Would it be possible to remove the shields on some ships using a mission editor?

Yes. But I think the results are pretty consistent after several more tries.
I tried against a transport: 3 ion blasts.
Then I tried against a star destroyer. Shields aren't a concern here, because you can easily destroy the shield generators and so shields will not recover anymore. 7 ion blasts.

So it seems all ships smaller than a Container are disabled with 3/4 ion blasts, while all ships like a container and bigger require 7/8 ion blasts.
The variance could be related several reasons.
My current hypothesis is this:
Small ships have 1024 systems hp.
Larger ships have 2.5 times that amount. That is 2560 systems hp.

An ion blast deals 400 damage. If there are absolutely no shields left, it all goes to systems, so 3 hits are more than enough to disable a small ship.
For a larger ship, if it has no way to recover shields after they go to 0, then it takes 7 hits. For example, the Star Destroyer.
Most other ships take 8 hits. My guess is that those ships are always recovering shields, and that can greatly lower the ion damage that goes to the systems, because larger ships apply their Armor rating to the damage sustained to shields or hull.
For example. A Frigate gets damage enough to remove its shields. The player switches to ions and shoots at it.
If the frigate manages to recover even just 20 shield hitpoints in that time (that is, a 0.125% of its shields), that is enough to counter 20*16=320 damage from the ion blast due to its capital ship armor. So 7 ion blasts would deal just 400*7-320 = 2480 system hitpoints.
That wouldn't be enough to totally disable the ship, so an 8th shot is needed.

I need to confirm this by creating a mission with a bunch of crippled capital ships without shield generators. If all of them get disabled with 7 ion blasts, then this hypothesis gets confirmed. Or is close enough to the truth for what concerns us.

Confirmed: A frigate crippled without shield generators is disabled in 7 strong ion blasts, not 8.

However, I have also noticed that 7 weak ion blasts also disable the frigate without shields. So definitely something works different when ions damage systems in respect to when ions damage shields. I need to think further on this.

And you've got a few replies on the XWAUP forums. :)

Keep up the great work, Azrapse!

And thanks for the updates!

Hi all!
Hmm, 10 days without update. That's bad.
Certainly, I have not had much time to spend on the game, but I have done something. I will post a picture later today, as well as updating the post at the XWAU forums. Thanks, FekLeyrTarg and MajorParts for keeping that thread alive, and for your contributions in the form of 3D models, 2D reticules, and suggestions and ideas!

I have been dealing with the disabling of ships. In particular, what happens to the AI when a ship is disabled.
It has had some quite deep implications on the rest of the game, because I started designing the AI in a way that wasn't exactly matching how it works in X-Wing. I will go to the details:

In X-Wing, every flight group is assigned one particular Order. Like for example, "Attack all enemies", or "Escort this other flight group". Okay?
That order determines what is the AI supposed to do during the missions. Some orders instruct ships to react to enemies within certaind distance, while other orders can make the AI even totally ignore incoming fire.
Some involve the AI moving thru up to 3 custom waypoints before doing anything else. Some don't have any waypoing into consideration.

The way I have programmed the AI is by using something I call a "flight plan". Depending on the order, on spawn, a ship is given a flight plan that is basically a recipe with different steps, of how to behave and what to do during the mission.
For those that know what this means, these different steps form basically a non-deterministic finite automaton that decides, at every moment, what the ship should do.
These different flight plans have tasks common to all ships, like for example coming out of and into hyperspace or a mothership hangar. Other tasks are exclusive to some particular Orders. For example, the Escort order include a task to form with the escorted flightgroup at a particular position, and to react to enemies getting closer than certain distance; while the Fly Home task, doesn't have anything like that and focuses on just getting close to the mothership and then entering the hangar.

Well, this is all nice and has worked fine until the moment I added the possibility to disable a ship. Sure, I made sure that the ship engines shut down and the ship stops trying to shoot around while it is disabled. But what happened once it was boarded and repaired, or captured?
Well, the Rescue Ackbar mission that I am using a testbed present a similar case. You disable the shuttle Epsilon X where Ackbar is kept prisoner, then friendly shuttle Hasti hypers in, boards Epsilon X, picks up Ackbar, and flies home.
What happens with Epsilon X? Maybe nothing, since it is not repaired or captured in this particular mission. But what if it was? (Remember that I am not programming ONE mission. I am programming a whole game able to play different missions)
Surely it wouldn't be enough to remove the "Disabled" flag from the ship. Because in that case, it would try to go on with its original flightplan, that was to fly home to the Imperial Frigate Vehemence. That is not what we want if we have captured it.
So what it needs to happen? The captured ship actually needs to change flightplan to some other in the middle of a mission?

Let's look at another mission that is similar to this one: Tour of Duty I, Mission 7: Recover Stolen X-Wings.
In this mission we have 3 X-Wings that have been hijacked by their R2 units and are taking them to an Imperial Star Destroyer.
We need to disable the X-Wings, let the shuttle group Rescue re-capture them, then escort the X-Wings back to the hangar of calamari cruiser Maximus.
So the X-Wings start the mission going to the Star Destroyer, but once disabled and captured, they change their order to go back to the Maximus? Or what is going on here?

Well, that is what I am trying to find out. What is going on? I can definitely program a way for ships to change orders "on the fly" (no pun intended), but I am not totally sure it is needed at all in X-Wing.
I have the suspicion those hijacked X-Wings were never meant to actually reach and enter the star destroyer. In fact, a group of TIE Interceptors comes and target the X-Wings.
Maybe, in the backstage, those X-Wings never had the order to go to the Star Destroyer, just to fly in that direction. Then, once disabled and captured, they all revery to a "Fly Home" order, that in this case is set from the beginning to be the CRS Maximus.

We can throw some light into this if we download the strategy guide form the Goodies section in GOG. By looking at page 548, all orders for all flight groups in that mission are specified.
The X-Wings have the "Fly Once and Evade", order, that means that they will follow some waypoints, evading incoming fire and then go home to the STD Invincible. But these waypoints are so far away that, surely, the x-wings will be destroyed by the many enemy TIEs before they complete their task.
So there went my theory.

So where is stated in the mission file that once captured, the X-Wings need to fly home to the CRS Maximus? I cannot see it anywhere. You can only specify one Mothership for a flightgroup, and in that case it is the Invincible.
I wonder if the Shuttle Rescue (that has as Mothership the Maximus) somehow overwrites the X-Wing mothership with its own when it captures it. That is just a guess, but is the best I have.

All this was just to explain to you all where most of the time goes while making XWVM. I am all the time second-guessing myself with how the game should work, and that is time that I am not directly programming, or that I am programming and reaching dead ends when I figure out that I guessed wrong.

When I reach those dead ends, it saps my energy a little bit. But I try to keep being productive and move onto something else to keep the pace, until I gather some energy back to face the problem again.

One of these diversions has been the Target Selection Reticle.
That is what demarks a ship in the viewport as the targeted one. In X-Wing, it was just the ship model blinking red. In TIE fighter, it was so, plus also, at longer distances, a little rectangle appeared.
In XVT and XWA it was the 3 corners of a rectangle, surrounding the targeted ship.
Just for the lulz, I wanted to try something slightly less boring and more fluffy.
I will show a screenshot later, but you can basically get the idea from this image.

In particular, I am trying to circumvent the problem in X-Wing (and TIE Fighter) with the cockpit getting in the way all the time. I didn't really like the option to totally remove the cockpit with the Period key. It was quite unrealistical.
But clumsier cockpits, like the Y-Wing's, make it hard to steer the ship towards the target when the target is direcly below the horizon, behind the dashboard.
Instead of a virtual cockpit like that of XVT or XWA, I have opted for overlapping the targeting selection indicator in front of the cockpit dashboard. Like if it was projected inside the pilots' helmet viewer.
I think it really improves dogfighting with the Y-Wing, without removing realism by making the dashboard disappear.

What about the CRV Bixby in the 1st mission of Tour 1?
Does she have a specified exit point or could she inherit the transport's one after her capture?

I am checking the strategy guide and it has some evident errors. Or missions were changed in the game after they printed it. In any case, I am also opening the mission files with a mission editor to confirm or correct what the guide says.

In particular, corvette Bixby in TOD 1 Mission 1 has as order to remain "Stationary". It has, however, a hyperspace point set. But "Stationary" of course makes no use of any point other than the start point.
Then, transport Dagger is set to come and leave thru hyperspace, and it this transport the one that captures the Bixby. The Dagger has no mothership set.

However, there is something quite strange here:
Bixby has the Dagger set as its mothership!
Of course that makes zero sense. It would involve the Bixby (a 150 meters ship) getting into the Dagger (a 20 meters ship). And indeed, it doesn't do that in the game.

It also has some unused setting set to 5 minutes boarding. This setting applies to ships that board other ships, and tells how long the boarding opeartion takes. The Dagger has it set to 1 minute.
There is no point on the Bixby having any value provided here, so I guess it is leftovers from a previous version of this mission, along with the mothership setting.

Anyway, it is clear that whatever setting the Bixby has for its mothership, it is forgotten as soon as the Dagger completes the boarding operation, and the Bixby just aims for its hyperjump point and hypers out.

So this kind of reinforce my suspicion that ships that capture other ships overwrite whatever mothership and leaving method the captured ship might have with their own.

It would be nice if you all could think on other missions in the game that are like this, so that we can confirm or rebate this hypothesis.


Regarding the targeting selection indicator, I have attached the screenshot to this post.
It looks better in movement. Basically, that sprite is shown around the targeted ship, but in front of any instrument that could obscure it. Also, I have added the shield, hull, and distance ratings of the targeted ship. I think it is handy to have in those close flyby mission near transports or shuttles. What do you think?

Hi again.
Last night I recorded a few minutes of the game running on the debugging window.
Please, be warned that there are no sound effects, and the explosions are totally placeholders.
The throttle instrument is still missing, as well as the torpedo launcher.

Video

I am in the middle of programming the disabling and capturing mechanics, so that is why shuttle Hasti doesn't appear wit I disable Ackbar's shuttle.

Looking good so far. The new target indicator looks a bit big on targets that are a far away. (But that's minor, of course, at this point.)

I liked the little touches I noticed: Laser charge indicators slowly lighting up as they charge, more granular shield level indicator (I guess the coloring isn't implemented in yet, but this style would be nice to have available even once they are), shield hit effects.

It's all at prototype stage right now. The size of the target indicator changes with the distance to the target, while staying withing a minimum and maximum size. It's just matter to tweak the distances and the minimum and maximum size until we are happy with it. That's no problem.

Both laser and shields contain an amount of charge that is expressed as a real number (that is, a number with decimals). Probably it had no decimals in the original, but by having them in XWVM allows us to have a continuous smooth charging appearance on the instruments.
The original laser accumulators had 8 lights with three glowing states each (off, half, full). That allows the game to show 17 different load levels (from totally empty to totally full) per cannon, while internally it had probably around 1024 different levels. It was much less granular, but good enough.
Now, each light has an infinite amount of glow levels, so even when it was good enough already, now it should be as good as it can get.

In the case of the shield, I don't think it was good enough at all in the original.
While a laser cannon could store up to 1024 energy and show it with 16 3-state lamps, the shields had only two lamps per hemisphere, each with about 5 or 6 different glow levels, to represent up to 12500 values in the case of the B-Wing.
Due to the fact that X-Wing was a 8-bit color game, it used a 8-bit color pallete of 256 colors to represent the whole screen. That limits the amount of different colors that can be shown. Probably the reserved about 6 different colors from this pallete to represent the different charge levels of shields, but that is too little.

That means that no variation could be percieved on the shield lamps until after about 2000 shield units had been recharged (that is almost twice the amount of a full laser accumulator) in the case of a B-Wing.
Of course, it felt like charging shields was worse than charging lasers and then passing the energy from the lasers to the shields. There wasn't enough feedback to the player.

In XWVM I wanted to solve that by dividing every of the 4 shield lamps into 8 lamps each. That matches the amount of lamps that lasers have per accumulator.
Now you can see every little lamp lighting up slowly from black to green as the shield recharges.

About the coloring, I didn't think on that. I implemented the lamps by making them glow from black to green linearly depending on the charge.
Of course, now that you mention it, in the original the shields lamps glowed from black to red, then to yellow, then to green.

I will try to make it mimic the original, but now that every hemisphere is divided in smaller lamps, how should it be colored?
Option 1:
- Lamp by lamp, they glow from black to red. Once all of them are red, they begin to glow from red to yellow. Once all are yellow, they glow from yellow to green.
Option 2:
- Lamp by lamp, they glow from black to red, then to yellow, then to green, before moving to the next lamp.

The second option is easier to implement, but the first one sounds better, as it would triple the granularity of the shield instrument. You would see the lamps lighting up at a pace three times faster than the current one.

So far there has been barely any interest in those forums. Most of the replies there are from people that already take part in this forum.
I guess they are more interested on X-Wing Alliance and improve it graphically, than on the process and challenges of recreating the original X-Wing.
It is normal. After all, it's the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade forums. :)
I think they are just being nice and letting us post in their forum with out offtopic stuff. If that is the case I don't wish to anger them by being particularly spammy.

The thread at xwau is basically showing what you are doing. You should ask specific questions over there...questions that haven't been answered here.

Later games eventually gave you a percentage indicator to help out with the lack of granularity, at least.

To make matters even worse, the white flash that indicates you're taking damage made it difficult to tell how low your shields are while taking multiple hits in quick succession. Having the visual indicator that you're taking damage is valuable, and it works great when you take isolated hits, but that implementation didn't work well for taking multiple quick strikes. First option fits in with the style done for the laser charges. The second option fits in with the style we already see with the shields. in my opinion, at least. I think I'd prefer the second.