Rework blinding

[Song]

Disclaimer: This is pipe-dream stuff, and is likely to take a fair bit of work and make things potentially a bit harder ingame. On the other hand, it will mean that blinding weapons actually have a purpose besides getting laughed at.


Current behaviour of blinding weapons is to obscure the players viewscreen on an armor hit. That's it. It doesn't affect omni weapons, targeting, and has no impact on NPC ships. Atarlost and I talked about this over in #Transcendence and we came up with a few ideas.


Idea 1. Increase aim tolerance on NPC ships when "blinded". This assumes that the enemy can use LRS to navigate (like the player) and is just a lot less accurate. This is probably the easiest to do, and affects balance the least. It is, however, somewhat lame in terms of giving the player a reward for using a blinding weapon, and doesn't really give much reward for using blinders.

Idea 2. Actually simulate blinding. The AI starts random-walking and firing more or less at random. Possibly overpowered, but a very good way to show that a ship is being blinded. Turrets on enemies would still work (as the player can still target omni/swivel weapons while blinded) and have regular accuracy.

Idea 3. Simulate blinding, and making blinding affect more things. As well as wild behaviour on NPCs, it also takes out turret and missile targeting, making them fire with massively reduced accuracy and/or at random points. Missiles would not auto-target the player except at close range (like a playership with no targeting ROM). This would then be carried over into impacts on the player's systems when they are blinded: Either making missiles lose the targeting ROM boost and omnis/swivels have reduced accuracy, or having both omni/swivel weapons and missile weapons lose the effect of the installed targeting ROM. Further to the shipside stuff, it'd be really neat if blinding/EMP weapons could disable the tracking on homing missiles if they hit the missile in flight (or if missile weapons had a variable that controlled whether they could be affected by them). We started talking about blinding while discussing how annoying ICX/Longreach systems are and trying to find a way to reduce friendly-fire. This would allow ICX devices that cannot kill ships and cause accidents, at the cost of only being able to stop tracking missiles (and then, only if the player can get out of the way of the missile once the tracking is disabled). Obviously, this one is the most work, but the one I think is most interesting.

Improving blinding allows for it to become a legitimate tool for players, modders and extension writers. At present, it's a threat to players (unless they know how to deal with it), but sucks at everything else, and there's no reason to make weapons with it unless you want a weapon that can only damage shields.

[george moromisato]

I love the idea. This needs to be done in concert with stealth/perception.

Internally every object has a stealth value and a perception value. The difference between the detector's perception value and the target's stealth value determines the distance at which the target is visible.

Today the engine uses these values only in a couple of places:

1. The AI uses this to determine if it sees an object (including the player). For example, if the player approaches a station, we use these values to determine if the station sees the player and if the guards try to attack. Unfortunately, once the the player is detected, the AI never loses track of it, even if the player goes out of range.

2. The LRS view uses this to figure out if the player sees an object.

3. Stealth armor increases stealth; nebulae increases stealth. I don't think there is anything in the game that increases perception.

Your suggestions, I think, would be enhancements to the above. Blinding is (roughly)* setting perception to 0, so the ship never sees anything coming and should be unable to aim.

[*I say "roughly" because blinding works only on the viewscreen--the LRS still works; and the player gets an intermittent view of the field. We could simulate this for the AI also.]

[PM]

At present, it's a threat to players (unless they know how to deal with it), but sucks at everything else

This makes it good at knocking out missiles without harming unshielded ships (aside from aggravation). In other words, damage type of missile defense only. Probably not the intent of blinding though.

[Song]

At present, it's a threat to players (unless they know how to deal with it), but sucks at everything else

This makes it good at knocking out missiles without harming unshielded ships (aside from aggravation). In other words, damage type of missile defense only. Probably not the intent of blinding though.

Yes, these changes would sacrifice a currently rather useful trick. Although I think that could be fixed through changes to the missile defense system (which, at present, is still horrendously annoying. I've been killed by my own point-defense autons at least twice in 1.2 so far). Alternatively, take the idea of my post on auton-aggro stuff and apply it to point defense: charge the player for damages where they occur and possibly have a game-over if it happens too much, but don't immediately try to kill the player for it. Or something like that.

[Song]

Internally every object has a stealth value and a perception value. The difference between the detector's perception value and the target's stealth value determines the distance at which the target is visible.....

1. The AI uses this to determine if it sees an object (including the player). For example, if the player approaches a station, we use these values to determine if the station sees the player and if the guards try to attack. Unfortunately, once the the player is detected, the AI never loses track of it, even if the player goes out of range.

2. The LRS view uses this to figure out if the player sees an object.

3. Stealth armor increases stealth; nebulae increases stealth. I don't think there is anything in the game that increases perception.]

As a less relevant thing, being able to alter perception and stealth on the fly, especially if we could tie it to specific angles (eg. have higher perception between 345-15 [degrees], have greater stealth when the ship is being looked-for from behind than infront, etc.), would allow for interesting extension and modding possibilities (eg. Active scanners that defeat stealth, but make the ship highly visible to hostiles that notice the activity [and possibly send a squad out to investigate], passive arrays picking up vague impressions of where stations are on the map based on their emissions). Stealth is another thing that, like blinding, isn't really used right now but has massive potential.