Sorting out the F3 Ship Outfitting screen.

[Redspear]

Especially when looking at Laser Combat Reimagined which has the ColtMaster CM2 Starlaser (Bolt Laser) and New Lasers which features the ColtMaster CM2 'Starlaser' Beam Laser!

Yeah... guilty m'lud.

How about referencing just the classic four (pulse/beam/military/mining) and instead dividing by damage/second?

So...

• Low Power - anything up to and including a pulse laser
• Medium Power - anything up to and including a beam laser
• High Power - anything up to and including a military laser
• Extreme Power - anything exceeding a military laser
• Specialist - mining, cargo ejecting, disabling etc.

There's more to lasers than damage output of course but if the goal is to subcategorise then wher is laser would go would be clearly defined.

[Cholmondely]

Here's a starter for you: EquipmentSorting.ods

The linked spreadsheet should be usable in either Excel or LibreOffice Calc. Instructions are on the "Instructions" tab, which I've hopefully made clear enough. The calcs on the SS will automatically calculate a sort order value, and create the plist entry for each item as well. I've also added an "Interval" feature, so that if you ever need to come back and manually adjust a sort order value, there will be space for putting items in between others.

I've done a basic pass through the equipment items and removed any that I recognised as not being ever offered for sale on the F3 screen (eg all the Ship Config items, HUD-related items, that sort of thing). The are undoubtedly others that aren't relevant, but there is no harm in leaving them in the list.

I've also got a plan to display some sub-headings in the list. There will be some caveats, but it should work reasonably well with the current game. Having sub-sub-sections with collapsible sections would require core code changes, so that's out of scope for the moment. (I mean, I did that sort of thing with all the equipment in Ship Config, so it's possible, but it would mean subverting the F3 screen entirely, and things like F3F3 for the Shipyard would need to be changed as well - so, possible, but not easy or pretty).

Problems!

I've been plugging away at this, trying to keep similar stuff together within each category.

Here is the Defensive equipment page:



Order:
Electronic Shields > Physical Armour > Anti-Laser stuff > Anti-Missile stuff

It looks wrong to me.

I'm using Open Office. Do I need to use another spreadsheet instead? Am I doing something wrong? Am I worrying about nothing?

"Cut and pastes" of top line of each section (from the original/larger spreadsheet page prior to deleting the in-between empty lines between the 4 sections to fit it into a screen-shot):

EQ_AFT_SHIELD_CAPACITOR Aft Shield Capacitor 5 "EQ_AFT_SHIELD_CAPACITOR" = {sort_order = 5;};

EQ_ADDITIONAL_AFT_ARMOUR Additional Aft Armour 6230 "EQ_ADDITIONAL_AFT_ARMOUR" = {sort_order = 6230;};

EQ_ANTISAPPER Anti-Sapper Equipment 340 "EQ_ANTISAPPER" = {sort_order = 340;};

EQ_AMS Anti-Missile System 375 "EQ_AMS" = {sort_order = 375;};

[phkb]

It looks wrong to me.

The "#REF!" errors are definitely a problem. Each one is a calculation that is referencing a cell that doesn't exist, hence the reference error.

If you click on one of the #REF! cells, then press F2, the formula should be displayed and all the cells it can find should be colored, like this:

What you can see here are cells B1, A4 and E1 are colored, as they are referenced. The formula references B1 and E1 by using the construct $B$1 and $E$1. This means that, no matter where you copy that cell to, it will always reference those cells. A4 is different. That cell is related to the row the cell is in, and whenever we copy this cell to other rows, we want this to always use the current row.

To get a #REF! error, one of those cell references must have been changed, either during the copy process or at some time during editing. Without seeing the formula, it's hard to know which one is wrong. But some of the references are correct, indicated by the fact there are numbers listed and the plist code is complete. Perhaps if you can send your SS to me I can fix up anything that might be amiss.