[FlareBaffled]

OK....made some progress, but I am pretty much working blind here.

I found a table in a thread in modding where a guy had made a basic ballistic primary. Great I thought...I can get this working and then play with values and models to learn what goes where. At least I would have a working weapon as a start point.

I copied the text and pasted it into a freshly extracted copy of 'weapons.tbl'

Saved that, and then added some extra bits to my 'Gladius' warship. This basically consisted of changing the P-Banks, Default P Banks and Dogfight P Banks to ONLY have my new weapon. I also added 'ballistic primaries' to the flags section. The rest of the ship is a copy of a Ulysses...so the flags include player ship, in tech database etc.

I fired up the game, and dived into the techroom. My new weapon appeared in the list along with the description and details that I had pasted in to the table. Great. so far so good!

Now...the basic mission I have set up has one on one ship combat. I go into the mission, check the loadout...but my weapon is not there. Even though it is allowed as a dogfight weapon. The weapons I removed from the list ARE there but cannot be selected. This is as it should be...but the fact that my new weapon does not appear here worries me...

So, I start the mission. Instead of the weapon I expected, I have the Subach and prometheus combo of the default Ulysses....

Everything seems to work...but I can't get the new gun to show up on the ship, even though it is the ONLY weapon listed for the ship apart form the missiles.

Makes No Sense  To Me.....

[Wanderer]

Try

i) Pressing 'reset loadouts' in the briefing screen
ii) Try mission with new pilot

[Dysko]

You are talking about my Annihilator, right?

Well, you won't believe it... I had exactly the same problem when I tested that weapon. I tried all the day to find a solution for it, but you know how computer works: when the day after I rebooted my PC, it worked

And BTW, DON'T use it as a dogfight weapon. You'll just waste ammo

[FlareBaffled]

It certainly is your annihilator

Pressing reset loadouts did make a change to things.... it removed the loadouts that I had taken away from the list of allowables in the ship.tbl. This showed me the table file was being correctly read, and that my changes were actually getting noted!

I will try again tonight and see if things work after I have re-started ... never know!

I suspect there must be something in a cache folder that is getting left over...so I will clear out those too, and try a new pilot just for good measure.

I'll post back tonight and let you know how I get on.

[FlareBaffled]

Well....all is (edit )now well again.

When I created a new pilot, there were some changes. I now no longer have the old 'Subach and Prometheus' combo. The display on the HUD has no weapons on the primaries, and just the missiles on the secondaries. No primary fire at all.

The problem seems to be with the ship table bit...since the weapon shows up just fine in the Tech Room.

All the weapon bit is pasted in between the Subach Dogfight version, and the Mekhu data. It is copied exactly from Darth Dysko's code. The ship table stuff is stuffed into the Ulysses. It looks like this:


$Allowed PBanks:       ( "GAU-73 Annihilator" )
$Allowed Dogfight PBanks:       ( "GAU-73 Annihilator" )
$Default PBanks:           ( "GAU-73 Annihilator" )
$PBank Capacity: ( 25 )
$Allowed SBanks:        ( "Rockeye" "Tempest"  "Hornet" "Tornado" "Hornet#Weak" "Harpoon" "Harpoon#Weak" "EMP Adv." "TAG-A" )
$Allowed Dogfight SBanks:    ( "Tempest D"  "Hornet D" "Harpoon D" "Rockeye" )
$Default SBanks:        ( "Harpoon" )
$SBank Capacity:        ( 40 )

a bit further down we have added:

$Flags:                         ( "player_ship" "default_player_ship" "fighter" "in tech database" "ballistic primaries" )

All the rest is stock and unchanged. This should have given me a Ulysses that fired the ballistic primary weapons. Instead..it gives me a ship that fires no primary weapons at all and only has harpoon missiles. Trying to change the loadout doesn't work, since there are no valid weapons for those slots. 

so...after a cup of tea and a bit of a think, I made a brand new mission. Exactly the same as the one before...but new. The weapon now works!
Would love to know why.... but the main thing is...IT WORKS!

[Wanderer]

Did you edit the mission file at all?

[FlareBaffled]

No...since the mission was so simple ( just 1 ulysses and 1 marahead to head ) I scrapped it and re-made it. The weapon didn't work before.... but worked afterwards!