Tractor Beams

J

Jumper

Rear Admiral
There was a discussion about these a while back..

If you eject in WCP/SO, you get tractored into either a bug or a confed SAR ship... So the tractor beam feature is not totall absent from WCP/SO.

Just being a master of the obivious..
 
I don't see why you couldn't script it to be used... Like everything else this week, apparantly, HCl's leech cannon modification could be used to impliment it. Throw a short ranged gun on that'll, on hitting the target, make the target move towards the player ship... then dissapear it. I'm not sure why you wouldn't just do it in a cutscene, though... then you don't need to deal with the gun junk, you just script the motions and tractor effect.
 
Thing is, we don't know anything about the tractor effect, Jumper. All we can do is edit the tractor scene so that a different ship appears - but this is an EXE modification, so it's obviously not something you can do on a per-mission basis. We also have no idea how to trigger the scene outside of the ejection sequence.

What we do know is that in the WCP mission where you search for Maniac's lost pilot, there was no tractor effect. The ship got close enough to the pod, played the tractor beam sound for a few seconds, and then the pod disappeared. To me, this is rather troubling. If Origin had implemented a visual tractor beam effect but for some reason found it preferable not to enable this effect inside the game... draw your own conclusions :p.
 
What if we made a tractor beam gun, and an FMV movie of the tractor beam for each ship with a tractor beam. It could be scripted to play upon firing your tractor beam gun, as long as your within a certain range of the pod. After the movie is completed, we could destroy the pod. The mission would basically halt, show the movie, then continue without the pod. It take a lot of space with that many FMV movies, and I dunno if we can implement the within a certain range thing, or the firing of a gun to trigger a movie, but if that's possible, then this would work. If not possible, then we can just have you fly within a certain range of the pod and stay there for say... 10 seconds (I know we can do this) then show the movie and destroy the pod. I think we could probably implement a tractor beam without too much work.

Then again... I'm just a composer... what do I know?
 
That probably could work, but it would remove some of the tension. I mean, usually in tractor missions, there was the element of people shooting at you while you're trying to stay put long enough to drag the pod/pilot/whatever in.
 
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