I'm not a big fan of the missiles anyway, but they can be kinda fun sometimes.

That icon is just as handy for escaping from the enemy as it is for chasing them. I try and avoid circling if possible and instead go for kills from further out. It also stops friendlies bumping in to me.

As for the BF2 missile lock tone, I'm not sure it can be done with the 2142 engine. I think I also remember something about not being able to use BF2 assets in 2142 mods or something. One of the devs could probably clear that up though.

Bite my shiny metal Tie Fighter!

Three things.
1) can't do mouselook due to the way our blaster weapons work on the fighters (blasters are not like vanilla aircraft weapons functionally).  With the a-wing if you mouselooked you'd end up shooting sideways.

2) Somehow the HUDs got broken. there should be a constant locking box around all fighters to identify enemy fighters at extreme long range.  Expect a fix for that as soon as we're able to.

3) We've had a lot of problems implementing a locking-on system.  We can get the heatseeking autolock box to appear but the BF2 beep-beep-beep-LOCK ability has thus far eluded us.

Fear the Woodzilla

you can still shoot while in mouselook in vanilla.  But the weapon projectile direction is not reliant on the direction of the camera for vanilla vehicles.  For our blasters it is.  That's why the blaster goes where you're looking.

The basic reason for this setup is so that the blaster bolts from the fighters converges then goes straight forward from the craft, helping with the aim.  Previously when we had the xwings (for example) firing straight from the wings then:

a) straight on you would actually miss with most of the shots or even have it where the enemy fighter would be dead centre in your targetter and the shots would go around it

b) when we angled in the blasters in slightly to converge you'd have them converge only at a fixed point ahead.  If the enemy was not at that fixed point (if he was too close or too far) then you'd have the problem listed in a.

As such, we eventually were forced to set the actual projectiles to fire straight from the nose so they line up perfectly with the crosshairs at any distance.  The shots you see coming from the various wings/blasters on the spacecraft are tracer rounds which converge with the real rounds around 1000-2000 metres away.  Without this accuracy becomes so low as to be almost impossible for some of our fighters to hit the enemy for the reasons listed above.

There are other reasons as well.  Like I said, blasters are not like vanilla weapons.  You can't see most vanilla weapon fire so they don't have to wire it straight up to the nose of the craft.  Plus all the vanilla maps (bf2 or 2142) are only 1-2km long maximum with an engagement range of a few hundred metres.  On our spacemaps each side is 8km long and you begin engaging at the enemy at 3km away.  The scale is rediculously big compared to what the engine was originally designed for.

Fear the Woodzilla