Well, I can say from my experiences with modded burst beams that even when the weapon in question has the STRIKE AI hint it will still behave this way.
Strike (non-missile anyway) weapons don't ever target fighters to my knowledge even when the weapon group is directly controlled. Nvm I've now see that is not always the case.
Caveat: I have literally no clue about the AI under the hood so take this with a grain (or, you know, many grains) of salt, but:
I have to admit that I'm not convinced that it's an issue with retargeting or ship rotation except that I don't think that this occurs in a 1v1 situation. In other words, it seems like it is something related to retargeting or some other situational awareness trigger that is causing it to happen, but I don't think the behavior itself is necessarily an attempt to retarget - which makes it very tricky to diagnose I'd imagine. I think retargeting would look different and that does sometimes happen. Or the target moves out of range and the beam searches for a new one.The behavior I'm talking about, however, seems too "consistent" in that when it
does happen it seems to happen in the same general manner. The beam starts in the center, and then less than a second after the burst starts it attempts to move to a specific offset of the target - typically ~200-300? range directly to the left or right. Depending upon the burst remaining it doesn't always make it that far, and I've noticed that this target location is maintained regardless of the target ship's movements after the burst was initialized so it definitely seems like a retarget on the surface. I guess what I am getting at is that it seems like a deliberate "sweep" instead of attempting to target something else mid-burst. This could most certainly be confirmation bias though. I also think that this behavior is different than the situation where a target moves out of range mid burst. But once again that's way more "feeling" than fact.
Here is an example video if it helps.
Every purple beam is a strike beam so it shouldn't be targeting fighters. Specifically look at ~4:21 to see an example of the sweep behavior I'm referring to. The AI targets the dominator, initiates the burst, detargets the dominator directly after that, and sweeps the beam to the left. It
does hit a fighter in this case, but it isn't clear if that was the AI's target or not since no target seems to be highlighted in that moment (or I missed it). If it is, in fact, targeting the fighter even though it is out of range, and therefore the beam is following that target by default, that is strange because no weapons that should hit fighters are even remotely in range of the paragon. The beams are its longest range weapons. I'm not really sure if targeting something out of range like that would even cause the beam to follow the new target. I don't think the autofire AI that the player uses will cause that to happen though I haven't verified that its just off the top of my head.
Iirc the behavior happens a fair amount in this video, anyway, so maybe that will give some anecdotal evidence that might help to troubleshoot the root cause. You can see from the targeting UI that the beam was well within range so that wasn't the cause of the sweep at least. Just for clarity's sake, while this is obviously a mod and so less reliable for diagnosing things like this, I can confirm that there aren't any custom scripts at play here or anything that would further muddy down the analysis. On the code side of things the weapons are extremely close to the vanilla phase beam.
If anyone wants to take a stab at analyzing the behavior or correcting my analysis please do so.
*EDIT*
I re-watched the whole video.
See 0:36 for what I think is an "out of range mid burst" sweep.
See ~1:50 for a rotational sweep. Shortly after that you can see where the onslaught begins to flank and the beams on the dominator seem to lurch off center for a brief moment but stay on target for the full duration.
Around 3 minutes there is a another "detargeting sweep" so I think it has to do with the AI detargeting the ship being bursted and before it selects a new target.
4:48 - detargeting sweep. Had the dominator targeted - burst - immediately detargeted and the beam moved towards the onslaught - which isn't explicitly targeted until a few seconds later.
9:20 - Errrrrrrrrr, nvm it just used the beam vs fighters it directly targeted.
Anyway, it definitely seems to be related to when the AI is target juggling. Directly targeting fighters seems to be related.
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Topic: Ships should try to stay on target if firing timed-burst weapons (Read 1597 times)