Turrets manned by the blind?

[apL]

Am I doing something wrong? I bought a frigate in my playthrough, and the first engagement I get...the turrets are just spraying hopelessly in a general direction. It's as if they're trying to listen for the enemy ship and just shoot what they hear.

Do I need to hire better crew? Or put a specific setting on? Or buy a combat extension? Or is this a problem with turrets at the moment...(I haven't faced turrets yet so I don't know if the NPC is just as useless with them as my ship)

[LameFox]

I haven't met an NPC who could aim yet, friendly or hostile. Even the Kha'ak with their beam guns shoot around me more than at me. Unlike their flying I don't think it's a bug so much as their default skill being way undertuned.

[Vidares]

Same here >.< my turret´s are shooting at the position of the ship 3 seconds ago. and even if the enemy stands still, they cant hit it

Maybe we need more service crew or the aiming software mk1 is bugged'????

[Vidares]

More service crew doenst change a thing =(

[Vidares]

More service crew doesnt change a thing =(

[Imari]

Yea, seems turrets are manned by blind crew and AI. 1% hit rate regardless of loadout. At least for my frigate.

Not sure if higher crew ranks will significantly improve accuracy.

[Gazz]

Some things have not changed, I see.

[Carl Sumner]

... Not sure if higher crew ranks will significantly improve accuracy.

Probably will, if it is like the other games. In Rebirth it made a -big- difference.

And the other things mentioned, although I have not heard about a bug there, yet.

[Kaeltheras]

Don't know if there's maybe something to do w/ overall crew rating or software or maybe turret type, but on my Cerberus, I had the mk 1 laser turrets and they had no problems hitting S ships going 80-200 m/s

[Revenant342]

Enemies definitely suck. Took out four Ms and two Ps in a Discoverer earlier without my shields dropping below 75%.

[Zippo342]

Linear Algebra is hard, yo? I mean if they had someone good at it working there, both the autopilot and the turrets would be spot on.

I mean, it's not hard to plot a course through an asteroid belt if you know how to take the projection of an asteroid's vector on your vector. If you do, finding out the distance which you will close on the asteroid is as simple as:
v_a = vector of asteroid from you
v_s = ship's projected movement vector

v_a->s (Projection of A on S) = dot.product(v_s, v_a)/dot.product(v_s, v_s) * v_s

d_a = abs(v_s - v_a->s) (This is the closest distance you will get to this asteroid)

Then once you had the distance from the asteroid you would pass, you can then tell if you'll be too close if the distance is less than the radius of the asteroid, and you can plot around the asteroid by simply by doing this:
r_a = radius of asteroid

wp1 = v_a->s + (v_s - v_a->s) / d_a * r_a
wp2 = v_s - wp1

Something similar would be used for tracking turrets. The linear algebra behind it is pretty hard to understand, but once you do, you can easily even get the GPU to help by doing a whole sector at a time.

[Gazz]

It's not quite that simple.
Ships have the annoying habit of not flying in a straight line so all too often any calculation fails as soon as you begin it because the ship has already changed course again by the time the projectile could arrive.
Then there's the issue of what you do in hardcode, which parts you externalise and how fast all that is. It's complicated and that's just the rough design.

[Zippo342]

Gazz, I know you have experience in this, but those curves can also be simulated with a rotational matrix multiplication.

Theta = the angle and direction you wish to rotate it

[[cos^2(Theta) sin(Theta)cos(Theta)]
[-sin(Theta)cos(Theta) sin^2(Theta)]]

There are ways to even model the more complex modelings. It's not easy to understand how, but if you do, it is easy to implement with linear algebra.

Edit: I had to use this kind of stuff a lot for stuff like affine transformation of images in Computer Vision last year.

[Zippo342]

It's not quite that simple.
Ships have the annoying habit of not flying in a straight line so all too often any calculation fails as soon as you begin it because the ship has already changed course again by the time the projectile could arrive.
Then there's the issue of what you do in hardcode, which parts you externalise and how fast all that is. It's complicated and that's just the rough design.

Also, I just wanted to say, Gazz, 12 years ago when I was in the military, I first played X3:R and then discovered your turret mods, I didn't have the appreciation then of the math you had to do that I do now that I'm graduating with my CS degree. You did a great job, but maybe I can help you do better in the future when trying to hit something moving "predictably not in a straight line"

[Gazz]

Yes, I know this can be done "properly" but in a game that's very often not an option.
You look for ways to cut corners and get a "good enough" solution with 2D or 2.5D math or completely unrelated but faster functions.

You don't have to get it to work once. You have to get it working at a high frequency for hundreds of entities. Math is great and useful but not always the right answer.

[FalconGrey]

-Munches his popcorn watching the back and forth as he remembers the X3:R years and before mods.... then jumps back into his X4 cockpit-

[Chris0132]

I found that the turrets on my ship actually weren't tracking things. They would aim at something, then fire for a few seconds without updating their aim point, then aim back at it and do the same thing. Basically meant they wouldn't hit anything.

[aristos_achaion]

I found that the turrets on my ship actually weren't tracking things. They would aim at something, then fire for a few seconds without updating their aim point, then aim back at it and do the same thing. Basically meant they wouldn't hit anything.

Have you tried leaving the sector while combat is going on? It's been a long time, but IIRC in X3 out-of-sector combat was rather different from in-sector combat, and the AIs tended to less awful at OOS combat.

[PDS001Sniper]

Same here. Turrets on my Cerberus can't hit a thing... I was lucky that I had 2 defence drones and 1 S class fighter on board.

[Darlandra]

Same here. I just brought my cerberus to the anomoly point to escort the transport ship, and 5 s fighters showed up, and even sitting still they never hit anything. It was obvious watching the guns movement that they wearn't really tracking anything, they would aim, shoot for a second, re-aim, shoot, re-aim etc etc. They don't re-adjust moment by moment