[karajorma]

Most of the FREDders will probably have noticed the Amount used in wings: option on the Loadout Editor.



 The documentation only has this to say about it.

Amount Used In Wings and Player Entry Delay don't do anything.

Well that's not quite true cause Player Entry Delay does actually do something (just not anything particularly useful) but the Amount Used In Wings description does seem to be accurate. It really doesn't do anything!

In fact here's the code it uses when parsing the mission.

Code: [Select]

num_starting_wings = 0;
if (optional_string("+Starting Wings:"))
num_starting_wings = stuff_string_list(starting_wings, MAX_STARTING_WINGS);
Note that num_starting_wings and the starting_wings array are never used again!


Anyway I'm thinking of commenting out the feature completely but before I did that I just wanted to know if anyone has any idea one what they think the feature was meant to do had actually implemented it.

[Goober5000]

I think it's supposed to tell you how many ships and weapons are already specified in the starting wings.  It's a read-only property because you specify it through the ship editor.

This way you can easily calculate how many total ships or weapons you need.  For example, if you have Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, "Amount used in wings" might display 4 when you click on the Hercules and 8 when you click on the Apollo.  That way you'd know to specify 8 extra Hercs and 4 extra Apollos if you wanted to give the player the option of specifying the same ship for every pilot in the squadron while leaving none to spare.

[Mars]

Sounds useful, why doesn't it work?

[karajorma]

No code. The control was put in but no one ever connected it to anything.

I think it's supposed to tell you how many ships and weapons are already specified in the starting wings.  It's a read-only property because you specify it through the ship editor.

This way you can easily calculate how many total ships or weapons you need.  For example, if you have Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, "Amount used in wings" might display 4 when you click on the Hercules and 8 when you click on the Apollo.  That way you'd know to specify 8 extra Hercs and 4 extra Apollos if you wanted to give the player the option of specifying the same ship for every pilot in the squadron while leaving none to spare.

Hmmmm. That is a nice idea. But why would anyone write that into the mission file when you can calculate it on the fly? For that matter why stuff a string list when an int list is not only more practical but already has code written to support it?


I'll have a think about making the control work in the way you describe though Goober. It would be a nice feature to have.

[Goober5000]

Hmmmm. That is a nice idea. But why would anyone write that into the mission file when you can calculate it on the fly? For that matter why stuff a string list when an int list is not only more practical but already has code written to support it?

Hm.  Guess I should have finished reading your original post.  If you're trying to say that "amount used in wings" and "+starting wings" refer to the same feature, I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion.

I would assume that the +Starting wings section was an aborted attempt to implement the custom wing names feature.  The string list would seem to support that... it's a list of size MAX_STARTING_WINGS, comprised of strings of length NAME_LENGTH.

[karajorma]

Well I made the assumption that wouldn't have 3 incomplete features in team loadout but I would guess that you're right about that one

BTW in case you're wondering the third one is +default_ship which doesn't appear to have ever been used for anything. Interestingly that one is complete in mission parse but there's no way to set it in FRED