Oolite Bulletins

1) ... with the new hyperspace countdown adjustable function, create an equipment item? I know it can be done in shipdata.plist, but can a piece of equipment lower or raise the time for the hyperspace countdown?

2) ... with a combination of i.e. the twin plasma cannons and weapons energy (does that command work for equipment.plist?) create a new type of quasi-laser weapon?



L

Lestradae wrote:

1) ... with the new hyperspace countdown adjustable function, create an equipment item? I know it can be done in shipdata.plist, but can a piece of equipment lower or raise the time for the hyperspace countdown?

Yes.

2) ... with a combination of i.e. the twin plasma cannons and weapons energy (does that command work for equipment.plist?) create a new type of quasi-laser weapon?

weapons_energy works for a ship, not a specific weapon. It is just the measure of how big a punch any of your weapons deliver (how much energy a hit takes away from the hitten ship). It does not in any way change the look of a weapon. So I don't see how a higher or lower weapons_energy could transform a plasma bolt (ball-like as a flasher) into a laser (beam-like).

Hi Commander McLane,

thanks for the tip!

With ...

weapons_energy works for a ship, not a specific weapon. It is just the measure of how big a punch any of your weapons deliver (how much energy a hit takes away from the hitten ship). It does not in any way change the look of a weapon. So I don't see how a higher or lower weapons_energy could transform a plasma bolt (ball-like as a flasher) into a laser (beam-like).

... I didn`t mean to create a weapon that looked different, but one with a different name and strength.

My idea would be to create an "alternative" Twin Plasma Cannon - let`s call it a Small Plasma Accelerator - which has the same properties as the Twin Plasma Cannon (the way it looks, ball-like), but a higher strength. And, obviously, a higher price, other name and equipment description.

Is this doable?

Cheers

L

As I said, weapons_energy is a property of a ship, not of a certain weapon.

So you can create an über-ship with tenfold (or whatever you like) weapons energy, simply by c&p'ing an existing shipdata-entry and changing the value of the weapons_energy-key.

All weapons of this ship would deliver the damage defined in weapon_energy. If it has a laser, the laser would be more powerful. If it has plasma cannons, they would be more powerful.

You cannot create a new equipment as an alternative to an existing weapon, but more powerful. Whatever the player (assuming we are talking about a player-ship here) would buy, would have exactly the same power.

Ah, I see. What I wanted to do, is not possible then

Idea would have been to give the new weapon to player & NPC ships alike.

Thanks for the feedback

L

You could however remove the keys for all lasers in the shipyard.plist so that the ship could only mount a Twin Plasma Cannon, boost the weapons energy and set the TPC as its default weapon in standard_equipment.. That way the player version would be fittted with the weapon and could only mount the suped up plasma cannon. Realistic maybe as the SPA weighed a couple of hundred tons as aI rembember, so not the sort of thing you can just mount and unmount easily. All those generator and power leads etc would mean its a fixed part of the ship carrying it. For the NPC version just set the TPC as the forward weapon with uber weapons energy. The Plasma Accelorators fitted to the Balrog Dreadnaught in Assassins are just standard turrets in code. But as each one is bigger than a Cobra Mk III I booted the weapons_energy to suitable proportions. You HAVE to fight this ship at a distance!

The main problem of the plasma cannon, however, is not its punch, but the slow speed of the plasma, which make it so easy to avoid them, and so hard to hit anything with them. And even an über-plasma cannon would do no better. What's a huge weapon_energy worth, if all your enemies can easily dodge your fire?

The charm of the idea is of course, that the weapon would have this huge drawback, nicely balancing out its strength.

@LittleBear:

LittleBear wrote:

You could however remove the keys for all lasers in the shipyard.plist so that the ship could only mount a Twin Plasma Cannon, boost the weapons energy and set the TPC as its default weapon in standard_equipment ... The Plasma Accelorators fitted to the Balrog Dreadnaught in Assassins are just standard turrets in code. But as each one is bigger than a Cobra Mk III I booted the weapons_energy to suitable proportions. You HAVE to fight this ship at a distance!

That`s rather neat, could do something like this with ships like the Navy Juggernaut!

@McLane:

Commander McLane wrote:

The charm of the idea is of course, that the weapon would have this huge drawback, nicely balancing out its strength.

Exactly

That would, then, make sense for player and NPC ships alike, too ... the Jamesons can run if they see something like this coming as they are faster than the unwieldy superweapon and the Elite platinum-asses can fight fire with fire with their own carriers

One last question remains ... is it possible to change the name of the Twin Plasma Cannon via equipment.plist - override?

Potentially inspired

L

Yep, but then the normal TPC would then also be called the SPA even though it would only function as a SPA when fitted to the special ships! As the normal TPC is pretty useless anyhow you could mod it with an overwrite to effectivley remove the TPC from the game so that only the SPA version would be available and then only on the special ship that are big enough to mount this monster sized weapon. Personally, I'd give up the option to fit a TPC in favour of the SPA! As long as you explained in the readme that your OXP does this I don't see a problem as players who don't want this feature just woudn't install it. Would suggest though you made this a seperate OXP to RS and moved the massive carriers with the SPA to this OXP to retain flexablity.

BTW I cannot fit a TPC to my Imperial Courier as the device can only be fitted to a ship if its listed specificly in the ships available equipment and most OXP writers (myself included) haven't bothers as its just such pants as a weapon! Woudn't be losing much as a substition. The effect would be in the shipyard the player would see "Behemoth Forward Weapon : Small Plasma Accelerator", but would never see a SPA for sale as equipment available to be fitted to any old ship. (Set its available tech level to 99 so you can't just go and fit one to an Adder as on the adder it would just be a crappy TPC (but would appear on the equipment list as SPA) as the Adder doesn't have the uber weapons energy!) That would seem sensible as somthing this big (and bleeding edge tech for the Oolite time peroid) coudn't be fitted to any old ship, you'd have to buy a ship where it was an intergral part of the ship. Should also not allow any left right or rear guns on the SPA equiped ships as if you did a laser fitter would be absurdly powerful as it would still have the SPA level weapon energy.

EDIT : Of course turrets now work on player ships but the turret is a sub-entry having its own weapons energy independent of the main ship, so on both player and non-player versions the turrets would pack a standard punch. Only the SPA at the front would be leathal!

LittleBear wrote:

Of course turrets now work on player ships but the turret is a sub-entry having its own weapons energy independent of the main ship

Are you positive about this? I seem to recall that it didn't work that way in previous versions. But that might have changed with the integration of player turrets.

As for changing the name via an override: On my computer trying to override the built-in equipment.plist crashes Oolite 1.72. Seems Oolite can't accept two items with the same identifier. And I am not aware of an equipment-overrides.plist, analogous to the new shipdata- and shipyard-possibilities.

Ok, so there are two potential showstoppers there:

1) It might be that the weapons energy of a subentity is defined after its ship`s weapons energy and can`t be set independently and

2) It might be that it`s not possible to override a peace of equipment from Oolite`s code itself.

Tricky. I`m not yet there implementing this, but don`t see a solution yet

Lestradae wrote:

2) It might be that it`s not possible to override a peace of equipment from Oolite`s code itself.

Forget about that second obstacle. Probably I just made a c&p-error or managed to corrupt the plist otherwise. A new attempt brought no crash. It's working fine.

@Obstacle 2: Very good!

Hhhm. Now you mention it I don't know if its correct for player ships as I haven't got round to finding one with turrets on 1.72. I think it is true for NPC ships though. The weapons energy of the monk's turret is set separatley from the energy of its lasers.