[Quintaped]

I recently downloaded the SCP, and I have been want to play around with the table files and FRED. I did this with the original FS2, so I knew that there were a few limits to the table files, such as

the ships.tbl couldn't be larger than 379KB and could only hold a certain number of ship entries (forget the exact number)

the hud.tbl could only have 40 entries (a really tough one to stay below)

you could only have ~75-80 objects in a mission (i made a little gaunlet mission last night for FS open and it had around 100ships, crashed the game so I had to delete some of them )

Thanx

[Cobra]

379 KB would be pretty much the entire original FS2 ship set.

AFAIK, the SCP team hasn't upped the table limits yet. (new to SCP myself. )

[Taristin]

Errm. Yes. They have. Almost all of the original limits have been upped.

[Cobra]

bah. i said i was new to scp. when i couldn't use scp i stayed away from the scp forum unless something tempting was produced.

[Taristin]

If you don't know something, don't post. Simple as that.

[Quintaped]

I know that i have created a working ships table that was around 450kb, so I was jsut wondering if any one knew the amounts for certain.  In the past I just deleted all the tech descriptions, leaving only the names of the ships, this got the ships.tbl down to about 290KB for the original fs2 table.

[WMCoolmon]

It can be up to 1000 kb large, a little less than a MB. Max shield icons is at 80. MAX_SHIP_TYPES is at 130. Hud.tbl is no longer even opened; you just have to put the names in ships.tbl and everything is handled automatically.

Also, only the "$Name:" and "$POF file:" entries are required in the most recent builds. In my most recent build, I made the engine washes dynamically allocated. Also in that build, all sounds can be specified with the sound name rather than its index in sounds.tbl.

[Quintaped]

wow thats more more allowed.
Thanks for the info, coolmon!

[Cobra]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
It can be up to 1000 kb large, a little less than a MB. Max shield icons is at 80. MAX_SHIP_TYPES is at 130. Hud.tbl is no longer even opened; you just have to put the names in ships.tbl and everything is handled automatically.

wha? i had a 390 KB ships.tbl and it wouldn't work.

[WMCoolmon]

How many ships did you have in the table?

[Cobra]

all the original fs2 ships and 4 modified sentry guns.

[StratComm]

That almost has to be well under limits, unless all you have are a million different cargo containers.  Sounds more like a table bug than a size issue.  Have you tried a debug build to fix your tables up?

[Cobra]

no. i don't use debug builds that much. and actually, whn i started a build with one of the builds, i got a parsing error...

[Quintaped]

What is a table build?
I have a system to altering the ships table, in that i have extracted the table info for each individual ship and saved it as its own .txt file. Then I can add and delete the ships s I see fit. I would assume this is what a table build does automatically...

[StratComm]

Originally posted by Cobra
no. i don't use debug builds that much. and actually, whn i started a build with one of the builds, i got a parsing error...

[sarcasm]*shock*  What on earth could a parsing error be?[/sarcasm]

The parse error occurs precisely because you have something wrong with your tables.  Look for the line number and table responsible, and there's your bug and the source of your crash.  Please don't post an answer when you don't understand the question.

Originally posted by Quintaped
What is a table build?
I have a system to altering the ships table, in that i have extracted the table info for each individual ship and saved it as its own .txt file. Then I can add and delete the ships s I see fit. I would assume this is what a table build does automatically...

Well, I don't honestly know what a table build is.  "Stable" builds are those that don't crash constantly, but that's something else.  Some builds incorporate new tables into the mix, but they aren't necessary and you should not worry about them unless you know what they are for.  Also, you might want to look into the concept of modular tables; basically, if you take your individual ship txt file, add the line "#Ship Classes" in front of the first line and "#End" at the end, and change the txt extension to tbm, you'll get exactly what you have described.  I believe you have been using my modpack ships, they have examples of modular table files included in them.

[WMCoolmon]

Quintaped: http://dynamic6.gamespy.com/~freespace/fsdoc/index.php?pagename=Modular%20tables

[StratComm]

Speaking of which, could we have FRED, the lab, and the techroom arrange its ships list by race and class rather than position in the table file?  You usually don't want your signature fighter to appear at the bottom of the list.  The recent change to the lab sort of takes a first step here (Terran, Vasudan, Shivan) but I'd love to see things further arranged by class (fighter, bomber, cruiser, corvette, capital, supercap, installation, transport, freighter, support ship, cargo container, etc?)  Right now, ships from modular tables go to the bottom, but adding a sort to the list, whereever it appears, would make modular additions much better integrated.

[WMCoolmon]

I can do that in the lab, but in the techroom it's an issue of politics. You can always rearrange stuff in the table, after all, but not if FS2 sorts it for you.

[StratComm]

But you can't rearrange stuff in tables if you're using modular tables.  They always go at the end.  The thing is, the lab doesn't really matter that much because it's a dev tool.  The techroom, and to a lesser extent, FRED, are the public face of ships.tbl, and the fact that their order gets butchered by modular tables really looks a little awkward.  It's also the only thing standing in the way of completely modular tables, which IMHO should be the way to go.

EDIT: Just realized that this should probably be placed into a seperate thread so that it can be properly discussed.  Someone with mod powers, SPLIT ME!

[WMCoolmon]

Goddammit.

I wrote up all the code needed to sort the ships but, unfortunately, I forget that under Gnome, objects in the clipboard disappear after a program is closed. I wrote it in Anjuta for syntax coloring/prober autoindenting/looking up anything from the codebase, didn't want to bother with the full implementation since I'm leaving soon, cut, closed Anjuta, tried to paste.

What it did was this:
- Create species order based on the order a ship with that species first appeared in the table.
- Create, within each species, a ship class type order based on the order that objects first appeared in the table.

In other words, things would be based on ships.tbl order - or if going purely by modular tables, alphabetical order, but the modder could still control the ordering without too much trouble. Modular tables would only appear at the very end if they added a new species that didn't exist in ships.tbl before.

Anyway, it won't be too much trouble to rewrite, it was a bit hackish anyhow.