ADCK wrote:Thanks, but isn't having "available to all" kind of redundant if you need a tech level of 100 to buy?
Not at all.
There are exactly two ways of making a certain piece of equipment buyable for a certain player ship:
1) You have to define the equipment as an
optional_equipment in the ship's shipyard.plist. That's the reason why some of the original ships can buy and install a Military Shield Enhancement, and some can't. It is not in their shipyard.plist. This way you can ensure that there is equipment which can only be bought for certain ships (like only ships above a certain size).
Obviously, that doesn't work for OXP-equipment. In order to make your new shiny piece of equipment actually buyable for anybody, you would have to edit and amend each and every shipyard.plist of all existing ships, and all future ships. This is obviously completely unpractical. Therefore you need:
2) You can make it available to all ships by inserting the
available_to_all into its equipment.plist entry. Of course this method has its disadvantage, too: You can't easily exclude some ships. Either everybody can buy it, or nobody. And if nobody can ever buy it, why create the equipment in the first place?
So the availability and the necessary TL are two completely different things. Setting a TL makes sure that the equipment doesn't show up on the F3-screen in stations with an insufficient TL.
Not using
available_to_all makes sure that the equipment doesn't show up on
any F3-screen,
ever, regardless of TL.
BTW: If your OXP is all about new kinds of Thargons, which would only be used by NPC Thargoid ships and never by the player, why bother with an equipment.plist at all? equipment.plist is
only for equipment which is supposed to be available to the player. The original Thargons are
not in equipment.plist. They only have a shipdata.plist-entry.
.
