New to this game, and it's really great, but I do have a suggestion (and I'll probably have many, but just htis one for now).

Maybe you could use cargo as chaff if you ejected it before a missile or some cannon fire hit you.

That would be a neat thing....

Right now the only lethal guided missile are the swarm missiles for the large weapon port. And that's something that I feel is absolutely necessary to defend the heavy class ships. If chaff and flares are introduced to the game, it would make nearly all the missiles useless. Trust me, you don't want 'em. As you level up, try some of the missiles yourself to see what I mean. You'll find that most of them already miss like 50% of the time anyway.

I suppose I don't mean "chaff" i nthe traditional sense of the word.

Basically, I want cargo to beable to absorb damage; any damage at all (IE guns too).

Thus, if someone is flying up behind you, you can jettison the cargo and turbo out before he can get a good shot on you. If he does fire, the shots will destroy the cargo and leave you intact.

I don't think that missiles should TRACK the cargo, especially sinceo our radar is apparantly good enough to tell the difference between freind/foe/cargo. But, I think that if the cargo happens to be between you and the weapon, the cargo should go first.

That actually makes sense -- but it would be tricky to do, otherwise you'll just end up losing your cargo and getting blasted anyway.

That -should- happen though, I mean, if the missile or laser shot hits a peice of cargo, the cargo should be exploded, it shouldn't pass through it.

Not sure if thats a great defence idea, but it would be a nick trick to pull once and a while.

--SD

We did explicitly disable cargo<->weapon collisions and it certainly is possible to reenable them...

Firstly, though, it's extremely unlikely that a laser shot will hit a cargo box unless the shooter explicitly targeted the cargo box. They are very small. If cargo triggered the proximity fuse on a rocket/missile, though, I suppose you have a point. I'm not sure how effective a defense this would be (due to point #3 below).

Second, if cargo takes damage and can be destroyed, then the explosion resulting from destroying ships could also destroy/damage the cargo. Maybe this would make things more interesting, maybe it would make things more tedious.. I don't think we could reasonably do this without also stealing the "disable ships and loot cargo" idea from EnB.

Third, explosions in this game don't do a fixed amount of damage. What I mean by that is that if there were an infinite number of infinitesimal objects surrounding an explosion with damage 1000, each of those objects would be damaged for max(0,1000*(rmax-r)/rmax) points (where r is the distance from the epicenter of the explosion and rmax is the explosion radius); in sum, an infinite amount of damage will be dealt. So none of the objects absorbs damage from any other.

I'm not saying any of this to shoot down ideas; I'm just explaining things-as-they-are-now in detail in order to guide further suggestions.

I'm not sure about your third point (I mean, I understand the equation, but I'm not sure what you were implying by it).

Your first point: you're right, one container would be hard to hit unintentionally. Put if a ship jettisons a corgo hold of about 8-10, that will produce enough to increase the chances of them being hit instead of you.

Your second point: Cargo is obviously stuff that survives the ships blast. So, maybe you can put in the code a line that makes sure the initial ship's explosion does not damage the containers. Therefore, you wouldn't need to worry about having to "disable and loot" sicne destroying them would have the same effect.

I dunno, just an idea I had. Maybe not practically applicable, but it would be cool.

Orion Prime: The point behind the formula is that explosions damage everything in radius, regardless of obstruction, and that something in the blast radius does not reduce damage to something else in the blast radius.

I dunno if this is something you'd even want to consider for explosion damage, but if you have explosion epicenter a, object b, and object C.. Maybe if b is a path between a and c, and b has a hitbox smaller than c (do you use radius hit detection?), it could reduce damage by a ratio based on difference in hitbox size. If b had a hitbox the same size or larger than c, then it could negate damge entirely. It'd be a bit more math, but I dunno that it'd be enough to negatively impact performance, unless there were a lot of explosions, or a lot of objects within blast radius.

'Course, like mentioned, we'd need to make the cargo boxes tough to survive ship explosions.