Modification Difficulties

posted on May 30th, 2009, 4:07 am

I was adding a ship to the game, and after i got it all done i realized that all weapons would always hit and deal full damage. This poses a slight problem; since it is a destroyer, torpedoes should miss it a fair amount! I suggest changing how you apply damage reduction (you modify every relevant weapon file, which isnt really an option for us hobby FO modders). Also, these commands would offer the ability to do just about anything a special weapon would do (obviously some things like the assimilator beam would be hard to do this way), drastically improving the moddability of this game. Commands would range from simple damage modifications to the ability to hold ships in place, disable systems, boost fire rate, etc.
Commands for ordnance/weapon files:
//can be systemsDisable, holdTarget, systemsBoost, hitChance, etc.
effect0 = "damage"
//these are the (is it classlabel? shiptype?)s that it applies to, use "all" if this doesnt apply
effect0AppliesTo = "cruiser"
//there can be different commands like effect0Time for systems disabling and boost
effect0Modifier = 0.8
Commands for ships:
//not sure what else this would be...
shipModification0 = "damagereduction"
//this can be any ordinance or ship class name, or "all" possibly
shipModification0FromSources = "photontorpedo"
//this can be "shield", "hull"
shipModification0DamageTypes = "shield"

This would mean that whenever i add a new ship to the game, it would automaitcally recieve the proper hitchance and damage, and i could add special effects like reduced damage from stations or reduced hull damage taken or something. Please, oh please FO team can we have this?

posted on May 30th, 2009, 8:13 am

easy ti write, but actually quite hard to implement without losing much performance. we have something similar on todo, but thats nothing for the near future, sorry

posted on May 30th, 2009, 9:33 am

Couldnt you do it (at the cost of loading performance) by processing each of those commands at loadtime into that list of damages/hitchances? this woulnt offer the special abilities on weapons but i think i would be more than happy with the knowledge that whenever i add a destroyer, it wont get shredded by torpedo toting ships!

posted on May 30th, 2009, 10:10 am

that would actually increase the load time by an immense time if we want to preserve all functionality we have currently using a tool to compile meta files into odfs, so nope, thats not a solution

posted on May 30th, 2009, 10:28 am

I was adding a ship to the game, and after i got it all done i realized that all weapons would always hit and deal full damage.

Bluntly, why?

posted on May 31st, 2009, 1:01 am

Each weapon has a list of hitchances theat tell the weapon how much hitchance this weapon has against that ship. This is how things like the sabers increased evasion ability is applied; every torpedo and pulse weapon has an entry that looks something like
    "fed_saber.odf" 0.6
that. Same for damage. Now, if there isnt a specific entry for the hitchance or damage, the weapon just uses the default values (which are always hit for hitchance and full damage for damage), thus leading to the problem. My suggestion would mean that you dont have to add stuff to hundreds of files and adding new ships would be more balanced.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 1:09 am

This is why I prefer list files over having all info in the weapon odf; it's a lot easier to correct things like this because there were fewer files to edit.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 8:46 am

xea but we couldnt do many of the things v3 special weapons can with listfiles. we havent droped them out of good will

posted on May 31st, 2009, 2:39 pm

Each weapon has a list of hitchances theat tell the weapon how much hitchance this weapon has against that ship. This is how things like the sabers increased evasion ability is applied; every torpedo and pulse weapon has an entry that looks something like
    "fed_saber.odf" 0.6
that. Same for damage. Now, if there isnt a specific entry for the hitchance or damage, the weapon just uses the default values (which are always hit for hitchance and full damage for damage), thus leading to the problem. My suggestion would mean that you dont have to add stuff to hundreds of files and adding new ships would be more balanced.

Oooooh, of course!

I see the problem now. I've never delved into the weapon files of FO before