Strat Wars - Scenario Editing

All right! Now we're talking! Time to set up a bunch of lasers to rule the universe! This panel lets you create, remove and modify guns, which in the Strat Wars screensaver are weapons that shoot forward (in the direction your ship is facing).

At the top of this panel is a list selection enabling you to set which gun array you are currently working with. Gun arrays work as groups, targeting the same targets and firing in concert or in sequence.

If you need another array (another set of guns), you can click the Add Weapons Array button at the bottom of the panel. This will add a weapon set to the list at top with a gun in the array already. If you need to remove a weapon set, select it in the top list and click the Delete Current Weapon button. Note that these buttons both apply to the gun sets and not to individual guns.

The gun selection list enables you to edit each individual gun in a set. Clicking the Add Gun button will add a gun to the weapon set, while click the Remove Gun button will remove the currently selected gun from the set. Pretty simple stuff.

The Gun element position fields (again X, Y and Z) are used to position the individual guns. Just like the cockpit view positioning, this may take some trial and error. The good news is, once you have one gun in a set positioned correctly, you can use those positioning values with your other guns. For example, you've placed a gun on the left side of your ship at 3, 1, -5. If the other gun in that pair was exactly opposite, it's position would be 3, 1, 5. Using existing position values to place other guns is a great time saver.

When you harmonize a gun set, all of the guns in that set will fire on a single point in space. This is useful for weapon sets that have guns relatively far apart from each other. To prevent the ship from constantly firing straight ahead, not hitting anything, we can set the harmonization point so that all of the weapons fire on a point in front of the ship.

Selecting the Harmonize option enables this feature. Note that this affects *all* guns in the weapon set. Turning on the Show Fire Paths option will help you see where all of the guns are shooting. The harmonization point is defined just like the gun position, in X, Y and Z values.

The Cylon Raider ship has two lasers set far apart. Without the harmonization option their enemies were flying right at them, through their lasers. With the harmonization option turned on and the harmonization point set roughly 307 units in front of the Raider, the Raiders were extremely more efficient in their slaughtering of the cursed Human pilots.

The next set of settings enables you to specify how the guns will fire. Selecting the Linked option will make all of the guns fire in concert (at the same time) while the Sequenced option will make the guns fire one at a time in the order they are listed in the set. Which you choose can be dependent on whether or not you are modeling a ship from an existing universe or simply which setting you think looks cooler.

Fire rate is the delay between shots, expressed in increments of 33 milliseconds (which is the length of time for one frame at 30 frames per second). A fire rate of 10 will fire once every .3 seconds and a fire rate of 100 will fire once every 3.3 seconds. Burst count is the number of shots that occur in one trigger pull. If the AI pilot pulls the trigger one time with a fire rate of 2 (66 milliseconds between shots) and a burst count of 7, there will be a roughly 0.5 second burst of seven shots. Note that this is not really noticable if the pilot lays on the trigger. The built-in Tie-fighter fires burst of three shots.

Speed is the speed at which the shots travel. Higher numbers move faster. Range is the range of the weapon and power is the damage the weapon does on a successful hit. *Note* A special case for beam weapons is that the speed field actually contains the beam's width. Keep this in mind, so you don't end up with a mile-wide beam. Beam weapons also take into account distance and fade rate when calculating power (see below).

This is the color of the weapon's shots expressed in RGB percentages. 0 is no color from that channel, while 1 is full color (like full red). To get weapons that look like they have a glow to them, it's best to include some of the other colors and brighten them up. For example, a blue laser would benefit from having slight red and green values to help it look like it is glowing. A value of .3, .3, 1 looks like the laser is glowing a lot more than just a straight blue channel (0, 0, 1).

There are currently four types of weapons in Strat Wars:

     Bolt (standard) is your classic laser beam typical of Star Wars.
     Torpedo is a spherical radiating projectile typical of Star Trek's photon torpedos.
     Beam is a continuous beam from your ship to the target.
     Cutting Beam is the same as Beam except that the beam continues through all other objects to the full range of the weapon, doing damage to everything it comes in contact with.

The Shared trigger option is currently unimplemented and will hopefully be added in future releases of the ship editor. It's purpose is to link weapons arrays to each other, so a laser and a torpedo, both in seperate arrays, can fire at the same time.

Beam fade rate is the rate at which the beam loses power each frame (33 milliseconds). A beam's duration is how long a beam will last with one pull of the trigger (again in frames or 33 milliseconds). A beam weapon will become weaker (and darker) over a distance. At maximum range, beams are effectively doing no damage. Note that beam fade rate and duration only affect beam weapons.

A beam fade rate of 0.1 would reduce the beam's brightness and power to nothing after 10 frames. A fade rate of 0 would keep the beam on until the duration period was over which would then switch the beam off, like the Minbari fighters' beam weapons in Babylon 5. An extremely high beam fade rate can make the beam look like it's getting sucked back into the ship.

So, if you have a Fire rate of 30 (one shot per second) a burst count of 3 and a beam duration of 15, you would have, with one pull of the trigger, the beam gun firing three times in a row with each beam lasting for half a second (roughly) and with half a second separating one beam being turned off and the next being turned on. If the beam duration is longer, then the fire rate you can have the beam stay on for as long as the trigger is held (like a Star Trek phaser effect) or, if it is shorter, the beam will pulse on and off for as long as the trigger is held.