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Homing Beacon


Marker Mage

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Disclaimer: My knowledge of what's in the game so far is based on the pre-alpha build, Lathland's videos, and the patch notes. I would appreciate any youtube videos that go in depth at what the closed alpha has added.

I would like to suggest a part that, when activated, is treated as the current location of the cursor. Either that or have directional sensors and weapons able to be set to aim at it. Basically, it would be like the camera block, but for the cursor instead of the camera.

I see it being able to be used for sticking onto a target so that weapons can auto-aim or just placed at a location for a drone with a direction sensor to fly towards. And if you don't have distance sensors able to detect the cursor yet, that might be a good idea to implement along with this.

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So I just thought of an alternative that can avoid the problem of multiple beacons. Basically it would be a part or weapon upgrade/ammo that shoots out a beacon that sticks to whatever it hits, whether it be terrain, an object, or an enemy. Each time it is fired, the previous beacon is lost/destroyed. Maybe have it have outputs for if it is attached to enemies, terrain, ore, or something else and an input that causes it to self destruct or deactivate.

I can see it being part of a setup where once stuck onto an ore deposit, automated drones will seek it out to gather resources until the ore around it is collected and it drops to some non-ore terrain, whereupon it gives an output that matches its deactivation input.

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I would love to have such a part as well :) I'm not sure how we should handle it if there are several of those, as the Directional Sensor would have to be able to point to a specific one, but I think we can find a good solution for that. Thank your for the suggestion!

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19 minutes ago, Markus said:

I'm not sure how we should handle it if there are several of those, as the Directional Sensor would have to be able to point to a specific one, but I think we can find a good solution for that.

I figured that you could handle it the same way you handle multiple camera blocks (the camera is able to point to a specific one of those right?), just having it work with where the weapons and sensors think the cursor is instead of where the camera should go. I could even see using camera blocks as a watered down version of this if the view wouldn't move ahead of the block during movement and the player left the cursor in the middle of the screen. In the pre-alpha, I can even use the drone brain for a watered down version of that watered down version.

I wouldn't be surprised if you implement my suggestion by just taking the camera block and giving it a toggle that lets it act as the cursor location instead of the location for the camera to track. Maybe even have it able to be set to different channels so that sensors and weapons could be set to point at different ones (with the default being either the cursor or the drone brain).

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Sounds like a good solution. Micha will implement it, so I can't talk about it much. Ideally you could configure the Direction-Sensor in any way you want, and let it point to whatever target you might think of, even switch targets during the game. I have no clue how we would implement that code and UI wise, but I think this would be the ideal case :) 

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OK, so it turns out I was operating on some misunderstanding of how cameras worked in the game. I thought activating a second camera would deactivate the previous camera, not zoom out to show both. Good thing I started this suggestion with the disclaimer.

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I would love to (And I know, i know, I've said it before) be able to 'pair' directional blocks somehow so that they always pointed to each other.  I have this dream of creating a drone fleet that operates like a bunch of gradius options, following me around in formation and firing at things with me.  But to do that they need to know the direction to a specific drone or part, and the distance to a specific drone or part.  being able to point directional sensors to each other, or to a selected 'part' is halfway done.

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A 2x2 block that has a icon on the minimap and allows for directional sensors to track it. They can be named and when selected by the directional sensor will have you type in a name for it to track, simular to the TAG mode

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This has been suggested multiple times. I think that 2x1 would be a better size, and that it should be called a “beacon”

In a future update a block that sticks to terrain and has a minimap icon is already planned, and the devs are considering making it detectable by direction sensors.

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Sticks to terrain?  I think I missed that part. 

Personally, I'd mostly use it to track. The hopper and various drone parts - a tracker with directional detection, and my formation flier would get a lot easier to build. 

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On 10/25/2018 at 9:15 PM, ManTheMister said:

This has been suggested multiple times.

Well, if you aren't going to link one of them, then I will just take this opportunity to link my own version of this suggestion.

Why not post a reply to it with the naming/tagging idea?

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5 hours ago, Marker Mage said:

Why not post a reply to it with the naming/tagging idea?

 

The man's not a moderator, nobody's obligated to do any extra work in being helpful.  I had intended to start merging tracker topics, and forgot to, in fact.  Let me do this now.

EDIT: Interestingly, only two topics on beacons, though a couple more for things like laser targeting and lock-ons; directional sensor criteria.

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On 10/5/2018 at 8:30 AM, Micha said:

Interesting idea.

It could be something like a targeting-laser. You can aim at a position and let your smaller drones fly there

We've been mentioning trackers again lately.  I'm excited, in the context that it can let one part of your ship track another part.  I've mentioned I want to make formation fliers.  Right now my formation gun wings that flank a core are stupid and clumsy; they find the core, and keep it to its left, push in if they can't detect it with a distance sensor, push away if the distance sensor finds a drone part, and I'm using sensors on the drone part to find the companion to guide it forward or back . . . it's slow going.

Trackers offer a unique opportunity, with two trackers and two directional sensors, each tuned to a different tracker, to detect not just a ship part's DIRECTION, but also it's orientation.  

Trackers that can be selected as a specific directional tracker target can change a LOT.  They can be very powerful.  I'd like to reiterate that I really, REALLY want these, and I really would like them with the following specific feature set:

  • Name a tracker with a specific identifier
  • Select an identified tracker as a directional sensor target, and if altimeters get wider targeting parameters, (Rangefinder) an altimeter/rangefinder target
  • Sensor dots, with configurable icons, on the minimap.
  • Sensors, instead of detecting average position (as with cameras) detect the 'nearest' position.  So you can mark several positions, and a subdrone can act on one marked position at a time.
  • And, this would be a luxury, but an offset to the position read by sensors.  For instance, an x offset of -100 might produce a sensor target 100 pixels left of the tracker's actual position.  This goes back to wanting formation fliers. (Though the previous points make it doable, with some effort.)
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