[AV8R]

I have a self-made mission that features only being able to select a ship and primaries (no secondaries) after the briefing. When using the 5/9/2020 nightly for the EXE instead of the version 19 official release, I get a message stating, in so many words, that I could not proceed because at least one ship had an empty weapons slot. Version 19 will let me enter the mission without loading missiles pre-mission, the nightly will not.

Obviously, there was a weapons check installed in the code after version 19 but my question is, why? There may be times a mission designer may want to limit or negate the use of certain weapons or not "fully load" all ships before a mission starts (as in my example), so maybe this can be a switchable function (unless the reason for the weapons check was some game-breaker I don't know about?) 

[Mito [PL]]

I believe there was a bug when if you didn't populate certain banks you could circumvent certain weapon limitations. For example, if you didn't populate the second primary bank (with 6 gunpoints) in BP's Uriel, the contents of the third bank were moved up by the amount of empty banks, resulting in this case in you having the Archer in your 6-gun bank, which is not allowed there.

So someone came up with the idea that in order to not make this happen (and to prevent the need for diving into complicated and poorly documented code), it's just needed to never let a fighter have an empty bank. Then it turned out that having empty banks would be really useful in some rare circumstances, like yours, and that actually at least one retail mission loadout has empty banks.

Though I'm not sure what SCP will decide to do with this.

[FrikgFeek]

This has actually been addressed in the most recent nightlies. Instead of using your current build use 20.5. or 22.5. , the 2 most recent builds.

[AV8R]

This has actually been addressed in the most recent nightlies. Instead of using your current build use 20.5. or 22.5. , the 2 most recent builds.

Wait, what, 22.5?

Holy moly, how did FSO go from 19.0 to 22.5 so fast? Are there that many major changes coming out in the next release?

[FrikgFeek]

20.5. and 22.5. are the dates, not the engine versions 

The actual engine versions are still 20.1

[EatThePath]

Those version numbers as deployed to Knossos would be 20.1.0-20200520 and 20.1.0-20200522

[AV8R]

Got it.