Additional equipment slots - any plugin?

Hehe… don’t poke the bears….

ST & chips are dead right, workarounds exist… use yer noggin

I personally just want it for a class 3 torp slot for Why’s vertical missiles… I sacrificed cl2… and can live with that for now, you wont however ever see me crying “its not out… you said it was coming” as if Adoxa says it’ll take time… i believe him, If he says “not yet” I’ll patiently wait for him… that’s 'cuz i love and respect his work… and don’t want the guy burning out on us due to 1000 silly requests (that have workarounds) and being pushed to work on things he put aside for now

I know EXACTLY how that feels…

StarTrader wrote:
The 10 weapon classes for guns and the 10 for turrets are more than enough

Check out how the pros have used them in the mods and you will see that your thinking falls WAY short.

Don’t keep on bleating for plugins for stupid stuff like this.

Haha, nice joke.
I take care about all levels of fighters. I also have fighter turrets lvl 1-5, because gun and turret are different. 6-8 are transport turrets. 9 and 10 are special slots for stuff like healing turets.
But i need at least 3 slots for each class of capship. I also need extra torpedo slots. And more…

…
Gun is not an equipment? lol?

Actually no. Weapons are guns, turrets, mines etc. Equipment are things like scanners, tractor beams, armour etc. If you look through the original code, all these items have models, i’d personally like to mount my tractor beams and scanners externally from a visual point of view, but that’s just me.

Reordering the weapon classes is easy, i have a different class for each type of ship, just one solution amongst many. It follows that making diffent types of hardpoints, you can work round the limitations in FL and achieve some excellent results.

As to the plugin, yes it will make things easier, but i can wait. I’m sure Adoxa will get round to it when he’s in the mood. Until then, the above options apply

I had no results shamaning with hardpoins. Give the example.
If i want one weapon can be moutnted on exact slot, i must have this slot. I dont understans how hardpoints can help here.

maybe the topic is not called correctly as simply slots are just hardpoints and hardpoint definitions. but in fact, just for the cause of precision it could be helpful to have more than 20 different gun classes. the vanilla already uses gun and turret hardpoints so you can only mount those devices where they belong to. also you have the chance to exchange a gun on a gun hardpoint with another gun but not with a turret. yes, 20 classes are pretty many and enough for all the purposes. but if it should be possible somehow to have more, why should we stick on only 20? how would you represent a realistic universe where the differences of the hundreds of ships are technically based on only 20 values (for guns at least)?

Nova wrote:
I had no results shamaning with hardpoins. Give the example.
If i want one weapon can be moutnted on exact slot, i must have this slot. I dont understans how hardpoints can help here.

I think what Gibbon means is gone are weapon class 1-10, and instead you bring in weapon classes:
Light
Medium
Heavy
Very Heavy

Each ship type can mount just their own type (so light fighters can only mount light weapon class, medium mount medium only (or maybe light too)), heavy mount heavy etc).

Now maybe you’ve compressed class 1-3 into light - this means the players have a choice of weapons to mount, some of which are obviously stronger, upon a light fighter. However, this is where you fiddle around with the amount of POWER use of each weapon, and the corresponding power unit they have.

You may say you’ve got the good old fashioned capacitors, boosters etc for power. That’s easy again, you make another trade off… heavier weapons = more mass (if this works for making ship handling worse), and/or take up cargo space.

Now your users have a choice. Mount the heaviest weapons possible for their class, but at the same time this means they cannot constantly fire, they lose cargo space, they lose manoeuvrability - or go with the light stuff.

This is the content I removed from my post on the earlier page which you instantly dismissed as “stupid”.

You may think such solutions are “stupid”, but players LIKE having the choices which lead to pay-offs. Do they go for heavier fire-power and a slower ship, or do they go for lighter weapons and a fast ship…

That potentially frees up x numbers of gun classes.
Next up, turrets, do the same.

Oh, and as for gun classes. Is there a reason you cannot specificy turret hardpoints as gun class 10 or something in the shiparch.ini, and then change class 10 guns to a turret movement arcs and change the models of the gun to be turret models. I’ve never tried it, but effectively make guns behave like turrets? That way you could potentially compress guns into 5 classes (assuming gunboat main guns - so light, medium, heavy, very heavy, gunboat) and utilise the last 3 gun classes types onto Turret HP’s instead?

or does the game limit the motion of / fire arc of gun classes specifically?

(To test, take a turret, change it to gun type class 10, take a turret HP and specify it as gun class 10 in the shiparch, mount the turret to the turret HP which is specified as a gun hp and see what it looks like/behaves like).

I haven’t looked at the ini to find out, it’s been years and I can’t be arsed - but this is the sort of way we found stuff “back in the day” by experimenting in trying to get around limitations that we couldn’t otherwise break.

There is no difference between turrets and guns, it’s how you mount them that makes the difference. The only difference is between a fixed HP and a revolute HP…

BTW, off-topic here for moment, NPC can only fire from fixed HPs if you mix the 2 types together. If you want them to use all of the guns/turrets, make them either one type or the other (fixed/revolute).

Back on topic, as a side project from my game I spent the last couple of days looking at the HP layout. Without a hook you aren’t going to get any more HP types. There is exactly 0x01F8 bytes set aside for the name offsets and numbers. There is also a secondary table that contains just the reference number so hps can be accessed by number. There is 5 sections of code that used these lists. Thats just the parser code, it doesnt include the actual usage code. Plus you also have to add in additional strings for the hp names.

In my mod I did just like the others did, I split the available hps up for each class (1 per class+lower classes) and made alot of variations on the weps that could be mounted upon them. On top of that I even had some leftover slots. By doing that a smaller class wep could be kept until it could be replaced with a higher class wep.

Plus, client-side hooks would be the single biggest security issue you could ever find. What would happen when somebody doesn’t load your “make me 40 weapon classes” plugin?

You know, Nova, people have managed just fine in the past with 20 classes and I don’t exactly see what would make your mod soooooooo special as to require more than that. Yes, you might need to reorder and repartition your weapons a bit, but you’d quickly find out that you can actually do most things with a handful of weapon classes.

In many mods, the number of used classes actually diminished compared to vanilla.

And if you really can’t do without, you can still use things like FLHook to place additional restrictions on equipment and weapons. For instance, SWWT has a plugin that adds additional classes (behaving just like FLAC in this matter), so you could have weapons that are classes 1 through 10 and then are limited to light fighters only in the code. You wouldn’t see that last part in the game, though; you just wouldn’t be able to mount the weapons on anything but a light fighter.

FriendlyFire wrote:
Plus, client-side hooks would be the single biggest security issue you could ever find. What would happen when somebody doesn’t load your “make me 40 weapon classes” plugin?

Hook checks the dacom.ini/dacomsrv.ini

FriendlyFire wrote:
You know, Nova, people have managed just fine in the past with 20 classes and I don’t exactly see what would make your mod soooooooo special as to require more than that. Yes, you might need to reorder and repartition your weapons a bit, but you’d quickly find out that you can actually do most things with a handful of weapon classes.

I attentively care about low levels too. Compressing low levels will kill the gameplay at the beginning.

LancerSolurus wrote:
There is no difference between turrets and guns, it’s how you mount them that makes the difference. The only difference is between a fixed HP and a revolute HP…

Well…bith guns and turrets usually use revolute HPs (exception: weapons like the Liberty Cruisers forward gun). The difference is just the arc set in the HP itself.

LancerSolurus wrote:
NPC can only fire from fixed HPs if you mix the 2 types together. If you want them to use all of the guns/turrets, make them either one type or the other (fixed/revolute).

What do you mean with this? In my mod I have a Liberty Cruiser that succesfully uses both turrets and forward gun.

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One example where you could need nore than 20 weapon types: Use one class for every different turret type of every house’s gunships, cruisers, and battleships. By this I mean that the different ships don’t share HPs, and have multiple, e.g. you have Liberty BS Primary Turret, Liberty BS Secondary Turret and so on, and this is useful because the different turret models don’t fit on every slot. The Liberty BS Primary Turret’s model does not fit onto the Liberty BS Secondary Turret’s base. And it also doesn’t fit onte the Bretonia BS slots. Also this might solve balancing issues, as the different ships have their turrets placed on different spots, also they have different amounts of turrets, and different destructible parts. So you could fix this balacing issues by giving the different ships different guns. By using the different classes you can prevent turret exchanging, but enable different turrets for the same type of slot, e.g. a Laser and a missile launcher, both for the Liberty BS Primary slot. So please don’t say such many slots are useless, i think it would make the game nicer. Of course, if it’s not possible that’s a different thing.