[asyikarea51]

While writing up the tables for something I'm working on, I looked up ship templates, since I have a ship that can make use of this feature. At the same time I implemented the Artemis template as sort of a "bugfix", looked handy to me since it'll also -1 to ship limit, but I go in-game and see no entries at all in both the Lab and in the F3 viewer (apart from some SC Cain in the Terran species slot, don't know where it came from).

Is something potentially wrong with my table, or do I need to wait for 3.7 to be able to make use of this feature? Or is there a test build that I can use for the time being? (And I just saved the table too, oh well... but it shouldn't take too long to copy-paste the old entries from the backup document in any case...)

side notes: I haven't actually done the templating for the ship I wanted to do it on. I only did the Artemis one and fired up the game, my copy-pasted entries should match retail except for speeds and handling, as well as $Shield_icon, $Ship_icon, $Ship_anim and $Ship_overhead commented out (will be using the SCP's integrated ones), so I'm very sure that's not the source of the problem. Another thing to note is that debug builds throw up no errors related to ships.tbl...

[Wanderer]

For errors with new builds.. Check you fs2_open.log file in main data directory.

As for the ship template feature... I can't really say that i would know if and how it works

[asyikarea51]

Wow, I am so not viewing that logfile with vanilla Notepad, . Still scrolling through it with something that can recognise individual lines as at the time of typing.

Thing is though, I get no crashing whatsoever, just a blank Techroom (that goes for the F3 ship viewer too). That SC Cain issue I mentioned can be safely ignored too...

[Wanderer]

Yeah.. its notepad killer - just use something better than notepad (ie. wordpad, crimson edit, aranea, notepad++, etc. etc.)

[asyikarea51]

Update, couldn't really find anything interesting in the log, plus it always gets overwritten each time I start the game. Then again I can barely keep my eyes open...

Decided to just comment out the entire Artemis template entry (even the #Ship Templates and #End tags) as well as the edited Artemis entries in the #Ship Classes section. Now I can see all my ships again except for the two bombers, obviously.

Any ideas, or should I revert back to two separate ships and somehow hold off on 3.7 for the time being?

(goes to read wiki on ship-copy)

[Turey]

Last I know the feature worked fine.

[asyikarea51]

I have no idea how to get ship-copy working. The wiki description is vague, and it doesn't say anything about specifying the ship to copy from.

What build were you using for the ship templates, Turey? Not that it matters, but since you say the feature worked fine the last time you checked, I might want to try again at the end of the week... though FTTB I reset my tables again since I'm doing cleanup.

[Turey]

I'm just using a generic HEAD build.

Here's a ships.tbl with the artemis templated. Please note that this doesn't actually save a slot on the shiplist, as each ship using a template becomes its own ship upon load.

EDIT: Note that you need to do a Ctrl-Shift-S in tech room to see Artemis.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[asyikarea51]

HEAD build? Those builds in the Recent builds section, or builds taken directly from the source code?

Yeah, that, or the F3 viewer.

Admittedly if it doesn't really save a ship slot then it gives me less of a reason to use it, but I'll have a look later tonight, see how it's done since it makes the tables cleaner. Thanks though.

[Zacam]

By not saving a ship "slot" it's usage doesn't count against the ships limit. And you can do a lot with ship variation to spice things up.

[asyikarea51]

*Is between Turey's and Zacam's posts*

Temporarily put Turey's supplied table into my mod directory - well, it's a build issue now. It's either I source out a HEAD build for myself, or carry on with 3.6.9/10...

[Zacam]

FSO (non-inferno builds) has a max number of ships that can be "slotted" in the tables before it stops adding ships. I think it's 130 ship objects that can be defined in the ships.tbl.

I could be completly mis-understanding what this does, but it will allow variations (Ex: Artemis D.H.) to base off the regular Artemis but with a different load out and texture. (Even a different POF? Have not fully looked into this or read the wiki yet) and it would do this without counting agansit the total limit.

[asyikarea51]

I thought Inferno builds had a limit too, only raised to ~200? Or have we gone dynamic already?

I think I'm confused when the word 'save' is used . I figure if I could cut down the number of used ship slots as much as possible, then whatever I'm doing wouldn't need an Inferno build (If I finish it, that is. ).

If ship templating isn't a solution then it doesn't give me much of a reason to use it, although it does make for easy variations without copy pasting everything and making it harder to skim through. (I only commented out the entries from my table anyway, so if a build comes out that has templating enabled, I can just uncomment and use the new system immediately...)

meh... tried to compile a build myself but I got TrackIR errors, and there's no way to get the SDK. Oh well, doesn't matter, I'll just carry on.

[Backslash]

Try adding code\io\trackir.cpp and code\io\trackir.h to your project.  Or just update your project files from the SVN (provided you use a compiler that uses one of the project file types updated this month )

Really, if it doesn't work with this build it should be Mantised.

Yeah I got confused in that discussion too.  I've been meaning to try templates but haven't gotten around to it, so thanks Turey.  I'll try that example sometime this week.

[asyikarea51]

Yeap, a total n00b at all this coding business even though I can compile the supplied project files (like, err, a matter of clicking? ). I didn't know which branch to select though (based on the program selection, it's definitely not HEAD, it compiles 3.6.9 debug builds)... but I'll have a look at SVN again.

(VC6 asked for some password or somesuch, got stuck and tried compiling in VC2005 instead.)

EDIT: G5K's supplied Trunk build isn't working with it either. The entire Techroom and F3 viewer just goes blank. I'll use Turey's tables, check two, three times before I Mantis it, just to be sure.

EDIT2: Nevermind, looking at VC2005, I think I get what you mean by adding the code files to the project. I'll get around to it when I can. Thanks.

[Turey]

Zacam is wrong, with the table I provided, Artemis and Artemis D.H. take up two different ship slots.

[Zacam]

Well., they do anyway, right?

The question is, does it take up a ship slot if the DH is not used in a mission but another ship is?

[karajorma]

Ship slots are assigned when the game starts, not when missions load.

[Galemp]

On this topic, I'd really like to see a method of texture swapping for the POF in here instead of a full-blown POF swapping.

Suppose you had an HOL variant of the Seth with a black reskin, but you wanted to preserve the POF file reference in case an HTL Seth came along sometime in the future. Can we use the texture replacement code here?

[taylor]

Suppose you had an HOL variant of the Seth with a black reskin, but you wanted to preserve the POF file reference in case an HTL Seth came along sometime in the future. Can we use the texture replacement code here?

I coded that up last summer.  It's only in my Xt builds at the moment though.