Y-wing laser to shield transfer amount

[Rob Pilkington]

The Y-wing transfers about twice as much energy to shields per press than the original game does. Each transfer in XWVM is about equivalent to 2 transfers in the original game.

The original game seems to transfer a certain number of cells (12 per transfer). So the more cannons you have, the less proportional energy is removed from each cannon.

(It is weird if all cells are fully charged. It transfers the normal 12 cells, and then 1 for each cannon. Haven't looked into that behavior further so I don't know it's a quirk or bug, or if you get cheated out of anything in that transfer.)

XWVM seems to transfer about 6.5 cells from each cannon. It's a little hard to tell with the indicators slowly lighting up (which is a really nice effect, BTW).

The total amount transferred for the Y-wing seems to be right. The net effect is just that managing your overcharges in combat is trickier since a single transfer won't leave you with as much overcharge as the regular game does.

[David Esparza Guerrero]

Your impressions seem to be right. XWVM transfers much more energy per press than X-Wing.

Perhaps you are right and it always transfer a fix amount between all cannons.

The amount of cells is not an accurate way to measure how much it transfers, since I believe the game uses a more granular value under the hood than "cells".

My guess is that every cannon can hold 1024 energy (1 laser energy = 1 shield hitpoint or "SDB"), and it is represented by 8 cells, that have two positions each: half charged and totally charged. That means that every cannon accumulator has a 16 different divisions. So every division is 1024/16 = 64 energy. In original X-wing, the divisions are either on or off because it used only 3 sprites: empty, half, full. We don't know when a cell decides to change sprite, but in any case, it's clear that one sprite represents 64 different values. In XWVM we have a different brightness value for every energy value, that is why it looks like it slowly lights up or down. It's not animation, it's the real thing charging or discharging.

My point is that your calculation of "12 cells plus one per cannon" could be just 1000 energy, that would be 1000/64 = 15.652 cells, that would show as 12 plus 1 per cannon on some ships due to the imprecision of the cell sprites?

[David Esparza Guerrero]

Fixed: #24: Y-wing laser to shield transfer amount

→ <<cset 274553b894da>>