Teach me, Sensei! Replaceweapons

posted on January 27th, 2011, 2:11 am

I've long been interested in modding Armada II, but was too fearful or too lazy to start learning.  Well, now I've broken into the odf's and my curiosity is mounting.

With regards to replaceweapons, it seems they are coded into the original Armada II engine to allow a ship to "gain" a new ability by instantaneously replacing it with a different ship.  Obviously a big problem with this is that it causes the ship in question to forget its orders.  I recently tried the new saber-spam recently and learned just how hard it is to control.  Props to guys who use it.

Anyway I was digging just now and I noticed that in the avatar odf's there is this line:

replacementmaintainorders = 1

Is there any possible way to make it so ships remember their orders when they use replaceweapons?  Or is this a decremented feature that doesn't actually work?

posted on January 27th, 2011, 2:24 am

It works for the most part, but the Devs are still working out the bugs.  It doesn't currently work perfectly.

posted on January 27th, 2011, 2:37 am

Yes but the individual ship files don't contain that line.  If it's a simple command you can give to the Armada II engine, I'm wondering where it belongs.

posted on January 27th, 2011, 2:53 am

in the weapon odf

posted on January 27th, 2011, 3:53 am

Ah, and so it is.  Which means the original Armada II engine doesn't handle it correctly.  I was confused for a bit there because I was looking specifically at rank-ups and not special weapons, but now I see it doesn't make a difference.  Unless it's supposed to be

replacementmaintainorders = 0

instead 

posted on January 27th, 2011, 4:53 am

The modding section of the guide contains descriptions of all the weapon ODF commands currently - replaceweapons are tricky and there are plans to shift to something with less issues. Replacementmaintainorders covers quite a few commands, but it does not preserve more complex ones yet unfortunately. 

posted on January 27th, 2011, 9:48 am

replaceweapon is an Fleet Operations addition which did not exist in vanilla Armada2

posted on January 27th, 2011, 12:38 pm

replaceweapon is interesting as a tool. It allows so many possibilities in modding. Its a workhorse.

I wonder if vanilla would have been better with replaceweapons.

Its a shame they forget orders tho.  So many times a rheinn dies cos awesome super armour turns off and the ship stops or even worse turns around and goes back into the fight lol.

posted on January 30th, 2011, 8:25 pm

Its a shame they forget orders tho.  So many times a rheinn dies cos awesome super armour turns off and the ship stops or even worse turns around and goes back into the fight lol.

Ships do that w/o replaceweapon effects allready, tho nowhere near as bad as it was in the last version.