[Martinus]

All primary weapons drain energy (unless you intend to incorporate weapons with physical ammo of course) so why not simply have an on/off switch for each bank and no cycling?

Sure you could fire all banks at once but it would only last for one or two shots overall before you needed a recharge.
Why over-complicate things? It's hard enough to mess with key pressing during heated combat in any case (or at least it is for me).

[Vasudan Admiral]

Originally posted by penguin
Just to post what gevatter Lars and I PM'ed each other about:  The 2pri/3sec is kinda hardcoded in several places in the code -- actually turns
out that MAX_SHIP_WEAPONS is never used...

So adding additional primary & secondary weapons is non-trivial  Even though it's apparently in FRED...

ahh. so that's why my attempts didn't work. (i was trying to add 6 gun slots for turrets . would that have the same effect as trying to add primaries?)

[Star Dragon]

IT would be cool if you guys figure out a way to add more. Till then we just have to make do with what we got. Make more weapons but be more creative on the load-outs (remember mission specific loads?) like in WC. BTW for voice commands 'Strike' is my Alpha Strike MW. IT will fire all weapons but they have to be chosen already and on dual fire. Just allows you to aim while other hand occupied.

This would be so important to the robot mod. Cause you have so many different weapons to choose from. Would a rocket punch be considered a Secondary Weapon cause it is fired like a missile and you need a lock? (unless you choose to dumbfire)...

[WMCoolmon]

How about this:
1-4 selects the primary
shift 1-4 adds a primary to the ones currently firing
5 cycles through primaries

6-9 selects a secondary weapon
shift 6-9 toggles doublefire on/off
0 cycles through secondaries

It sounds complex, but seems pretty intuitive to me.

[Anaz]

sounds great...I really don't mind the extra keys because I can touch type, so I kinda know where everything is...

[gevatter Lars]

Dosn't sound so much complicated. I have played games with a quite more difficult key configuration!

[penguin]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
How about this:
1-4 selects the primary
shift 1-4 adds a primary to the ones currently firing
5 cycles through primaries

6-9 selects a secondary weapon
shift 6-9 toggles doublefire on/off
0 cycles through secondaries

It sounds complex, but seems pretty intuitive to me.

It's certainly intuitive if you've played Descent before

We can add these keymaps, but here are my recommendations:

• Keep the comma and period  as the default "cycle primary" keys (but take out the linked-fire mode if more than 2 primaries)
• keep slash as "cycle secondaries" and shift+slash as "double-file secondary."  

We could eliminate the keys you have as 5, 0 and shift+6-9 that way and keep all backward compatibility...  That way we can leave 5 and 0 for your 5th primary and secondary, respectively... as long as we're going to the hassle of adding slots, might as well make it 5 for each ;)

You can always remap the keys in the options config.

[LtNarol]

number keys are currently used for messaging, shift keys are used for alternate stuff, shift > for example changes the time compression.  I would suggest using the F keys but im not sure which ones are used at this time.  We can still use the < and > keys fro cycling, so all we need is 4 keys for the individual banks.

[gevatter Lars]

It has been a long time since I played Freespace so are the F and G key in use?
In Wing Commander you can cycle through the weapons with G and F selects all.
Quite easy to use isn't it?
Beside that I think you should keep the numbers of slots by 3 primary and 4 secondary, because FRED2 supports it and so you don't have to change something in FRED2. Making this modification much easyer, dosn't it?

[Fozzy]

Select primarys as normal, but to link them first select the first primary you want then hold down shift. Now select the next primary you want to link. Repeat untill all the primarys you want linked are.

alternatavly to link all primarys press Shift and L

[Galemp]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
ahh. so that's why my attempts didn't work. (i was trying to add 6 gun slots for turrets . would that have the same effect as trying to add primaries?)

Hang on. The Terran Huge Turrets on the Orion have three primary banks... and the SB Seraphim and SB Nahema have 3 primaries and 4 secondary banks. So the code DOES support it, but not for player ships. I don't know how the Shivans manage weapons linking, though.

[Solatar]

Do you even notice it when the ai links there weapons (VERY rarely have I thought I've seen them). So if they don't ever link them, you wouldn't notice it.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor


Hang on. The Terran Huge Turrets on the Orion have three primary banks... and the SB Seraphim and SB Nahema have 3 primaries and 4 secondary banks. So the code DOES support it, but not for player ships. I don't know how the Shivans manage weapons linking, though.

it supports it alright. i think it would be much easier just to enable those three for the player for now, as there is probably quite a bit of code that assumes the player has only two weapons. but if the bombers will work with three, it shouldn't be too hard to enable that for the player......would it?

[gevatter Lars]

I hope its not to difficult, because we could realy use it in the Wing Commander mod we are making. Without it some ships get realy in trouble.
If it dosn't take to much time would someone do it?
I will also make sure that you will get some credits for your work ^__^

[gevatter Lars]

Is still someone working on this idea for more primarys and secondarys?

[KARMA]

i don't know if this is something going to be done, in case you are going to build a "new" system heavily modifying the code this is my suggestion for a system that may cover almost any possible situation, not too different from the other solution proposed:

you have n number of primary weapons (that consume energy)
you have n number of secondary weapons (missles)
we have banks and firing points, different banks means different primary weapon, any bank has its own number of firing points(like now)
1 we use a button to cycle between banks
2 we use a button to switch between primary or secondary cycling selection (this is necessary to have only one "bank activation" button instead of two)
3 we use a button to activate/deactivate selected bank
4 (its optional, it just may be useful for the sw-fs2 mod)we use a button to toggle between different way the firing points of selected bank are used (so you have for example 2 firing points for the selected bank, you can choose if having the two firing points linked or if having them firing alternatively one after the other, with a different rate of fire)

number of buttons required: 4 (3)

[gevatter Lars]

Oh not so complicated, I need just the 4 Prim and 3 sec that are allready supported by FRED2 in FS2 so that I can select them in two ways. All primarys togheter or single. For secondarys just that I can select them.
I don't want anything more than that.
The problem is that I can tell FRED2 to let the fighter have more different primarys then 2, but you can select them ingame, so only 2 primarys are fireing. Thats what should be changed...I hope you undestand what I try to say.

Could someone make this possible?

[KARMA]

the point is, whenever someone will put hand deeply on weapon selection, to have a system that will allow almost any combination that won't require further changes to fit other requests

[Sesquipedalian]

Being someone who brought up this issue before, I'll try to summarise the issues involved (insofar as I understand them):

FS2 (and Fred2, obviously) support up to 3 primaries and 4 secondaries for any fighter or bomber.  However, player-flyable ships can only have 2 primaries and 3 secondaries.  Adding support for 3/4 instead of 2/3 involves changing all code relating to the HUD and player ships generally, as well as altering the HUD images as required to accomodate an extra bank in each section.

No alteration of the AI is required, as it already supports 3/4 weapon configurations.

Weapon control key configurations require coding changes to implement the added primary bank.  The simplest known method is to change the current forward/backward (i.e. ,/.) cycling system to a on/off toggle system as follows:

• , toggles primary bank one
  
• . toggles primary bank two
  
• ; (which is unmapped in default configuration) toggles primary bank three
  

This system makes each bank independent of the other two insofar as its on/off status is concerned.  If the player wishes to use banks 1 and 3 to begin with, he presses , and ; respectively to turn them on.  If he later wishes to use banks 2 and 3, he turns off bank 1 (,) and turns on bank 2 (.).  A cycling system would not be used any longer, since it would be complicated, time-consuming, less intuitive, and ultimately annoying.

The apparent functionality of the secondary weapon key config system would not need to be changed, since only one type of secondary can be selected at a time in FS2.  The only change required would be having the code altered to cause the cycle to include the fourth bank, if present.

Adding support for four primaries would be a much, much, much larger task than for three, as support for that many primaries is not to be found in the engine in any way whatsoever.  Reams of code that I haven't even thought of would have to be ripped out and replaced to do such a thing.

If anyone decides to undertake the coding to allow 3/4 weapons support for player ships, I will be more than willing to collaborate with them in making the new HUD graphics that will be required.

[Bobboau]

actualy the way FS handels cycling and linking of primaries is that it only has one selected primary bank (0, 1, and 2), unless the ship is flagged that it's primaries are linked, so the togling idea would be more dificult to implement than you sudgest, though over all it would probly be the best system