FL Auto aiming disaster

[Jinx]

the autoaim is not useless. - freelancer guns are practicly turrets. - in other games ... the crosshair defines the point of the maximum range of a weapons projectile. - the guns are fixed and the targetting crosshair defines where a fixed gun needs to aim ( or where the ship needs to point to ) - in order to hit the target.

but usually - those games are a lot slower than freelancer ( that doesn t mean that the shipspeeds are slower - but it means that the movement is a lot less erratic ) - in games like freespace , wing commander etc. - ships don t make such a great use of strafe. - take away strafe - and your autoaim suddenly works just fine.

what the autoaim DOES for the player is to define a target on the z-axis relative to the playership. - that means that your guns know ( once you re on the spot ) that the target is at a certain distance to you - and they adjust the angle ( which is often done via the gun-tolerance that adds to the gunmount rotation )

if guns would not adjust itself to the autoaim - their "effective" angle of attack would decrease seriously.

a good example are pebbles. - they are basicly auto-aimed at when you click on them. when you click just next to them, the shot misses by quite much, cause the gun doesn t aim for the pebble, which is maybe 1/4 of the range ( shortened by depth [z-axis] ) - but it aims at the full range of the projectile.

guns in freelancer can focus on a target - that way a large ship can hit with all its weapons when fighting a small ship. - if the guns had no auto-aim, they d aim at the furthest point possible - which means that a small ship could practicly "slip" through the projectiles, even if its right in front of the playership. ( the outer wing guns of a titan wouldn t hit a hammerhead, when the shots did not focus on the center of the hammerhead. )

example of what the autoaim does for you:



getting rid of the autoaim would need a full rebalance, cause ships with a wide wingspan or guns that are located so far from each other that a smaller ship can slip through would gain an additional disadvantage - while ships with its guns in one place would be much much more efficient.

---

Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC