Do weapons shoot at the centre of a ship?
Suppose I'd make a doughnut shaped ship, would the AI tend to shoot through it? Or would the hitbox work for the hole in the middle too?

Katorone wrote:Do weapons shoot at the centre of a ship?
Suppose I'd make a doughnut shaped ship, would the AI tend to shoot through it? Or would the hitbox work for the hole in the middle too?

If the AI were to aim at the hole, the bullet would go through the hole and miss you as you might expect (because the collision shapes are the real deal). But the AI will not aim at the hole. It will aim at a point on the surface of your ship!

I'm so happy you're smarter than me and thought about all these loopholes already.
I just wanted to make sure, since I noticed in one of the videos that the shots seemed to land at the centre of the other ship.

At the same time I'm excited to perhaps try this doughnut ship idea to protect gates in a year or so.

I remembered that there was a custom M3 fighter in X3 that took advantage of exactly this (that the AI shoots at the center of mass, which corresponds to empty space for that particular ship). I think Gazz might remember a bit better, but that ship certainly did have some "unique" tactical advantages.

I never used custom ships.

The terran Tokyo used to be like that.
A basically L-shaped ship where the "center" was filled with great amounts of nothing.
I fixed that by shifting the graphics content of the scene forward so that the "disc" overlapped the center point.

Targeting in X3 isn't that clean-cut, though. Ships don't always aim at center target. But that's just another workaround for a creaking engine and would be irrelevant for LT. So *shrug*.