Not for the casual hiring of NPC wingmen - as NPCs take up server resources.
I mean for Larger ships to carry them in their hold, and spawn them to fight, thus allowing carriers to fulfil their true calling (and not mount heavy offensive weaponry).
But just spawning ships isnt enough. Without a means of control they could be a threat to friends, neutrals and foes alike.
So what then of FLHook? Are there any hooks into the games AI?
What controls need to be implemented for such a thing to be successful? I would think that the following commands would be the minimum needed for such a system to be viable.
1) 'Spawn': At the most basic level, can it be done in principle?
2) 'Neutralise': In an ideal situation - a spawned ship would be neutral to everyone to start with until it is attacked - or be able to be made neutral in order to keep ships in formation - or cease firing - rather than fighting a target indefinately.
3) 'Attack My Target': What provision is there to set a target for an NPC ship?
4) 'Form On My Wing': I know that in Vanilla the game makes ships form on you. Can this be hooked into?
5) 'Goto Waypoint': In Vanilla ships will automatically fly out to the next waypoint when it is set. Can we hook into a waypoint we set ourselves on the Nav Map? Will NPCs despawn if they fly too far? Will they go through jump gates and holes with the player?
6) 'Dock': Have the ships form up, then despawn back into the hold of the ship.
We don't need game mechanics to make up for what players can/should be doing. More things are possible through roleplay than currently available with the game mechanics.
It's not something we need, no matter how cool or flashy it might be.
' Wrote:If we had a NASA Supercomputer for a server, maybe we could do it.
Actually our server would probably have the resources to do this. The FLServer program, however, is not advanced enough to do this. It's already strained to the limit just supporting 200 players.
Something similar that would be cool (awesome) to be done is that if it would be possible to for players flying fighters (any type) and light freighters to dock in players carriers.
And I was thinking that once docked, they would simply see the same thing as the payer who is flying the carrier as if it was their ship.. only they can only do the action of undocking their ship, look around and chat..
If that's possible (I have no dam idea if it is), I don't think it wold make the server lag and it wouldn't harm player to player interaction.
' Wrote:We don't need game mechanics to make up for what players can/should be doing. More things are possible through roleplay than currently available with the game mechanics.
It's not something we need, no matter how cool or flashy it might be.
Then we dont need carriers either, I mean, a carrier that carries nothing? why not changing the names to battle frigate/cruiser/lolcap/ or command ship/vessel/lolwutter
' Wrote:We don't need game mechanics to make up for what players can/should be doing.
Of course there are only 200 slots for players, while players should be doing some things they can't be everywhere all of the time, NPCs can however.
Besides, NPCs exist mainly for the feel of the game, how much more awesome would fleet engagements be it there were a bunch of NPC caps and other ships flying around shooting things even if their guns did no damage?