As far as I can tell, the new option to manually control vehicle turrets is unwieldy as hell, but it’s about the only practical way to deploy that delicious M2 Browning.
I would rather have some way of deploying a carried MG on the ground, allowing the player to fire it without bearing the potentially-agonizing weight of it. As for how it would work, I’m unsure of the coding that’d be needed, but…
I would assume setting it up would work by applying it, then selecting the ground to place it on. And like with other placed objects, examining it would allow packing it up to retrieve. Compared to the logistics of firing it, that should be the simple part to code.
As for firing it, the only thing I can think of that sounds logical would be making the turret grabbable like furniture, then having the grab function somehow allow firing it. Presumably by making the fire and reload keys treat a grabbed deployed MG as the player’s current weapon.
Assuming this is at all feasible, I’d presumably suggest not letting the player drag a deployed MG around. If they want to move it, they have to pick it back up and place it elsewhere. Presumably light machineguns would be faster to deploy and retrieve. The gun might also have a limited cone of fire in which enemies can be targeted, which would presumably depend on where the player is relative to the deployed gun while they’re holding it. Moving to another space relative to the grabbed MG would be considered traversing the weapon, and presumably this movement would be slowed based on how easy the gun is to traverse.
ALTERNATIVELY:
A second, quick-and-dirty option that might be easier would be to code some function that immobilizes the player in exchange for making the gun weightless. This has the main disadvantage of not letting the player simply leave the gun set up to use later, however.
It would definitely be simpler than adding place functions, making the grab code do crazy shit, and all that other stuff.
