Recoil?

[marr]

There's a fine selection of recoilless weapons in Transcendence, but has anyone hacked a way of adding recoil for a really big gun?

[Yugi]

I wouldn't really described as hacked, Marr, more like modified. With hacking we would probably have to use a complex program to gain access to certain files, then we'd be looking endlessly on hours for the right bit, etc. With the Transcendence xmls we can do that a lot more easily.

There is a tag you can add:
recoil="1"
This causes each shot you fire to do one amount of recoil. Having two there doubles it, three triples, four quadrouples, five pentreples, etc.

[marr]

Oh. Well, that was easy.

In my defense, I did search this forum, transcendence.tbh and all the example mods I've downloaded so far for the word 'recoil' and no-one seemed to have used it, so I assumed it wasn't there. Tch.

Gotta agree, though, this is the easiest and most entertaining game to mod in the history of ever. Very impressed.

[hookoa]

All the howitzers use a recoil. You might want to check them out to see how much recoil you'll get.

[george moromisato]

The recoil attribute is in the same unit as the momemtum attribute (and the amount of recoil/momemtum is actually the square of the value):

1 = 1 unit of recoil
2 = 4 units of recoil
3 = 9 units of recoil
etc.

I should also mention that thanks to a suggestion from (I believe) fossaman, the recoil attribute honors the fire direction specified in the <Configuration> element.

In other words, you could make a gun that fires to the rear and pushes the ship forward (via recoil).

[marr]

So, given that I'm already messing around with flame effects, this would be a good time to work on a Thraddash afterburner..

The projectiles would still fire from the standard weapon point with just Shot Angle="180" though, right? That would look bad. Is there a big list of all these optional extensions anywhere? I'm beginning to get a little lost.

[SparcMan]

As I read the above, I starting thinking about the same thing. A "weapon" used to give you a boost. I don't think recoil will let you go faster than your max speed so it would only be good for initial acceleration.

[marr]

According to my experiments, your intuition is correct. There is a maximum speed for every ship, and an effective maximum speed for the game's physics engine, too. Set a ship's speed too high and it has all kinds of horrible problems, like being near impossible to dock without flipping away into the void at several times lightspeed.

But getting to max speed faster is always good for safe overtaking.

[Fossaman]

You can always do a low thrust, high speed ship with an afterburner...

That would be pretty cool on an enemy ship, actually. Except they'd only use it when they fired at you...

Is there any way to link using a drive device like the tritium upgrade to a weapon type effect?

[marr]

You can always do a low thrust, high speed ship with an afterburner...

That would be pretty cool on an enemy ship, actually. Except they'd only use it when they fired at you...

I had to try this, so I fitted my experimental prototype to a captured Corsair gunship. Actually, they do sort of use it to get away occasionally. Basically, they'll fire it if they think the flame might clip you, which is fair enough. If I can adjust something to make the AI way more trigger-happy, so it kicks in any time you're even vaguely behind them, it would make for some interesting fights.

Is there any way to link using a drive device like the tritium upgrade to a weapon type effect?

I doubt that, from what I've seen of some attempted mods. Transcendence items have very clearly defined types like weapon, reactor, damage upgrade, and a mod will pretty much 'be' whatever one it reads first in the xml definition. I think.

There is one easy dual-use item you can make, though. Give any useful installed device negative power use, and it effectively doubles as a reactor upgrade. Cheap, but handy for mod testing, since you can turn it on and off in flight to switch between playable stats and uber-reactor.