Equipment taking up cargo space? Also some engine questions.
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I’ve seen internal equipment such as scanners, armor upgrades, and tractor beams take up armor even while equipped. Is there a way to apply this to regular external equipment like a thruster or gun turret? Why do internal things take up space to begin with anyway? Is that just a hard coded behavior of Freelancer?
Is there a way to enhance engine speed or maneuverability without equipping whole new engines? Or perhaps, is it possible to equip multiple engines that have an additive effect on your top speed? Can engines even be equipped without some sort of hook or hack?
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for the first point, the “volume” parameter is the key. this is how much any piece of equipment takes from your cargo hold. a side effect is that you can’t mount an equipment if your hold is too full.
for the engines thingy, you can mount multiple engines this is buggy though. however, adoxa recently released the shield drag plugin, that allows (at least?) shield type equipment to affect the motion behavior of the spaceship it is mounted on.
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Why485 wrote:
Why do internal things take up space to begin with anyway? Is that just a hard coded behavior of Freelancer?It’s just the way it behaves. When you dismount a piece of equipment it goes into the cargo hold, so the hold has to have enough free space to hold it.
We have used it to our advantage to prevent special weapons from being dismounted from a particular ship type.
But this only works to a certain extent though - when you sell the ship, the special weapon is usually transferred to the new ship f I remember. This is undesirable but we don’t have a way to prevent that yet.
Why485 wrote:
Is there a way to enhance engine speed or maneuverability without equipping whole new engines? Or perhaps, is it possible to equip multiple engines that have an additive effect on your top speed? Can engines even be equipped without some sort of hook or hack?Speed is a calculation of (engine thrust) divided by ((engine drag) + (ship drag)).
When the engine is on, its drag is added to the ship drag for the speed calc. When it is off, only the ship drag is used for slowing the ship.
In vanilla, ship drag is set to 1, so the engine drag gives the speed. This is done to enable the ship to “coast” - slide on in the same direction - when the engine is turned off, and lose speed slowly. A higher drag slows the ship too fast.
You will see most engines have a drag of x99 so that when the ship drag (1) is added the total drag = (x+1)00.
Manoeuvrability is ship handling. It is set by the ship mass, rotation_inertia, angular_drag and steering_force values in shiparch.ini.
There are a couple of methods around to permit engine replacement and selling engines in-game. Try a search.
Multiple engines cause the ship to keep on accelerating to ludicrous speed!
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Judging by what he’s done with Itano Circus, I figure he already knows all of that ST, I think he’s asking a deeper question. I think he’s asking about the possibility of purchasable equipment that can modify the characteristics of an already mounted engine, in a similar fashion to equipment like armor addons that increase a ships hull, or shield capacitors that increase a shields recharge rate.
At a guess I think he’s asking for equipment that can somehow modify the angular drag values and what not for handling, and maybe equipment that can modify the linear drag values for engines, in the same fashion that the armor modifier works.
I’m clueless about how it could be done, but that’s my take on what he’s asking.
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StarTrader wrote:
Multiple engines cause the ship to keep on accelerating to ludicrous speed!Is this a fundamental behavior or can an engine be specifically engineered so that these “addon engines” only boost speed marginally?
Adoxa’s plugin with the shield drag modifier should work well enough for my purposes. It’s mostly a speed modifier, but it does affect ship handling slightly. I was hoping someone would know a method for modifying the actual ship handling characteristics but that may be beyond normal modding.
On the topic of equipment taking space up it seems I might have been misunderstood. I am aware of how internal and external equipment is dealt with in terms of cargo space. (Although I’m not quite sure what denotes internal vs external equipment.) What I wanted to know is if you could make a weapon or some other external equipment still take up cargo space after it has been mounted. Internal equipment exhibits this behavior, but external does not. Can I force this behavior for external equipment?.
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Well - I just answered what was asked, guys.
Here’s more, hate to see unanswered queries.
Why485 wrote:
StarTrader wrote:
Multiple engines cause the ship to keep on accelerating to ludicrous speed!Is this a fundamental behavior or can an engine be specifically engineered so that these “addon engines” only boost speed marginally?
It’s a bug, any second engine causes this problem - players used to take advantage of it long ago, now I think all modders removed their additional engines.
Why485 wrote:
Adoxa’s plugin with the shield drag modifier should work well enough for my purposes. It’s mostly a speed modifier, but it does affect ship handling slightly. I was hoping someone would know a method for modifying the actual ship handling characteristics but that may be beyond normal modding.Any additional equipment mass does affect ship response. The problem is that mass is not high enough in most equipment. I checked for you yesterday by increasing shield mass progressively, the heaviest shield I set at mass=65 and the lightest at mass=15.
There was only a half second difference in turning the ship a full 360 degrees, on a Centurion whose ship mass is 120.
So it seems that the additional mass is not just added together to the ship mass. You will probably need much more mass to see a noticeable effect - have a go with mass = 300 for a shield, it’s fast to do and you will see it for yourself.
Why485 wrote:
On the topic of equipment taking space up it seems I might have been misunderstood. I am aware of how internal and external equipment is dealt with in terms of cargo space. (Although I’m not quite sure what denotes internal vs external equipment.) What I wanted to know is if you could make a weapon or some other external equipment still take up cargo space after it has been mounted. Internal equipment exhibits this behavior, but external does not. Can I force this behavior for external equipment?.OK, I did misunderstand you on this one -
No, I don’t know the answer to this. -
So one of the things Freelancer does right, you want to remove? :?
common.dll 053048 0000->E31F = include external equipment in cargo size PART 1 ~adoxa common.dll 05330E 0000->E31F = include external equipment in cargo size PART 2 ~adoxa common.dll 0A9BA3 18->00 = include external equipment in cargo size PART 3 ~adoxa common.dll 0AA904 18->00 = include external equipment in cargo size PART 4 ~adoxa freelancer.exe 0838AF 74->EB = consider volume when buying external equipment ~adoxa -
Is it possibe to add this space-taking effect only to some equipment parts, e.g. shield generators (as I think it is quite strange that such a small part that is only mounted outside without any inner part can create a strong shield)? Maybe even only to some of them?
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adoxa - ma super-cool man!
Quarks.
Each item has its own volume=xx and mass=xx
So - yes
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What if guns are supposed to take up space only while they are not mounted, but shields always?
It’s not a problem for me, as I probably won’t use this at all, but just as question… -
The addresses listed are actually DWORDs, containing the equipment type mask. Set it how you want.
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adoxa wrote:
So one of the things Freelancer does right, you want to remove? :?common.dll 053048 0000->E31F = include external equipment in cargo size PART 1 ~adoxa common.dll 05330E 0000->E31F = include external equipment in cargo size PART 2 ~adoxa ```Untested, there may be other areas that need to change.Thanks for looking into this adoxa, but I tried it and it doesn’t seem to have any effect.
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I realize this is a “have your cake and eat it too” type question, but is there some way that you could perform the same check that is done on internal equipment? A player can easily check to make sure that they didn’t just equip something they can’t hold. However, there is no interface mechanic preventing you from doing so in the first place. This results in a lot of uninformed people getting themselves kicked for cheating. (More cargo space used than available.)
The vanilla internal equipment (and cargo?) performs a check before letting you put anything that would cause you to go over your cargo limit. Is there some way to use this same check for when you mount external equipment?
