To Whom It May Concern -- How to get rid of those annoying missile effects

from Sins Forums

One aesthetic gripe of Sins is the missile effects....for those unaware, missiles have a nasty habit of "missing" their target, and thus having to circle back to hit it (this is purely aesthetic, AFAIK it has no affect on actual DPS)...I highly doubt I am the first to discover this but I do recall a recent thread about the issue where some gent was trying to fix it in his mod (one that had lots and lots of missiles)...

I'd like to draw your attention to these three lines that appear at the bottome of each weapon declaration (in the entity file) that is the type "Missile":

missileStartTurningDistance 250.000000
missileSlowTurnRate 0.708997
missileMaxSlowTurnTime 6.000000

These values are what you would find if you looked at the missile weapons on most (if not all) entities that have missiles (TEC missiles, PMs, doesn't matter)...

First some fine details...if a missile "misses" it's target (ie it doesn't hit but flies past it):

  1. The first line determines how far the missile will go before it starts to turn...this distance is measured from the weapon mesh point...in principle, having some positive value here guarantees that the missile will come straight out of the "missile tube" instead of at an angle (gives a smoother aesthetic look)...
  2. The second line determines how quickly the missile will turn immediately after it hits the "StartTurningDistance"...in this case, the missile will start turning with a rate of 0.708997 after it travels 250 from the weapon mesh point...the missile will maintain a straight trajectory until it hits that distance, so in general you want this distance to be small...
  3. This is a fallback that forces the missile trajectory to aim straight at the target after a certain amount of time...this "timer" starts as soon as the missile is hits the "StartTurningDistance", not when it is fired....this is what causes those immediate sharp turns for missiles that have been flying around their target for too long...

The easiest way to fix the issue is to simply set all those values to zero....one drawback is that missiles will launch from their weapon mesh points at angles...but, you won't have any missed shots....

modding
9,574 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

You are correct in that missiles are purely a cosmetic effect. As well as all of the other weapon effects.

No weapon "misses" in sins. In fact if you look real hard in a one on one fight you will see damage applied to the enemy at the moment the weapon is fired. This includes missiles. Damage is applied before the missile even hits the ship.

While no weapon ever misses in sins there are buffs, debuffs, and modifiers that effect DPS. Those could "simulate" a weapon missing, or just glancing off the hulls.

It was funny in SoA 2 watching photons, and plasma torpedos missing ships then doing an instant 180 to hit them.

Good to know info.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Major, reply 1
You are correct in that missiles are purely a cosmetic effect. As well as all of the other weapon effects.

No weapon "misses" in sins. In fact if you look real hard in a one on one fight you will see damage applied to the enemy at the moment the weapon is fired. This includes missiles. Damage is applied before the missile even hits the ship.

While no weapon ever misses in sins there are buffs, debuffs, and modifiers that effect DPS. Those could "simulate" a weapon missing, or just glancing off the hulls.

It was funny in SoA 2 watching photons, and plasma torpedos missing ships then doing an instant 180 to hit them.

Good to know info.
End of Major's quote

 

Are you sure about the damage being immediatly? I am pretty certain I had missiles hitting my ship and still doing damage the the moment of impact.

 

BTW... missiles have interstellar range :P

 

 

If somebody fires a missile on your ship and said ship phase jumps out of the gravity well..... and then wait in the next gravity well.... the missile finally catches up and hits it.... although it of course takes a while and as such has no influence on game balancing.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting ARESIV, reply 2
Are you sure about the damage being immediatly? I am pretty certain I had missiles hitting my ship and still doing damage the the moment of impact.
End of ARESIV's quote

I believe it would depend on the DamageApplyType...for example, missiles usually are "Backloaded" while beams are usually "Overtime"...

Of course, you could do whatever you want in a mod...you could have your missiles do the damage instantaneously, if you so preferred...but in vanilla sins I do not believe this is the case, the damage occurs when the missile or projectile "hits", which loosely corresponds to when you graphically see the missile hit...

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Maybe that is what it was. It would be an interesting study to watch the weapon effects, and see if the damage occurred before impact or not. I am pretty sure i've seen damage happen before impact. Maybe its just a glitch.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I like the idea and will likely update several ships to follow this.

It does mess up missiles that fire from hard points at an angle. For example, I have some launch tubes on the top of ships that look really cool as the missile launch out arc up and turn towards their target. 

Though following the 80/20 rule, if I can get 80% of them to not do circles then that should still be a vast improvement.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Did some further testing, made some corrections to the OP...some of the things I said were very wrong (counfounded some variable changes) so hopefully now it should be fixed....

This is a simple solution to the problem of missed missile shots...but as zombie said, the drawback is that it won't come out of the missile tube at the "aesthetically pleasing angle"....

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Zombie, you may find that setting the distance to something small (say 250), the turning rate a little higher (say 1.0), and the time very small (say 0.5 - 0.75) may give you the best compromise...the missiles won't come out at angles, and for the most part you won't have any crazy sharp turns...not perfect but it may work for you....

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Something I discovered very quickly in Black Sun.

 

As for the damage delay, I think the game may either fire invisible damage "projectiles" or have an estimated timer in some vain attempt to sync damage between graphics and the actual weapon numbers. This is more easily broken with longer travel time. I used the "overtime" damage type for many weapons to avoid this as much as possible, and also made most weapons have very fast travel times to alleviate the issue (and also to help performance).