A couple questions about editing / modifying vanilla FL

Moved to conventional modding.

This happens because your ship can take so much damage that sometimes the hit points of your attached equipment go to zero way before your ship gets destroyed. Almost every piece of equipment has a specific amount of hit points which is displayed by the green bar in your inventory. At your level, these numbers should be around 1000-2000. As you can see, it is quite likely that one piece of equipment takes 2000 damage before you receive a total of 30k. You haven’t broken the game, this is just how the game works.

Missing hardpoints are probably caused by losing a wing during a fight. When the part of the ship is missing, you of course can’t mount anything on it.

Grab HardCMP, you’ll be able to see (and move) the hardpoints with that. It’ll be in the downloads section somewhere.

As for the HP of your destructible parts, I believe the magic lies in the hit_points line of the [Collision Group] section of your ship in the shiparch.

But, never editing it myself I could be wrong.

Bobthemanofsteel wrote:
As for the HP of your destructible parts, I believe the magic lies in the hit_points line of the [Collision Group] section of your ship in the shiparch.

That is right. And when such a part is destroyed, all equipment mounted on hardpoints attached to this part is lost, too. These parts are definded in shiparch.ini as [Collision Group] entries under the ship itself.

You have to be carefull when modifying the hitpoints in the CollisionGroups, as they share the overall hitpoints for the ship.
A ship with 10k hitpoints and 4 CollisionGroups with 200 hitpoints each, means that the ships hull only has 9200 hitpoints.
So if you go nuts you could end up with a ship with a tissue paper hull that gets killed with 1 shot.

Bejaymac wrote:
You have to be carefull when modifying the hitpoints in the CollisionGroups, as they share the overall hitpoints for the ship.
A ship with 10k hitpoints and 4 CollisionGroups with 200 hitpoints each, means that the ships hull only has 9200 hitpoints.
So if you go nuts you could end up with a ship with a tissue paper hull that gets killed with 1 shot.

Wow, that’s a new info for me.

So if I have a ship with 2 CollisionGroups, the ship with 10000 hitpoints and the 2 CollisionGroups with 3000 hitpoints, that the ship hull only 4000 hitpoints, right?

But those CollisionGroups has many weapon mounted on, if I give those CollisionGroups only 500 hitpoints, when those CollisionGroups get more then 500 hit, it will be destroyed or not?

Yes all, for weapons question.
And for the other question, yes.

Odd thing : when you destroy one Kusari Battleship’s rear wing, the battleship get destroyed, Biggest fail of freelancer! And the battleship has all of his other hitpoints. Collision group is buggy!

You could always just add armor_scaling to the loadout of the ship to increase the overall hull strength. I think then you could increase the hit_points of the collision groups and still keep the hull strong.

JONG wrote:

Wow, that’s a new info for me.

So if I have a ship with 2 CollisionGroups, the ship with 10000 hitpoints and the 2 CollisionGroups with 3000 hitpoints, that the ship hull only 4000 hitpoints, right?

Yes

JONG wrote:

But those CollisionGroups has many weapon mounted on, if I give those CollisionGroups only 500 hitpoints, when those CollisionGroups get more then 500 hit, it will be destroyed or not?

Yes

CollisionGroups are designed so it looks like your ship has been in a fight, ie missing parts and sparks & flame coming from the damaged end, and yes that does mean any equipment on it gets destroyed as well, which is why you’ll find vanilla ships have most of thier equipment attached to the Root.

JONG wrote:

Wow, that’s a new info for me.

You’ll find that it’s more a case of just not being common knowledge, most custom ships don’t have destructable components built in, so there is no need for most to learn about CollisionGroups. It’s only when you try to replicate what Digital Anvil did to their ships that you start to understand these things.

As I understand it, if you have set your Root to 60K hit points and all your components set to 60K hit points each what will happen is that your ship will die if you loose any one component, vanilla cap ships are set up this way.

The hit points on the ship is still 60K but the components subtract the amount of damage via root_health_proxy, so any damage to a component is passed on to the Root, so you will still die if your wing falls off, even if you haven’t taken any damage to the main body

I suppose you could leave some breathing room after having all your components shot off by making the hull 240K. vanilla ships seem run in the 15-20% range for wings less for fins

It’s been 3 years and I don’t have any of my files handy, but iirc you can change the root_health_proxy so the collisiongroups no longer leech health from the hull, there is a problem with this though, each component’s health is added to the health bar in game, so you could find yourself dead with more than half your health bar still full as you can’t tell when your hull has reached critical.

You’ll be fine as long as you keep the total HP of your collisiongroups to less than 30% of the hulls HP, over that and your hull armor starts to get a little thin

Wait-wait guys. Afaik hitpoints of the collision group do not influence hull.
Say if you have hull of 10000, and 4 collision groups of 2500, you’ll still have to hit 10000 hull points to destroy hull.

Ofcourse, the following facts MATTER:

if collision group has root_helth_proxy = true line, then all the damage got by collision_group is transfered to hull. Say if you hit collision group to 1500(took of 1000 hit_pts), your hull will have 9000 hit_pts left).
If all the collision groups will be hit by missile explosion that deals 2500 and more damage, those hit_pts will also apply to hull, that means it will deal 2500*4 = 10000 hull damage and the ship gets destroyed.
If collision_group has(in this case) hit_pts of 10000 and more, destroying it will destroy the ship, as it will deal 10000 or more dmage to hull.
The above will not happen if root_health_proxy = false.

If your collision_group has a fuse attached with destroy_root = true line, no matter what other parameters(including hit_pts and root_health_proxy) suggest, it will destroy the hull after destruction.

Collisio_group hitpoints are also influenced by constants.ini(hitpoints scale of player collision_groups adjustment).

?

Interesting.

We have capships flying on our server and many players like to target a single component (the bow section of the dreadnought for example) because they know that as long as they destroy that piece the whole ship dies.

I’ll have to look in the collision groups to see if that destroy_root = true line is in there, I never paid any attention to it.

It would be funny if the Dread could continue to fly after losing its bow section…

It can. For this you would have to set the hitpoints of the component lower than the ships hitpoints. Besides that you have to remove the death fuse.

So I guess I cleared things up a bit here(I am right??) eh??

Yes, now the question becomes ‘should I do it…’. The fighter pilots are already whining about the fact that they can’t beat a battleship one on one…

Isn’t it this value?

root_health_proxy = true

I guess it is but the other value…

separable = true

…seems to act as a dispatcher when the part is destroyed.

I will make a try with :

root_health_proxy = false

After I have test it, I’ll do an edit.

Edit : that wasn’t it…