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In-Mission Techroom Script v0.4 (Updated 19/06/2013)

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FelixJim:
Updated 19/06/2013

Sometimes, you're playing a new mod, flying a new ship, using new weapons, facing new adversaries, and you're not sure how they all fit together. Is that a weak, cannon-fodder fighter you're flying, or a top of the range killing machine? Are those 4-volley dogfighting missiles, or heavy-duty bombs? Is that capship you're trying to take down deadly to fighters or other capships?

Do you memorise the entire techroom before the mission? NO! Do you alt-tab out to the wiki to read up on all this new equipment every ten minutes? NO! Do you blunder about with trial and error? Unfortunately, yes. UNTIL NOW!

With this script, you can simply tap Alt-1 at any time during the mission to read up about the ship you're flying:




Alt-2 gives info on your weapons:





And Alt-3 gives info on your target:








The game is paused whilst you're in one of these screens until you press the same key combination again, upon which the game is unpaused and you can continue playing.


Installation:

Download the attached file (bottom of this post (this has been deleted by a ninja at the moment, so go for the second option)) or extract imt-sct.tbm from data\tables in the modder pack. You can put it in any existing mod, including the mediavps, or an entirely new mod and edit the mod.ini of the mod you wish to use it with to load the mod you've just created.
Optional: Open up the file using a text editor such as Notepad++, and edit the values in the settings section near the beginning to your liking (includes options to change keybindings if they're clashing with something else).

Modder pack: This script can be tightly controlled via FRED and various auxiliary files; the modder pack contains the (same) script, documentation and example mission and auxiliary text files. Download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?c5emoq9knnnu0p9
You do not need FRED to use the script! It will work just as-is if you dump it in \data\tables; this is just if modders want to use it for a specific purpose. The modder features are too numerous for me to test all the possibilities thoroughly - I've done what I can, but keep this in mind, especially if you're using the features in odd ways.

I'd be especially grateful for any suggestions for improving this script further.

Known Issues:

* Text will overspill text boxes if the font size is too big, screen resolution too low and/or there is simply too much text. Should be fixed once Mantis issue 0002891 has been resolved.
* For the ship specifications and target specifications sections, the Max Speed entry will scale with current ETS. Should be fixable once Mantis issue 0002889 has been resolved.
* The secondary bank capacity will return the maximum number of the current secondary type loaded.
* Turrets and subsystems are not always clearly named.
* Background images will not work from inside VPs.
* The SEXPs unlock-primary-weapon, unlock-secondary-weapon, unlock-afterburner and allow-warp are run whenever the "techroom" is left; this may interfere with mission logic.
Coming in version 0.5:

* Fix for Known Issue 1. m!m has a patch in the works for this: http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=2891, it's just waiting to be reviewed and things (good old m!m).
* Fix for Known Issue 2. What I needed to do this appeared in 9986 (good old Niffiwan).
* The way the script handles centring of strings will be much improved thanks to something I spotted in one of WMCoolmon's scripts (good old WMCoolmon).
* Most excitingly: I've finally worked out how to access files inside VPs. The .txt files I've been trying to work with are no good, but .cfg files are great! This means the text files for settings and custom descriptions will be renamed from blah.txt to blah.cfg, and moved from data\scripts to data\config, and the auxiliary script will be completely chucked out as redundant and henceforth unsupported, which will unfortunately require anyone using these to do a little cleaning. This is thanks to a conversation with Axem which prompted me to re-look over the way the mediaVPs team did things (good old Axem, good old mediaVPs team).
* Fix for Known Issue 5 - background images will load from inside VPs properly in version 0.5.
* Hopefully a fix for Known Issue 6 - I haven't looked into how yet, but I am at least aware of the issue.

Phantom Hoover:
this is incredibly cool!

FelixJim:
Thanks! Have you got it working or are you just going by the screenies?

X3N0-Life-Form:
W00t, this thing looks awesome. I'll see if I can get it to work this w-e.
*grabs code*

niffiwan:
very cool  :yes: We should figure out how to give LUA a pause hook (or whatever it's called, I'm noobish with the whole C++/LUA integration thing)

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