[NGTM-1R]

Now that everyone has finally really got to the fighterbeams concept with Tides of Darkness and a few other people's mods/campaigns, I've noted a glaring flaw; it also extends to other ships probably including some that are going to come out of Diaspora and others that people have built with large, heavy ammo-based (whether literally or in some capacitor sense) primary weapons in addition to standard cannon.

Beams (and their stand-ins) are tracked as primary armament. This is not practical in a situation when there are multiple banks of standard dogfighting cannon that can be used as well. Admittedly one can get around this by having only two banks, one for standard guns and one for the heavies, but this also puts unwelcome limits on what can be accomplished with the craft in a single mission.

In essence, is there any possiblity of setting up a "Tertiary" or hacking it so that beams/heavy guns act as seperate from standard primaries when cycling to "all primary" fire?

[Qent]

Maybe there could be a "no linked fire" flag in weapons.tbl, and heavy weapons would simply not fire when banks are linked. Of course, that wouldn't allow pilots to link their heavy guns if they wanted to.

[Nuke]

there is code in the engine to support tertiary weapons, though im not sure how complete it is. it was added long ago and never finished. i believe the holdup was interface related and then the whole idea was put on the shelf. i wouldnt mind it being resurected because i often want to give the ship special weapons that are specific to the ship class.

for example the turrets on the apis were originally meant to be a actuated forward mount weapon. but since the features to make them work the way i want weren't added yet, i just configured them as turrets. also i want to kind of put a targeting laser turret on the new version of the vulture im working on. its almost possible to to script in features like this. the almost is that only players can use them reliably. there are some cases where you can use dummy weapons to trigger something to happen in scripting, and ive added at least a couple features to scripting to signal when an ai fires a weapon so that scripted weapon behavior can be used.

normally id point at scripting and say theres your answer. but when it comes to custom weapon behavior the limit is what the ai can do (and scripting gives almost no direct control over ai). so the solution is clearly finishing the tertiary weapon system.