Wingmen Going Too Far

[RPC]

Sometimes, when you order a wingman like Buster (in UGW) or Volkov to attack, they go too far from the playership. I want to be able to dictate the distance they go from the playership, but have no clue how to do this whatsoever.
I have an idea with ShpOrder 'approach, but there's no documentation on what it does on the Wiki nor on Xelerus.

Also, ships get blown by a station's explosion when you order them to attack. I want to be able to stop that from happening. I also have no clue on how to implement this either.
As with the Dynamic Systems thread, I will not be able to implement suggestions... yet.
Oh, and if any of the admins feel to merge the three threads I created, go ahead.
Example:

buster.jpg (190.58 KiB) Viewed 6508 times

Yeah. Not cool Buster, not cool.

[Aury]

AFAIK, we don't have the fine control needed to do that without completely scrapping the existing wingmen framework and writing a new one in t-lisp.

[Ttech]

I'm not sure how useful dictating what a wingman would go, however a different attack pattern theoretically could be added? That might work?

[ThePrivateer]

off-topic a bit, but I tried to add a wingman to a mod of mine once. Utter disaster - I couldn't get it to work out all. -_-

That aside, I have noticed occaisionally that wingmen do fly off too far -- they should have a setting that would permit them to attack an enemy then return after they have gone a certain amount of ls -- like how enemy ships follow you and then fly back to guard their station.

[Drako Slyith]

I've noticed that sometimes if you order a wingman to attack itself, it sometimes spins off. I think the in game ones have a failsafe, but not all the modded ones. It is quite fun to watch.

[Aury]

Yeah, the vanilla wingmen are programmed not to try attacking themselves. I think its mostly old version wingmen from .99c and before that have this issue.

[Drako Slyith]

Back in .98 or something I accidentally told Volkov to attack himself. He spun out, but I was busy fighting and I thought he wouldn't go too far. I press "C" and nothing happened. The idiot decided to chase himself out into interstellar space. I think he's reached the core by now though... and he didn't even use the "cheating" stargates

[Aury]

Yeah, it wasn't until the 1.0 RC's that the wingmen & auton framework was introduced (that was version .99/a/b/c btw, as he wasn't introduced until version .99) - I remember when it was, because of an intro-screen crash they would cause in the first RC.

[Ttech]

I always to get wingmen to stay away jettison some wasted product and have them try to kill that.

[Atarlost]

There's a wait command now you know.

[Aury]

yeah, I just find some out-of-the-way location & have them wait there. Boom - perfect score on the CSC missions.

[Prophet]

Modifying wingmen behaviour is a simple task of overwriting the event handler they inherit from.

IT would be a trivial addition to add some code to prevent them from moving too far off.

Code: Select all

(and
 (gr (objGetDistance gSource gPlayerShip) 100)
 (not (eq behavior 'waiting)) 
)
  (block nil
     (shpCancelOrders gSource)
     (shpOrder gSource "escort" gPlayerShip 10)
   )

Stick that in the <onBehavior> event, as the first check in the switch.

[Aury]

I think that a distance of 200-300ls is more reasonable.