No need to give the power supply – or fuel supply – regeneration capabilities. A power supply with a capacity of 1000000000 will hardly be affected by a weapon does 100 energy damage. Increase the capacity depending on the amount of energy damage weapons will do. If you’re trying to stick close to Freelancer’s balance – where ships tend to die quickly under fire – the loss of fuel due to energy-damaging weapons is less critical than if you have ships that survive over long periods of combat.

You could also use WeaponMODDB.ini to increase the damage potential for shield-damaging weapons without, again, negatively affecting fuel supply.

Unfortunately, without knowing the particulars of your modification, I really can’t determine exactly what you need. From your initial post, it looked like you just needed weapons to do shield damage without draining power. Apparently that isn’t what you need, or I mis-read your post.

To easily modify Freelancer’s stock balance – to, say, overall decrease weapon damages (to prevent notable fuel/power drain) and hull/shield strengths (to prevent notable changes to the ‘genius’ Freelancer balance) – I’d recommend writing a simple tool.

inb4 Adoxa pops in with a hack.

In Freelancer: The Harvest Campaign, we had to develop a solution to this problem. You’ve got a few options.

If none of your MISSILES or TORPEDOES need to deal different shield damage from your GUNS, just use HULL_DAMAGE_FACTOR in Constants.ini. This value is used in shield damage cacluation by ((hull_damage * HULL_DAMAGE_FACTOR) + energy_damage [your energy_damage should be 0 for all weapons])). Damage dealt in this manner does not affect energy.

In THC, we have a few missile weapons that deal reduced damage to shields; consequently, we set HULL_DAMAGE_FACTOR to 0 and just used energy_damage for shield damage. To prevent that from affecting the fuel system significantly, we just made fuel capacities – and fuel drain – very high values.

Our modification uses force_gun_ori = true on missile weapons to create an arcing trajectory. It looks pretty neat, though issues with close-range engagements can arise.

HOWEVER as with ALL multi-hpfire weapons You have to work harder ro make it have sound. I have yet to try and do the workaround for it. But it envloves making a custion ale sound for that gun. I think thats it, but I may have missed something.

One could attach a sound to the muzzle flash for the weapon.

[Gun]
nickname = C01_GW2Z_AUTOCANNON_A
ids_name = 458771
ids_info = 458772
DA_archetype = Equipment\models\weapons\no_fighter_gun.cmp
material_library = ;none
HP_child = HPConnect
hit_pts = 99999999
explosion_resistance = 1.0000000
debris_type = debris_normal
parent_impulse = 20
child_impulse = 80
volume = 0.0
mass = 1.0
hp_gun_type = hp_gun_special_1
damage_per_fire = 0
power_usage = 0.0
refire_delay = 0.25343725
muzzle_velocity = 2200.0
toughness = 1.00000 
projectile_archetype = C01_GW2Z_AUTOCANNON_A_AMMO
dry_fire_sound = fire_dry
separation_explosion = sever_debris
auto_turret = false
turn_rate = 360.0
lootable = true
LODranges = 10000.0

The hit_pts field is where one sets how much health the turret has.

You don’t need a destructible = true entry; I don’t even think a Gun object takes it. So if you want to make any device roughly indestructible, just give it a high amount of health. Players will eventually have to repair it, though by then they’re probably better off just buying a new device.

Our modification is attempting to offer more customization capabilities to the player through both the standard designs (shield-based) and multiple engines and power sources. We’ve found that multiple engines and sources can be applied in an initial ship good; the craft launches and everything appears to be cumulative. We were worried Freelancer would panic, especially with multiple engine entries. It seems fairly stable, at least in SP.

We noticed that re-equipping one of these items would forcibly unequip all of the others of the type; this is in keeping with Freelancer’s apparent one-item limit on internal/non ‘hp_type’-taking objects.

We’re willing to bet that there’s a way around it via hex-edit. Any thoughts?

The funny thing is, I actually remembered coming across FLDev from one of the 88 Flak downloads, found it, and started writing a new method in my program for generating the CSV in-between the original post and your response ^_^

But your additional instructions just made everything much easier. Thanks very much, FF.

Howdy,

I’m in the process of building a mod that, for several reasons, has quite a lot of string and .xml entries that need to be entered into .dlls. I was planning to utilize Freelancer Mod Manager’s GENERATESTRRES and GENERATEXMLRES functions to inject the lot of them, but it appears that FLMM has a writing limit of less than 2000 entries. My team and I would rather not spend several months entering the data in by hand.

Consequently, would anyone be able to point me in the right direction regarding the functions for appending of data into Freelancer string tables?

Howdy, I’m Weredragon from Freelancer: Black Dawn, and I’ve a problem which, I hope, can be solved. One of the unique things about Black Dawn is its very long range (one hundred or more kilometers) combat, which I’ve been working on translating to the NPC ships. I’ve managed to get them to spawn at the proper variable distance, in the proper numbers, and with their own faction.

What they’ve been so far disinterested in doing is actually engaging my ship. Now, they open fire on it from their weapons range as per pilots_population.ini and the jobblock (and I’ve already played with the .dlls for it as well), but they steadfastly refuse to charge at me the way fighters seem to. Interestingly enough, the lead ship of the nine-ship formation almost always heads towards me after becoming hostile, but breaks off onto a perpendicular vector at about twenty klicks from my position. Despite my best efforts to force no formation, the other ships continue to follow the leader.

Also interesting is that the warships, when spawning close (within five klicks) of my ship, will all engage me properly when rendered hostile. This includes the leader.

What bits of the code would y’all like to see for this? There’s an awful lot of it, so…