So you mean buyable extra armour like in the monkeys universe mod, but with the difference that you can see it?

not really...

ok think of it like this
u know the crusader? in the original freelancer?
well when you click the target view and click on its fin, you can target it...
when you shoot at it...it changes colors and blows off..but when you shoot at it...the actual hull of the ship takes no damage.

now..think makeing new "fins" that arnt fins...but insted medium size pieces of the ships external hull...designed to make it still look like the ship...
so...when you down the ships shield (if any) and shoot at it...the piece of hull plating would get damaged and fly off...and the more you shot around at differient pieces more would fly off....

and you would only damage the red bar when you shot at a part where there wasent an armor piece anymore.

get it yet?

Its a wonderful idea, and from what Ive heard of the recent milestones in .sur file editing/developing I think this is very possible.

Think of large battleships with armor plating, where you first have to shoot of the armor to hurt its actual hull.. keep it up

Hmm, sound very interesting.

that will create alot of lag and you need to build custom plates for every ship which will be damn many of those things and that will heavily raise the serverload in connection with the additional surs

well, fox unit might try to get it working in the long run on his 88 flak mod...
we will see how much "sever load" it makes...the problem with that is (no offence fox unit) that 88 flak already needs some lag issues fixed...but right now its in beta anyway.

thanks for the input ppl

i had this idea... it is very neat, and it is a good way to help protect other things that can get blown off, like a fin, but otherwise, it's neat, sttrike a balance between small plates of armor and sheilds.

Limited use.
Take into consideration the Coalition ships making the assault at one of the Jupiter moons. Some appear as they have some form of extra plating...like they were covering critical ship parts.

who said anything about Coalition ships? did you assume i ment this for crossfire? this is ment to be on any ships that the makers of mods think deserve to have it. like cap ships or VHF's

I actually considered this for my mod at one point, though eventually I decided it wasn't what I wanted. If you're going to make the armor buyable, you might want to make a bunch of dummy shield generators and put hardpoints for them on your ship's hull. The shield generators would have .surs that more or less match the hull of the ship where they are mounted. This makes it easy to upgrade armor, since it's just buying/selling of shield generators.

However, there are some big drawbacks to customizable armor. Since your ship is not a big cube, the armor plating over different ship parts will have different shapes (so, different .surs). This obviously means that you will need multiple shield generators types per ship type. If they can be bought/sold, you will want to avoid having players mount shield generators in the wrong spots, which requires multiple shield classes per ship, over and above having no overlaps between ships. In other words, you can put plate on just a few ships before you run the risk of people mismounting armor.

If you opt to avoid customizable armor, you can avoid the above problems and just make the armor plates breakable parts of the ship itself (like fins or whatever). It's 100% doable, just kind of a pain to fit plates to the hull. Also, if you have a complex hull and/or if you have multiple plates per surface, you will probably need more than 18 parts to handle the hull + armor, which will take some creativity with utf edit (the splice can handle any number of .surs, but the .cmp exporter for MS3D caps at 18).

maybe you could make them invisible, and call it a force field? just make it a sphere. It soaks up a bunch of damage, the dies. You could make different sized ones for small fighters, getting larger and larger. You repair them when you land, and after a certain amount of damage, they explode. an interesting alternative to a sheild. protects fins, has more health, but doesn't recharge and costs money to keep working.

Sona he's talking about the freelancer extended intro. it was never used in the actual game, but when the coalition ships attack pluto they appear to have large plates of armor The intro on youtube

Edited by - lancerlover on 4/20/2007 6:17:16 AM

ahh...im sorry about that then.

yes i thought that the best way (for now) to do this would be to have the armor like fine on the ship and not comtomizible....for now.......