The short question:
1) Is the missile multi-lock part of trunk now or is it still WOD-specific code?
The longer question, I admit it sounds like a request (considering I don't play FSO anymore
), but just felt like putting this thought out there:
2) Last I remember ship templates were broken because of how data was being copied around. (correct me if I'm wrong please!)
Instead of doing it as part of ships.tbl and adding to the count limit, could this be done in a "variant" way instead?
Something like Mechwarrior but the player can't actually mod their ship - the player just picks an available "mod" version of their ship from a "parts list" like weapon selection; restrict available variants in a similar way to missile ammo? If no variant is selected, revert to default statistics of the ship as per ships.tbl / tbm's. If a variant is selected, just direct the game to read the entire table chunk from, say, ship_variants.tbl?
(No selective data replacement to limit complexity; just get the modder to supply complete table entries for all variants. Much more work & typo risk on the modder's end though.)Say if GTVA's BG14, all the latest block mods. Or if small-scale hodgepodge group, maybe 1 dude has bUly.pof because refurbished Ulysses hull with no advanced tech, but his 2 buddies have Myrms of different generations with different flight characteristics/loadout but look identical (i.e. same POF).
I'm no adequate coder so I dunno the complexity, but off the top of my head, I know this would need custom UI and enough code changes to FSO and FRED that there's no point doing it unless any campaign of considerable reputation decides to use it en masse. And I don't know how this can be extended to unplayable ships e.g. capitals.
Way back when I was messing around in FRED there was this lingering idea in my head to portray the generational gaps between ships, block upgrades, merc/pirate/engineer/IT hacker mods etc - you could do this in a small scale with ships.tbl, but even with 'separate entry' or 'template entry' in ships.tbl it still added to the limit. Somehow I could never get over that "OMG A LIMIT" feeling nagging at me, dunno why.
I suppose in the longer run this could go further Tachyon-style with add-on slots for ships on top of that, but I'm just dreaming at this point.
after typing this whole block of text I stumble across a similar thread by AdmiralRalwood
, whoops. Glanced through it VERY quickly, seems to cover weapons too and is more complex (awesome, I didn't think that far, 'circular variants' didn't cross my mind at all; the whole 'implementation-via-stats-appending' drawbacks did though). But I'll leave this here since I had the variants thought for a while too i.e. years.Right now one item I can think of that could only be done via 'appending' route is missile lock, but then again lock is presently determined by weapon type and not by shipcomputer e.g. Ace Combat...
FRED loadout editor layout / campaign loadout layout? (Reckon would need SEXPs to manipulate this between missions too, e.g. add-ship-variant -> pull from playable variants only)
Ship: GTF Artemis
Variant count in inventory: (somehow pull the below list from ship-variants.tbl, match text, populate accordingly in FRED and populate loadout menu)
GTF Artemis D.H. "1"
GTF Hydra "1"
Ship: GTF Chaos
Variant count in inventory:
SOF Chaos "2"
Ship: GTF Thor
Variant count in inventory:
GTB Athena "1"
GTB Athena Mk2 "1"
;ship_variants.tbl
$Variant: GTD Carthage
$Variant of: GTD Orion
+not_player_usable ;do not appear in variant list for loadouts, but display in ship editor variant list
;(Ship stats go below as per the norm)
;Target box
SSJ bad guy
SJ Sathanas
Variant: SJ Amritaya
I have one more query about fighterbeams but I suppose I should just stop moping and load the game again to see what has changed...