of "Calibrate your guns"

If turrets hit the mother-ship, they shouldn't fire in the first place.

When leaving the shipyard, you should be able to "calibrate" your guns.
Each square on the bounding box then has info about which turrets can aim at it without hitting the mother-ship.

Then you would just have to cast a shadow of the targets boundary box on your ships boundary box and know which turrets can hit it and where.
The "vanishing point" of the shadow is the gun position or a point relatively close to it.

The boundary box squares would have 3 quality ratings:

1. Gun can aim without hitting the ship
2. The gun should prefer other targets because there is a risk to hit the own ship based on calibration inaccuracies - gun-position/ship-centre deviation, etc.
3. Gun can't aim without hitting the ship

The second needs further testing mainly depending on the targets distance, but there should be few problems if it is far enough away.

 

[Malacodor]

If turrets hit the mother-ship, they shouldn't fire in the first place.

It has been like that in some older versions. I don't think that this calibrating thing is necessary, just a bugfix.

 

[jayman38]

I can see this creating unreasonable lag on ships with many turrets. Here is why:
Each empty block would need an array of values. The size of the array would be the number of turrets. Squared!

This is because each turret would need to calibrate not just with the mothership, but with all linked entities.

However, it might not be as much lag as created by overlapping bounding boxes, which this might help alleviate.

Here are some possible calibration values per block:

1. No interference, free movement and fire
2. Full, immediate interference, don't move toward this block or fire at it (when optimized, could significantly reduce bounding box lag)
   
3. Full, immediate interference if host is active, don't move toward this block or fire at it if the other entity is active.
4. Full, immediate interference if host door or forcefield is active, don't move toward this block or fire at it if the nearest door is closed.
5. Partial interference, prioritize another target if possible.
6. Partial moving interference, prioritize another target if possible. (slightly less interference might change target priorities)
   
7. Distant interference, can move towards this block, but don't fire if target is not in the intervening space.
8. Distant moving interference, can move towards this block, prioritize another target if the original target is not in the intervening space.

There are probably other values that I am not thinking of right now.

 

[NeonSturm]

Each empty block would need an array of values. The size of the array would be the number of turrets. Squared!

No. Each chunk.

Each turret would need 3 bits. per area-chunk.
Quality=good: 1 bit in a 32 or 64 bit variable referring to the gun that can aim there.
Quality=bad: The second bit for guns that can aim there.
Quality=medium, well this is a bit more complicated, but the complicated information is attached to the gun, not the square. Thus only a third bit here.

Lastly this could use compression techniques such as letting a group of similar area-chunks refer to the same list of turrets for #1..32 or #1..64.

About medium quality:
Most occasions could be cleared by a minimum pitch (X rotation) for each yaw (Y rotation) using a turrets primary and secondary axis.

For different settings of obstacles (rotating parts, force-fields, they would just make a single separate-medium quality +1/3 data.
But you can calibrate maybe 3-5 setups per ship.

 

[Rixxan]

Hey, we should at least get it so that
A) first off the target in direct, unobstrusted line of sight from the turret is primary target
B) if there are more than one of said targets, the one closest to the ship is primary,
C) if there are no targets in unobstructed line of sight from the turret, the turret should reset to it's primary starting position
D) if a target is not in range, the turret should track it but not fire until the target comes into range of the weapon.
E) if no viable targets are available in either the area or the effective range of the turret, all turrets should reset to starting position.

 

[Spartan-228]

This could be achieved if we could set sectors of fire for our turrets.