daid / daid/EmptyEpsilon

REQUEST - Cease Fire/Resume Fire toggle for Beam Weapons

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#205 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Lua
Stars
869
Forks
222
Avg merge
18h 33m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

I propose a toggle button be added to the Weapons station (maybe near the existing LOCK button?) with the following values:
DISABLE BEAMS
ENABLE BEAMS

Beams should default to being on initially (DISABLE BEAMS visible) so new players aren't stuck wondering why their beams aren't firing. If they use the toggle to switch them off and can't figure out how to reverse it I'm not sure there's much hope for them.

Why?
Currently the Weapons officer doesn't have full control of the beam weapons. For example, they cannot:

  1. Cease fire on a vessel (exception: if there are other vessels around they can select them instead).
  2. Hold fire on a vessel until the right moment.
  3. Fire beams on ships or stations that aren't "enemies".

I can see some cool moments emerging (especially in PvP) if weapons has the option to target a ship (or even better, a subsystem!) but hold off on firing until the time is right.

Of course wanting to fire on "Friendly" ships is a bit niche, but I don't really think it's a big problem to give them the option if they have the ability to prevent firing just because they selected a ship. If I'm honest some of the funniest "Captain shouting at a crewmen" moments I've seen have been the result of a stray nuke, so allowing the same mistake with beams doesn't seem so bad to me 😉

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the Weapons station implementation and the existing LOCK button behavior, then trace how beam firing and target eligibility are handled. Done means the station shows the requested toggle, beams start enabled, and switching it off prevents beam fire until re-enabled.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
lua
Domain
game-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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