Ship model variants

[spara]

I like different looking ships, but it comes with a cost. I've been installing Griff's brand new 1.79 versions of his ships and noticed that there are multiple versions of the same ship. The problem is that, if I for example install the new sidewinder, there are 9 versions of basic sidewinder and 9 versions of escort sidewinder there and if I spawn a ship with the role "escort", it will very likely be Sidewinder. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Is there (or could there be) any way (other than defining new shipdata with new role weightings) to add ship model variants to the game so that this balance change won't happen? For example some mechanism to define multiple model variants for one ship. Something like like_ship_alternative. There could be a model pool per ship and like_ship_alternative would add the variant model to the model pool rather than the global ship pool.

[cim]

I like different looking ships, but it comes with a cost. I've been installing Griff's brand new 1.79 versions of his ships and noticed that there are multiple versions of the same ship. The problem is that, if I for example install the new sidewinder, there are 9 versions of basic sidewinder and 9 versions of escort sidewinder there and if I spawn a ship with the role "escort", it will very likely be Sidewinder. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

This particular instance is fixable by having the OXP which defines 9 Sidewinders divide all their individual role weights by 9.

Is there (or could there be) any way to add ship model variants to the game so that this balance change won't happen?

I think something like your suggestion is possible, but I think it would require splitting shipdata.plist into a "ship classes" file (which could probably keep the current name) and a "ship visuals" file which would contain model, texture, shader, engine, flasher, weapon position, view position, etc. data, then have the game add a ship class and then select a ship visual from the list allocated to that ship class, merge the attributes together, and carry on. For compatibility with every existing OXP, a ship class with no ship visuals would have to be able to read the visual attributes from the ship class data instead ... which would mean that there'd potentially be a lot of work updating ship OXPs before you got much benefit from it, but it's possible.

[Griff]

i've got to update my oxps this weekend to fix some broken shader stuff, i'll sort out the role weights at the same time

[spara]

i've got to update my oxps this weekend to fix some broken shader stuff, i'll sort out the role weights at the same time

Sounds great.