Okay…one more post for now about the Tornado.
If you toggle the pilot seat like I do all the time when the Twin is detached, there can be instances where you just lose the understanding as to which half youre currently controlling.
So there are two methods to determine which half youre currently piloting.
Method One
Just look down at your Active Module Slots. Depending on whats loaded in slots three and four determine what ship youre piloting.
Method Two (the one I rely on the most)
There are five Decor positions on the ship. First decor is on the Host half, on the forward nose.
Decor two and three are on the Host half, aft, on the tail ends of the wings, port and starboard sides.
Decor four and five are on the Twin half, aft, on the tail ends of the wings, port and starboard sides.
By placing one of your Decorations on the Host nose, in decor position one you can see it all the time even when eyeballing a target or shooting at an enemy, without looking down at the HUD modules and taking your eyes off the battle field.
So if you toggle between both ships constantly, in a huge firefight, as you toggle away from the active ship, the Twins AI takes over and starts flying the ship, moving it away from where you even remember it was at on the battle field just seconds ago. It does that with both ships. So in a huge firefight one can lose track of where youre at and what ship youre commanding at the moment.
But just looking out the front of the ship will tell you which one, host or twin, youre currently piloting, without looking at the HUD. The ship with the decor on the nose is the Host. The ship with no decor on the nose is the Twin. I dont even look at the HUD anymore to know what half Im commanding.
There was a slight learning curve the first day after crafting to get the feel of all the toggling and module shifting in the slots to make way for the two Host Control Modules but once ya figure out that slots one and two are the Host modules and slots three and four are the Twins Modules…and that one and two shift over to three and four after the halves detach so the Command Modules have a place to be trigger, it almost becomes second nature after a few sorties in the ship.
So if you have trouble knowing what ship half youre controlling at any given time, even in a huge battle all over the place, just place a decor in decor position one…its the Host Half and youll see it all the time without taking your eyes off a target. If its not there on the nose, youre in the Twin. So now you dont have to look down at the HUD to know what modules are on what ship in slots three and four.
Not the way I would have coded something like that…its very non-standard as far as Module Slot usages go in the game…shifting the assigned functions two slots over (resulting in the Pilot not being able to remember what module was assigned to which keybind back in the Hangar)…but once you get the hang of it, it works. I personally would have coded such a feature to leave the assigned slots as is and show the Command Modules into two new module slots, (five and six) that dont allow modification while in Hangar and when Piloting the Host half, module slots three and four are X-ed out and disabled, and when in the Twin half, Module Slots One and Two are X-ed out and disabled. But the extra slots, five and six are always there when in flight and always enabled. There would be no shifting of assigned slots set up in the Hangar and since they are predefined functions, no modules can be inserted into slots five and six. All that would be required extra would be two new Keybind Setups on the Keybind config screen for a Pilot to assign what keys trigger the Command Modules.
Even if you didnt want to modify the Keybinds, a new seperate popup screen when in the hangar could have been added to define that ships extra keybinding for the two extra Command Modules. It just seemed counter productive to me to have the User assign modules into slots in the Hangar (some users use the same key patterns for modules) and then shift and move them around in logic when the Tornado separates. There is that need for the swap and command modules, but it shouldnt have resulted in the shifting of what a User had setup back in the hangar. The two new functions are basically hard-coded to swap and to command, so there should have been hard-coding of module slots five and six to hold these new functions. I can already imagine the coding of array items of the Module Slots and whats in them by the User, to then save and restore those values come time to separate or attach each time. Im not a fan of hard coding things myself, but sometimes it serves a better function for something that will be a one up kind of thing. If the intent was to implement these types of new features in the future and have more ships with similar functions like the Tornado, then, No, you dont hard code such things. What you do is spend some additional design time and implement better soft coded features that will function globally throughout the Product, in this case, throughout multiple ships in a game. If the Tornado is to be a off up type of ship, then it would have been better to hard code the additional two module controls, then to change out what a User set and configured back in the hangar.
It works as coded, but as this bug thread shows, it doesnt work with the normal slot methods we Users have grown accustomed to. The bugs that occur may be caused just from the modifications to known working logic and the shifting of slot array items and theres a line or two of code thats not reflecting the correct modules in the assigned slot (Im refering to my prior post of the Twin not using its countermeasure modules correctly). That could just be the Twin looking at the modules array and seeing the Host modules slotted, trigger them, but then later on down the logic path, the trigger fails because the twins array doesn’t have that particular module, its back on the Host ship. I say that because of the initial reported issue involving the Turtle Shield…the Twin detaches and its flight speed is triggering the Host to pop up the Turtle Shield, even when the Host is at a dead stop in space.
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I know some of you have said in the past about my posts being way too long here at times. But Im not here with a cell phone typing with my thumbs. I know how to actually type using all ten of my fingers on a keyboard and I know how to develop code and every one of you reading these use what I developed over the years just about every day in your lives. I know whats involved in giving us new things in the game and I respond in kind by trying to explain to the Developers doing the coding who read these, what is going on in the logic during Runtime, not what is happening in their minds as they read each line of source code. These types of post may seem off subject to some users, but that is never my intent. Mine is to give as much information in semi technical terms that developers understand, not Users. Sure, Im a Star Conflict User, but as I play it, the Developer and Designer in me sees and understand whats going on under the covers in the logic. So if these seem too long for you to read on your phones…skip my posts and just read the one-liners and smile at the GIF posts.
See ya (and even kill ya) on the Battlefields in my MK5s throughout, leveled up new Tornado running all gold seeds !!!
.Vu.
