Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: Avatar on April 20, 2007, 10:04:19 pm
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I have a horrible yearning. I yearn to fly an Arrow with two meson blasters and two mass drivers, because... well, I'm just that way. So, knowing full well that this was possible, I set off on a Interweb search to get me started on FS2 modding. Trusty Google did not fail me, and told me how to extract .vp files. A few pokes later, and I found myself face to face with what would soon prove to be my new arch-nemesis, the ships.tbl file.
This file seems absurdly simple to edit. I mean, how hard can it be? I mean, bust out SciTE, and change the line
$Default PBanks: ("Laser" "Ion")
to
$Default PBanks: ("Mass Driver" "Meson")
However, I have achieved a whole constellation of different results. I used the arrow gauntlet mission as a testing ground and got:
1) 2 lasers, no ions
2) 2 ions, no lasers
3) 4 lasers, depending on various input values
4) no guns at all, just the missiles
5) the standard 2 laser 2 ion loadout
I highly suspect I'm missing something abundantly simple. I've done all my changes to each of the three Arrow variants, but... no joy. I suspected I may have just overlooked some instruction on the various modding tutorials that involved a special directory structure, so I set up various permutations on the filename.
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Make sure your editing the right Arrow, the pilots arrow is a different model than the AI's version.
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maybe its because missions where the freder pre-chose the ships and set it to a scramble mission; the laser and ion did'nt exist for you? HRM?
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I edited all three arrow variants in ships.tbl in order to avoid just that problem, Scooby Doo.
I used exactly the same mission each time, takashi, the Arrow Gauntlet in the mission simulator. Should I be looking in the mission tables to set what weapons my custom Arrow is using?
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OH WAIT....
$Default PBanks: ("Laser" "Ion")
to
$Default PBanks: ("Mass Driver" "Meson")
you'll want that to be
$Allowed PBanks: ( "Mass Driver" )( "Meson" )
$Allowed Dogfight PBanks: ( "Mass Driver" )( "Meson" )
$Default PBanks: ( "Mass Driver" )( "Meson" )
You can add more types of weapons to the Allowed PBanks. (hehehe use my cloudbursts and watch the fur fly then :lol:)
Btw why does the arrow have two gun mounts yet it only uses one?
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No joy... your code causes CTD I'm afraid
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Opps
$Default PBanks: ( "Mass Driver" )( "Meson" )
should be
$Default PBanks: ( "Mass Driver" "Meson" )
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First make tables that allow for the weapon.. That is
$Allowed PBanks: ( "Laser" "Mass Driver" "Particle" "Ion" "Meson" )
Then open the mission file in FRED. Add the weapons to the 'allowed weapons' list (loadouts). Then start the mission, go to briefing screen. Press 'reset loadouts' (lower right side of the ship/weapon selection screen). Select the weapons. Play.
Or if you want to stick with the gauntlet missons.. Hmm.. well... You could change the $Default PBanks: ("Laser" "Ion") to $Default PBanks: ("Mass Driver" "Meson") and then try to press the 'reset loadouts'. Or if you cant 'reach' that, exit the game, start it again and create a new pilot and try the gauntlet again.
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Or if you want to stick with the gauntlet missons.. Hmm.. well... You could change the $Default PBanks: ("Laser" "Ion") to $Default PBanks: ("Mass Driver" "Meson") and then try to press the 'reset loadouts'. Or if you cant 'reach' that, exit the game, start it again and create a new pilot and try the gauntlet again.
Tried this and got the 4 laser arrow variant. Which is still lots of fun, but just isn't the same. I changed the $Allowed PBanks line in all three arrows, as well as opened up Demo-Sim-03.fs2 and changed these lines:
+Weaponry Pool: (
"Laser" 1
"Ion" 5
"Dart Dumbfire" 30
"Pilum FF" 30
"Javelin HS" 34
"Spiculum IR" 52
)
To this:
+Weaponry Pool: (
"Mass Driver" 1
"Meson" 5
"Dart Dumbfire" 30
"Pilum FF" 30
"Javelin HS" 34
"Spiculum IR" 52
)
Still no joy, I'm afraid. The ship and weapons selection screens are unfortunately not available. Tried the new pilot, still no joy.
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Just tested..
I added the weapons (mass driver and meson) to the loadout list in the mission file then edited the weapon entries in F-96D Arrow:
$Allowed PBanks: ( "Laser" "Meson" "Mass Driver" "Particle" "Ion" )
$Default PBanks: ( "Meson" "Mass Driver" )
Created a new pilot when i started the game. And done, it works.
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Created a new pilot when i started the game.
Most probably that's the problem why it isn't working for Avatar. Try that, I also often had the problem that some changes don't work before I created a new pilot.
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All right. Four pilots later, I'm still getting quad laser arrow.
Here's my code from the mission file. +Weaponry Pool: (
"Meson" 1
"Mass Driver" 5
"Laser" 1
"Ion" 5
"Dart Dumbfire" 30
"Pilum FF" 30
"Javelin HS" 34
"Spiculum IR" 52
)I'm not using FRED cause I've been having some trouble getting the ruddy thing and the mission files are all text files open. Is there some rock bottom super ultra secret mega necessity to be using FRED, or will SciTE do?
Here's my weapons from the F-96D arrow.
$Allowed PBanks: ( "Laser" "Meson" "Mass Driver" "Particle" "Ion" )
$Allowed Dogfight PBanks: ( "Laser" "Meson" "Mass Driver" "Particle" "Ion" )
$Default PBanks: ( "Meson" "Mass Driver" )
I have made whole scores of pilots here, to absolutely no avail. I'm still getting quad laser arrow here, and feel like I'm missing something TERRIBLY basic. Shall I upload my files directly?
*EDIT*:
So, I got FRED. Opened up the Arrow gauntlet, added the meson blaster and mass drivers to the weapons list. Saved, quit, opened up WCSaga, made a new pilot, got the quad laser arrow.
So, I opened up the Arrow gauntlet in FRED again, added every gun to the weapons list. Then, I looked around for the "Scramble" option, turned it off, saved, and quit. I opened up WCSaga, made a new pilot, tried to access weapon selection and failed, started the mission anyway and got the quad laser arrow.
So, I opened up the Arrow gauntlet in FRED again, and went to the ships tab. It stated there I had mesons and mass drivers on my fighter. I saved and quit, opened up WCSaga, made a new pilot, and got the quad laser arrow.
So, I opened up the Arrow gauntlet in FRED again, and went to the ships tab. This time, I decided to see what happened when I said my arrow had photon guns in the first weapons bank and particle guns in the second weapons bank. I saved and quit, checked the code and saw that the mission itself had a line describing what was in my first and seconds weapons banks. I opened up WCSaga, made a new pilot, and got the quad laser arrow.
Wanderer, can you send me your files? I have a hunch they won't work over here.
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Where are you putting the files your editing?
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Root directory.
I was fiddling with the Ticonderoga mission, and noticed the other AI arrows had at least meson blasters. I was surprised, because all my other tweaks to the level had absolutely no effect.
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Shouldn't it go under \data\tables ?
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Root directory.
I was fiddling with the Ticonderoga mission, and noticed the other AI arrows had at least meson blasters. I was surprised, because all my other tweaks to the level had absolutely no effect.
a common mistake.
You have to maintain directory structure.
so tables go into the tables folder (you will need to create it manually), effects into effects and so on.
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Yeaaah, that did it. Thanks a lot guys!
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Does anybody know why the meson blaster and the particle gun are the universes two best guns, and the photon cannon is a million times suckier than anything?
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hmm... smaller range perhaps? :)
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Small problem: Something I've noticed recently is that often fighter monted energy weapons bypass the shields of other fighters entirely. Sometimes it's me in my jury-rigged Excalibur dropping a Zartoth to 43% right through it's pristine forward shields, or a Gothris vaporizing me with a single salvo from its particle guns. I did some poking around the forums, and heard it mentioned that capital ship turrets have a special flag that says they never pierce shields.
So I opened up my weapons.tbl file and added the "no pierce shields" flag to all of the fighter guns, made a new pilot, but had no effect. Now, I know the weapons.tbl file is in the appropriate place and all because I've jury rigged fighter scale reaper and tachyon cannons for a Excalibur. Is there some other setting or variable I need to be tweaking in order to make it so the only way Kilrathi fighters can hurt my hull is by eroding my shields?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I've also been doing quite a bit of tinkering with the weapons. It takes no more than a cursory glance at the various guns to realize that the best fighter in the entire universe would mount either meson blasters, mass drivers, or in the mod lasers and neutron guns, as they take effectively no energy at all to fire continuously. The only way these guns can be rebalanced sanely is to make sure there's a reason to be using all of them. Roughly grouped, I decided that Lasers, Ion guns, and Meson blasters were all "light" weapons, Mass Drivers, Neutron guns, Photon cannons, and Reaper cannons were all "medium" weapons, and Particle guns, Tachyon cannons, and Plasma cannons were all "heavy" weapons.
The WC3 damage/power ratios are completely insane; there's no reason anyone in their right mind would ever choose a photon gun, and given their incredible D-P ratio of 3.75 Mass Drivers are simply the dogfighter's best guns. I reasoned that there must be some way to keep the feel of WC3 fighter combat and weapon diversity without making some guns obsolete. The method I came up with after some experimentation was this: lighter guns would fire faster, but their shots would do less damage per hit and would be less efficient overall. Heavier weapons would do more damage a shot, and they'd be more power efficient, but they'd fire less shots so accuracy would matter more. Additionally, many of the heavier guns have lower velocity projectiles than the medium and lighter guns, which makes them more suited for destroying bombers and capital ship turrets than for fighter swatting.
Thusly, if you are flying a heavy fighter hull like the Thunderbolt, you'd have two of each kind of "slots", if you will. Instead of, say, 2 plasma, 2 photon, and 2 meson you could opt for 2 particle, 2 reaper, and 2 lasers for a balanced loadout weighted towards antifighter work. Additionally, presumably you could underfill the slots and opt for 2 particle and 4 mesons, or 6 lasers.
I ended up making a large table, tracking my "target" damage/power ratio for each gun, the final "adjusted" damage/power ratio to take into account miscellaneous tweaks, rate of fire, range, no. of shots before the battery is drained, damage/second, and damage/full battery. Here are some sample "tweaked" guns:
The laser now fires for 15 damage, consuming 1.2 units of power (Freespace style, 12 WC style), every .2 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 70 damage a second for 60 power a second, and puts 5 shots out a second. Additionally, the laser has a higher velocity projectile than most, as in the WCSaga demo and in WC3 proper.
The photon cannon now fires for 48 damage, consuming 3.365 units of power (Freespace style, 33.65 WC style), every .4 seconds, for a range of 1049. It deals 120 damage a second for 84 power a second, and puts almost three shots out a second.
Finally, the plasma cannon now fires for 80 damage, consuming 4.8 (WC: 48) units of power per shot. It fires every .6 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 133 damage a second for 80 power a second, and puts out almost two low velocity shots a second.
I can make the table available to those who are interested, and also am willing to take any suggestions for an alternate weapon balancing system or improvements to this.
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Small problem: Something I've noticed recently is that often fighter monted energy weapons bypass the shields of other fighters entirely. Sometimes it's me in my jury-rigged Excalibur dropping a Zartoth to 43% right through it's pristine forward shields, or a Gothris vaporizing me with a single salvo from its particle guns. I did some poking around the forums, and heard it mentioned that capital ship turrets have a special flag that says they never pierce shields.
So I opened up my weapons.tbl file and added the "no pierce shields" flag to all of the fighter guns, made a new pilot, but had no effect. Now, I know the weapons.tbl file is in the appropriate place and all because I've jury rigged fighter scale reaper and tachyon cannons for a Excalibur. Is there some other setting or variable I need to be tweaking in order to make it so the only way Kilrathi fighters can hurt my hull is by eroding my shields?
Well, that's exactly what we did after the release of the prologue. In my estimation "no pierce shields" flags minimizes shield piercing by energy weapons.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I've also been doing quite a bit of tinkering with the weapons. It takes no more than a cursory glance at the various guns to realize that the best fighter in the entire universe would mount either meson blasters, mass drivers, or in the mod lasers and neutron guns, as they take effectively no energy at all to fire continuously. The only way these guns can be rebalanced sanely is to make sure there's a reason to be using all of them. Roughly grouped, I decided that Lasers, Ion guns, and Meson blasters were all "light" weapons, Mass Drivers, Neutron guns, Photon cannons, and Reaper cannons were all "medium" weapons, and Particle guns, Tachyon cannons, and Plasma cannons were all "heavy" weapons.
This will change in the future since we have added weapon_energy_regeneration_rate to the code. This small addition should allow us to balance weaponry in a more sane way. :) Still waiting for a stable EXE though.
The WC3 damage/power ratios are completely insane; there's no reason anyone in their right mind would ever choose a photon gun, and given their incredible D-P ratio of 3.75 Mass Drivers are simply the dogfighter's best guns. I reasoned that there must be some way to keep the feel of WC3 fighter combat and weapon diversity without making some guns obsolete. The method I came up with after some experimentation was this: lighter guns would fire faster, but their shots would do less damage per hit and would be less efficient overall. Heavier weapons would do more damage a shot, and they'd be more power efficient, but they'd fire less shots so accuracy would matter more. Additionally, many of the heavier guns have lower velocity projectiles than the medium and lighter guns, which makes them more suited for destroying bombers and capital ship turrets than for fighter swatting.
Thusly, if you are flying a heavy fighter hull like the Thunderbolt, you'd have two of each kind of "slots", if you will. Instead of, say, 2 plasma, 2 photon, and 2 meson you could opt for 2 particle, 2 reaper, and 2 lasers for a balanced loadout weighted towards antifighter work. Additionally, presumably you could underfill the slots and opt for 2 particle and 4 mesons, or 6 lasers.
An interesting idea - but not usable for the mod per se. You can't switch guns in the Wing Commander universe.
I ended up making a large table, tracking my "target" damage/power ratio for each gun, the final "adjusted" damage/power ratio to take into account miscellaneous tweaks, rate of fire, range, no. of shots before the battery is drained, damage/second, and damage/full battery. Here are some sample "tweaked" guns:
The laser now fires for 15 damage, consuming 1.2 units of power (Freespace style, 12 WC style), every .2 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 70 damage a second for 60 power a second, and puts 5 shots out a second. Additionally, the laser has a higher velocity projectile than most, as in the WCSaga demo and in WC3 proper.
The photon cannon now fires for 48 damage, consuming 3.365 units of power (Freespace style, 33.65 WC style), every .4 seconds, for a range of 1049. It deals 120 damage a second for 84 power a second, and puts almost three shots out a second.
Finally, the plasma cannon now fires for 80 damage, consuming 4.8 (WC: 48) units of power per shot. It fires every .6 seconds, for a range of 999. It deals 133 damage a second for 80 power a second, and puts out almost two low velocity shots a second.
I can make the table available to those who are interested, and also am willing to take any suggestions for an alternate weapon balancing system or improvements to this.
I would love to see what you can come up with :)
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Aw, darn. I keep praying that when I get to the five Zartoths stage of the Gauntlet my full shields will save me given my massive hull damage, but in the end those ion cannons just eventually slip through... Ah well.
Re: weapon_energy_regeneration_rate
Sounds a lot like my first stab at rebalancing it all actually. The first table I worked out had this awkward system where less efficient weapons augmented the total size (and thus the regeneration rate) of your battery more than the more efficient weapon systems. The whole endeavour was partially spurred by recollection of the Freespace ship gun loadout customization, which I thought was a neat mechanic. I also remembered tweaking my gun loadout in Privateer, and thought "Hey, if it worked in Privateer, maybe in multiplayer WC:Saga something like that might show up someday". That line of thought really was the genesis of the current project. Changing the ship's max energy in game is utterly impossible... having the different ship hulls have different base energy amounts based on their role, though, is much more feasible. As I was looking into my earlier problem of the quad-laser-arrow, I noted that you could set what weapons were available per given group on the ship independently, which in and of itself lead to the development of the light, medium, and heavy weapon slot idea. But I digress.
Here's a trimmed up version of the table as it stands. Dam/Batt and No. Shots are assuming 100 energy unit battery per gun. The rough idea is that final fighter battery power is base power + no. of weapons * 100, which if you examine the base power amounts, is pretty freaking huge. The Dam/Sec term has listed in parentheses the power used over a second to do that damage. The parentheses modifiers in the range list how much the deviation from laser range affects the weapon's efficiency.
NOTE: All battery values are given in WC terms... so divide all energy drain numbers by 10 to get the FS equivelants!
WEAPONS LIST 2.0
LIGHT Target Dam/Pwr Adjusted Dam/Pwr Fire Rate Range No. Shots Dam/Sec Dam/Batt Notes
Laser 18/14 = 1.25 15/12 = 1.25 0.2 1=999 7.1 75(60) 128 High V
Ion 22/17 = 1.3 23/16.7 = 1.35 0.3 .8=799(+5%) 5.8 77(55) 130
Meson 27/20 = 1.35 27/19.5 = 1.38 0.32 .85=849(+3%) 5 84(60) 135
MEDIUM:
Mass 34/25 = 1.325 32/22.55 = 1.42 0.3 0.6=599(+10%) 4.44 106(75) 142 High V
Neutr. 40/29 = 1.375 same 0.35 1=999 3.44 114(82) 138
Photon 46/32 = 1.425 48/33.65 = 1.426 0.4 1.05=1049(-1%) 2.97 120(84) 143
Reaper 35/24.4 = 1.43 51/35 = 1.42 0.44 0.9=899(+2%) 2.85 116(79) 146 High V
HEAVY:
Particle50/33 = 1.5 52/34.66 = 1.5 0.42 1.1=1099(-2.5%) 2.885 123(82) 150 High V
Tachyon 65/41 = 1.55 same 0.5 1.2=1199(-5%) 2.44 130(82) 158
Plasma 82/50 = 1.66 80/48 = 1.66 0.6 1=999 2.08 133(80) 167 Low V
Innate Battery Boosts:
Darket: 300
Arrow/Dralthi/Strakha: 650
Hellcat/Zartoth: 900
Thunderbolt/Excalibur/Paktahn: 1200
Longbow/Vaktoth/Gothri: 1050
Tweaked for readability
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Yes, this does make sense. Could you send me your table file?
And now that I think of it: another feature, that has been implemented lately was the removal of the "linked guns" penalty. Right now there is a refire rate penalty, which becomes active once you select more than one energy weapon.
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I may tweak at it more later; some of the range values are a bit paradoxical given the source material is roughly WC3. For example, if anything the TC should be much shorter range than the laser, not significantly longer range. Since overall the energy drain / shot got larger, unless you tweak the max energy for each ship, just plugging in the weapons.tbl file will probably not garner the most enjoyable of play experiences.
Heh, excellent news on the linked guns refire delay fix! I'm certainly looking forward to it.
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Thanks, I'll check it out today. By the way, I sent you a pm in case you haven't noticed :)
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Dont play with the ships, just make a mission in Fred2 and set the weapons that way :)
(Or use the cheats to switch guns in game) :yes: