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Star Wars™: X-Wing and TIE Fighter seriesXWVM - Any interest?(1272 posts)(1272 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 04, 2016
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Azrapse: Yes. I might need to play with the "planetary camera" settings. The planets are spheres, but I guess, the closer they are to the edges of the field of view, the less circular they look.
I added a really slow rotation to the clouds layer and to the moons, so during the course of a mission you can see some moonset and moonrise. All these settings could be also randomized and seeded by a hash of the mission name or something.

I think I will next work on letting the user remap their input method, and make the frigate properly shoot and move. Also, replace the frigate's XWAU model with something else. Once this is done, we would be ready for a first dev-test release that you all could download and play.
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f3if3i: Remapping joystick buttons make sense, but I would keep the default X-Wing series keyboard mappings, since the commands are already ingrained in our brain. I would say this is not of high priority.
I need to do it anyway. The way Unity works, or is meant to work, you need to define the different "inputs" a game can take if you want the player to be able to assign some joystick button to them.
So, for example, for assigning the right shoulder button to the "Target closest enemy", there must be a "Target closest enemy" input event, that by default I would bind to the R key, but the player can provide an alternate input method to trigger it, like the gamepad shoulder button.

Not only that, I need to also map all the possible axes that would make sense in the game.
For example, in original X-Wing, you rolled your ship by pressing the "Target Ship In Front" button, and moving the joystick left or right. It makes sense today, though, that a player would like to remap the "roll" axis to a physical axis in his gamepad or joystick, or whatever they have.

Another usual request is to be able to map the throttle controls to an analog axis. So instead of having to use key bindings for 0%, 33%, 66%, 100%, +1% and -1%, as it was in the original (with \, [, ], Backspace, NumPad, + and NumPad -), they could use, instead, their throttle slider, if they have one in their hardware.

As you say, most of us would be perfectly happy with the default key bindings, and even with the simple, two axes, directional control, and a couple of buttons for firing and targeting the ship in front/rolling.
However, this game is (relatively) quite popular internationally.
Most key bindings made sense for a keyboard with US layout. But they made absolutely no sense in any other international layout.

For example, the throttle keybindings that I listed above all fall conveniently close to each other on the US keyboard layout. But if you use, for example, a Spanish layout keyboard, the \ is to the far left, and you need to press also the AltGr key modifier to get it, and the [ and ] keys are on the upper numeric keys and also need to hold the AltGr key modifier to get them.
On a german keyboard it is just slightly better, but you still need to hold AltGr to get most of the keys.
Have a look at the attached image for a visual representation of what I am saying.

It would be great to be able to improve the input for those without an US keyboard, and as I said, I will have to do it anyway if we are going to support gamepads or joysticks.
Attachments:
keyboardlayouts.jpg (137 Kb)
Posted October 05, 2016
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f3if3i: Remapping joystick buttons make sense, but I would keep the default X-Wing series keyboard mappings, since the commands are already ingrained in our brain. I would say this is not of high priority.
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Azrapse: I need to do it anyway. The way Unity works, or is meant to work, you need to define the different "inputs" a game can take if you want the player to be able to assign some joystick button to them.
So, for example, for assigning the right shoulder button to the "Target closest enemy", there must be a "Target closest enemy" input event, that by default I would bind to the R key, but the player can provide an alternate input method to trigger it, like the gamepad shoulder button.

Not only that, I need to also map all the possible axes that would make sense in the game.
For example, in original X-Wing, you rolled your ship by pressing the "Target Ship In Front" button, and moving the joystick left or right. It makes sense today, though, that a player would like to remap the "roll" axis to a physical axis in his gamepad or joystick, or whatever they have.

Another usual request is to be able to map the throttle controls to an analog axis. So instead of having to use key bindings for 0%, 33%, 66%, 100%, +1% and -1%, as it was in the original (with \, [, ], Backspace, NumPad, + and NumPad -), they could use, instead, their throttle slider, if they have one in their hardware.

As you say, most of us would be perfectly happy with the default key bindings, and even with the simple, two axes, directional control, and a couple of buttons for firing and targeting the ship in front/rolling.
However, this game is (relatively) quite popular internationally.
Most key bindings made sense for a keyboard with US layout. But they made absolutely no sense in any other international layout.

For example, the throttle keybindings that I listed above all fall conveniently close to each other on the US keyboard layout. But if you use, for example, a Spanish layout keyboard, the \ is to the far left, and you need to press also the AltGr key modifier to get it, and the [ and ] keys are on the upper numeric keys and also need to hold the AltGr key modifier to get them.
On a german keyboard it is just slightly better, but you still need to hold AltGr to get most of the keys.
Have a look at the attached image for a visual representation of what I am saying.

It would be great to be able to improve the input for those without an US keyboard, and as I said, I will have to do it anyway if we are going to support gamepads or joysticks.
Nice, I love the thought of being able to roll using the joystick axis. That's one of my biggest gripes about going back to the old games.

Will you be adding the "match target speed" button that was introduced in TIE Fighter?
Posted October 06, 2016
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countbuggula: Nice, I love the thought of being able to roll using the joystick axis. That's one of my biggest gripes about going back to the old games.

Will you be adding the "match target speed" button that was introduced in TIE Fighter?
It's already done, along with
A -Target my target's attacker
E - Target my attacker
U - Target latest ship to arrive
Q - Quit mission

Any more controls from later games that we miss?
Perhaps weapon convergence and multi-linked cannons (lasers+ions). Although I am not sure this last one would be of much use considering the different speed of ion blasts and laser blasts in this game.
Post edited October 06, 2016 by Azrapse
Posted October 06, 2016
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countbuggula: Nice, I love the thought of being able to roll using the joystick axis. That's one of my biggest gripes about going back to the old games.

Will you be adding the "match target speed" button that was introduced in TIE Fighter?
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Azrapse: It's already done, along with
A -Target my target's attacker
E - Target my attacker
U - Target latest ship to arrive
Q - Quit mission

Any more controls from later games that we miss?
Perhaps weapon convergence and multi-linked cannons (lasers+ions). Although I am not sure this last one would be of much use considering the different speed of ion blasts and laser blasts in this game.
As long as we're dreaming, I can think of (but don't remember the key off the top of my head)
Target incoming warhead
Target mission objective craft

Combining ions and lasers would be awesome. I always used it for the B-Wing in X-Wing Alliance and it made a huge difference, even with the different speed of travel.
Posted October 06, 2016
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countbuggula: As long as we're dreaming, I can think of (but don't remember the key off the top of my head)
Target incoming warhead
Target mission objective craft

Combining ions and lasers would be awesome. I always used it for the B-Wing in X-Wing Alliance and it made a huge difference, even with the different speed of travel.
I am looking at the XWA key reference card, because I don't remember ever using those keys.
It seems they are
I - Target nearest incoming warhead
O - Target nearest objective craft

Those collide with original X-Wing's
I - Cycle targeting computer mode (Information (default) or Target aiming)
O - Toggle targeting computer on/off

Certainly, XWA's ones seem more useful than X-Wing's ones. I doubt any bothered switching off the targeting computer. And beyond the first couple of hours, everybody ignored the target aiming mode and just aimed at the ship with the normal reticule. It was actually harder to aim with the aiming computer than with your own eyes.

I think, in particular, the target aiming mode made more sense when the screen resolution was so low that even having the ship targeted and selected, you couldn't see it in front of you because it was smaller than one pixel. If you wanted to target lock and shoot a torpedo at fleeing ship (like a TIE Bomber on its way to do a warhead run on a critical craft), the radar scope wasn't enough, and there was no selected target indicator, so you could barely see your target. In that case, the target aiming could help.
Since TIE Fighter, where they introduced the target selection box at long distances, the target aiming was removed from the game and nobody missed it.

---

About combining lasers and ions, I mentioned the different travel speed. It was barely noticeable in XWA, because the developers changed the laser and ion speed in TIE Fighter.
I don't have the exact figures right now, but in X-Wing an ion travels almost half the speed of a laser, but lasts much longer. It is quite easy, after a while, to learn to hit enemy ships with your lasers during a dogfight. But switch to ions and it becomes much much harder.
From TIE Fighter and on, ions have almost (if not the same) speed as lasers do, so they are much more adequate for dogfighting.
I will try to add multiweapon linked fire between lasers and ions, because why not. But I don't expect it to be as useful as in XWA.
Posted October 06, 2016
With linked weapons, would the HUD show two different target lead indicators? Or are ion projectiles too slow for any sensible leading anyway?
Posted October 06, 2016
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Laserschwert: With linked weapons, would the HUD show two different target lead indicators? Or are ion projectiles too slow for any sensible leading anyway?
By "show two different target lead indicators" you mean when the reticule goes green when you have a good shot, or actually show a target lead indicator? Because no lead indicator is being shown for now.
If you mean the green reticle, the asnwer is yes. Most likely.

If you mean an optional feature to actually show target lead indicators... I don't really know what to say.
To start with, I don't really know how a target lead indicator should look like or be shown at. A dot? What does the dot actually mean? The center of the target?
If we go with that, then surely it would require a different dot per weapon, because the position of the target lead indicator depends on the speed of the projectile, and you would be shooting projectiles that move at two different speeds.
Posted October 07, 2016
I'm pretty sure there's been a discussion about target leading in this thread already, and I somehow remember the option of showing the lead reticule as well... Maybe that was only in my head.

Wing Commander shows the lead reticule just as a little circle or cross hair you could aim at. I don't know which part of the targeted ship it pointed at though. I guess the center of the ship would suffice (since hitting a turning target is already difficult as it is), but if you want to go really fancy, you could show an actual silhouette of the ship there, although that might go a bit too far. Just a little crosshair would easily be sufficient.

To make things not too convoluted, I'd say you should only implement an optional lead reticule for the ships' basic lasers, so that the player needs to find out himself how far to lead with other weapons.

And without lead indicators, how about the reticule turning green for leading correctly for a laser hit and blue for an ion hit?
Post edited October 07, 2016 by Laserschwert
Posted October 08, 2016
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Laserschwert: I'm pretty sure there's been a discussion about target leading in this thread already, and I somehow remember the option of showing the lead reticule as well... Maybe that was only in my head.

Wing Commander shows the lead reticule just as a little circle or cross hair you could aim at. I don't know which part of the targeted ship it pointed at though. I guess the center of the ship would suffice (since hitting a turning target is already difficult as it is), but if you want to go really fancy, you could show an actual silhouette of the ship there, although that might go a bit too far. Just a little crosshair would easily be sufficient.

To make things not too convoluted, I'd say you should only implement an optional lead reticule for the ships' basic lasers, so that the player needs to find out himself how far to lead with other weapons.

And without lead indicators, how about the reticule turning green for leading correctly for a laser hit and blue for an ion hit?
It shouldn't be too hard to add the target lead indicators as an option. The easiest would be some kind of dot or symbol that appears where the center of the ship should be.

Sometimes this will not be perfect. In particular, some rebel ships have really eccentric cannons (like the B-wing and the X-wing) and shooting them while you keep the target lead indicator right in the center of the targeting reticule can still lead to a miss.
In this case, the reticule lighting up green is still the most precise instrument, since it accounts whether any of cannons will actually hit any part of the target ship or not.
The only way I can think on to match this precision with a target lead indicator kind of thing would be to show a silhouette of the target ship as target lead indicator, and a few dots representing your active cannons. Then you would need to aim by shooting when some of the dots are within the silhouette.
But that sounds a bit more time consuming to program, also.
Posted October 08, 2016
None of the series had lead indicators, so this shouldn't either. The green thing is perfect and already done. MHO.
Posted October 08, 2016
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MjrParts: None of the series had lead indicators, so this shouldn't either. The green thing is perfect and already done. MHO.
I'm inclined to agree, although I wouldn't object to a lead indicator being a non-default option. I think it wouldn't really feel like X-Wing with a lead indicator, it feels more satisfying to nail an enemy with a well placed shot of your own making.

As for the colouring of the indicator, I always took the fact of it turning green as a case of "your current cannon selection will probably hit, assuming the target keeps going in a straight line based on its vector this millisecond".
Posted October 08, 2016
Exciting project, and great work. Some notes on key controls.

On the original X-Wing Starfighter Reference Card, space is the key for targeting the incoming missile. I used this a lot.

U is the key to select the ship within targeting sight (also joystick button 2).

H enters hyperspace, quitting the mission.

The throttle could be adjusted by 1 tick using the + or - keys. I saw old joysticks with throttle control make use of them.

F5 to F8 were preset keys, set using shift and the corresponding key. It might make sense to be able to set these in the briefing room or the in-flight Map. I'm not sure the R2 unit should be telling you which ship is relevant to your mission. Seems a post-special edition innovation.

I made heavy use of the targeting mode on the OSD. I found it crippling when the screen got shot out. Only turned it off when identifying, and only then for a moment to view the cargo and put it back.

Firing both ions and lasers at the same time with the same button seems extremely weird. I can see using different buttons for different weapons, but I would have to go back to the movies to see if that conflicts with their usage. I cannot seem to recall now any relevant moments.

At one time I had thought it might make sense to stop charging a weapon you do not need to increase power to the one you do, but I eventually accepted this as an added difficulty to the game. Similar to charging your lasers and transferring power to your shields manually, because it's faster. Hopefully you caught this detail too?

If it would be helpful I can type up the Starfighter Reference Card of controls for you.

As an aside, I have not read this entire thread yet, are putting your code online or planning to, so that others might contribute?
Posted October 08, 2016
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gbrendan: Exciting project, and great work. Some notes on key controls.

On the original X-Wing Starfighter Reference Card, space is the key for targeting the incoming missile. I used this a lot.

U is the key to select the ship within targeting sight (also joystick button 2).

H enters hyperspace, quitting the mission.

The throttle could be adjusted by 1 tick using the + or - keys. I saw old joysticks with throttle control make use of them.

F5 to F8 were preset keys, set using shift and the corresponding key. It might make sense to be able to set these in the briefing room or the in-flight Map. I'm not sure the R2 unit should be telling you which ship is relevant to your mission. Seems a post-special edition innovation.

I made heavy use of the targeting mode on the OSD. I found it crippling when the screen got shot out. Only turned it off when identifying, and only then for a moment to view the cargo and put it back.

Firing both ions and lasers at the same time with the same button seems extremely weird. I can see using different buttons for different weapons, but I would have to go back to the movies to see if that conflicts with their usage. I cannot seem to recall now any relevant moments.

At one time I had thought it might make sense to stop charging a weapon you do not need to increase power to the one you do, but I eventually accepted this as an added difficulty to the game. Similar to charging your lasers and transferring power to your shields manually, because it's faster. Hopefully you caught this detail too?

If it would be helpful I can type up the Starfighter Reference Card of controls for you.

As an aside, I have not read this entire thread yet, are putting your code online or planning to, so that others might contribute?
I think we can get the reference card from GOG downloads.
Many of the original controls were replaced in later games in the series with other commands that were perhaps more useful.

The Space key is used to "accept" a message such as "incoming missile". However, once the message is expired, you cannot use it to target missiles that might be still homing at you. In TIE Figher they added the I key for that.

Firing ions and lasers at the same time was introduced in X-Wing Alliance, the fourth and last game in the series. It was a way to boost damage output to ships that were a little bit underpowered, like the Y-wing and B-wing. However, by allowing that, I think the B-wing became a little bit overpowered, when used in conjunction with cannon convergence, a feature also added in XWA consisting on angling your cannons so that all of them would hit the center of the targeted ship, rather than shoot forward.

This laser+ion mode didn't use two fire keys. Instead, it was toggled with the X key, that would switch the fire mode from single fire(1 cannon)->dual fire(2 cannons)->fire linked(all cannons of the same time)->weapons linked (all cannons of different types).

About the code, it is on a repository in BitBucket. Currently this repository is private until we can replace all content that we are using but we don't own (in particular, all XWAU project models we are using as placeholders).
Also, the codebase is continuously evolving and there makes no much sense to open it up for collaborations until the fundamentals of it are more or less set in stone.
Posted October 10, 2016
I am currently programming the capital ships' laser weapons. I have noticed that these weapons appear in two different sorts: turbolasers and superlasers.
For example, the Nebulon-B Frigate has 4 rotating turrets with superlasers, and 4 fixed guns with turbolasers.
My question is, what is the difference between "turbolaser" and "superlaser" in the game?
It is obvious that the term superlaser isn't matching the Star Wars cannon term, that referred to the Death Star's superlaser weapon, able to blow up planets.
Posted October 10, 2016
In the game's strategy guide (included in GOG's goodies section of the game) the Frigate's weapons are listed as:

12 Taim & Bak XI 7 Turbolasers (computer assisted targeting)
12 Borstel RH8 Laser Cannons
Two Phylon-Q7 Tractor Beam Projectors

So, no mention of Superlasers there. But it's still unclear what the difference is.

But the guide also has some info on scoring and AI behaviour which might be interesting for you.
Post edited October 10, 2016 by Laserschwert
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This is my favourite topic
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Star Wars™: X-Wing and TIE Fighter seriesXWVM - Any interest?(1272 posts)(1272 posts)
(1272 posts)