[SCR] Set the course! (v1.00)

[Gazz]

English / Deutsch


What is this?

This script adds a helmsman to your ship.
It works with any mobile ship but is obviously intended for capital ships and freighters.

Know the situation?
You are driving an M2 and decide to do a 90° turn.
A simple enough action, but in TC you either have to...
- manually hold the controller in one position for a looong time
- program an autopilot course change on the sector map in 3 dimensions.

Neither is fun nor very rewarding. It gets really nasty if you want to order simple course changes like that for multiple ships.
You'd need 6 arms for that.



Usage 1

What you actually "use" with this script is one hotkey.

If you press it, you are teleported to a "nose view" of your ship.
You can now turn very very fast, using normal mouselook, joystick, whatever.

If you stop turning, an invisible timer is counting down. (see "Configuration")

Alternatively you press the hotkey again to cut the timer immediately.
Even very small movements count so joystick users may have to use this method.

When that happens, you are back in your ship and an autopilot course has been set to fly (100 km) into this direction.


One click and a mouse swipe for "Go that way!". In 3D.
Damn, I'm good.

This is exactly how I want "Flying capital ships in Rebirth" to work!
I agree that it's no fun to manually fly a single damn turn for 5 minutes but this can not be used as an argument for "direct control bad"!
I want to be able to point "Go there!" without having to go through speech menus, sector maps, and god knows what other UIs to puzzle that course together.


Usage 2

If you have another of your mobile ships targeted, you do the same thing... for the other ship.
That's a lot better fine control than with the remote control monitor from the bridge because you get a direct view from the nose of that ship.


Configuration

This script is technically an ALP although it doesn't do any artificially lively things.

The ALP part is only used for one setting and is found under Gameplay -> Artificial Life Settings.

Here you can assign, how long you want the "no turning" countdown to be.


Download: ZIP


Installation

Unpack the archive into the TC main folder.

[Gazz]

The set autopilot course will not include the exact roll orientation of your view.

There is no good way to "roll" a ship in the script editor because there is no such thing as rolling speed.

[Gazz]

** reserved **

[joelR]

A weird and uniquely useful script. Thanks Gazz. Youre the rainman of X-scripting.

[Gazz]

It's not that useful in TC, all things considered.

Even 3-4 km long capital ships turn crazy fast.
That's an unfortunate downside of "direct manual control" having been designed as the primary control mechanism for them.
If they had been "properly" sluggish from release, they'd have been hell to fly. And there was no other way.

Alas, two wrongs don't make a right...


I mostly wrote this script as a "technology demo" for how one could control a capital ship in Rebirth, gaining the accuracy and immediate response of manual flying - without the exciting prospect of holding the joystick to the left for the next 5 minutes.

If I can script this - dealing with all the workarounds involved in making the engine do something it was never designed for - then it would be child's play for Egosoft to implement it in an even smoother way.

Of course, classic navigation orders like fly to position / station / target ship will always have their place but in open space or in combat, those are ineffective.

[haerzog]

Instead of scripting a roll speed, can you script a roll time? Say you want to do a 30* starboard turn with 20 seconds of starboard roll?

Maybe you could script in a whole subdirectory into the navigation area, with standard course changes listed, also applicable to wing commands, such as Port 30/60/90/120/180 and starboard the other way, each of those subdividing to a list of standard vertical inclinations positive or negative to the Y axis of the ecliptic.