Tie Fighter, woes

Why can't we just have a folder that holds all the cockpit models, and when the player selects a ship, we swap in the correct cockpit model to replace the original? And anytime a new ship is chosen we swap in the required cockpit model.

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Thats why I was so suprised SC, because I had presumed that you had discarded the idea back then (in that referenced 9th post).

There is also something I didn't know/realize back when we first started talking about this:

The trick I used to place the starfury cockpit as a child sim on the crew null position only works when the cockpit is removed by pressing F1. Otherwise you have the new cockpit on top of the original. There is no way to press the F1 button for the player per pog! Thats why I used the F1 key as the keybind to actuate the function (killing 2 birds with one stone). You probably noticed that when you switch to the turret the "Docked" Icon is active too.

one solution I can think of to switch cockpits would be (simular to SC's suggestion): Somehow create all the ships without a cockpit at all (make a dummy Avatar for the Cockpit?) and then place a ship specific cockpit (or the original) as a child sim on the ship per pog as it is created.
The drawback is we would always have the "docked" icon flashing (all the time!) on all the ships.

Another possibility might be something like Shane and I did on the Verona freighter: Make the cockpit as the avatar of a class icturret (flipped "up" by 90 degrees). Then we could place the turret per ini file on the crew null. If that works at all (note the if!) we wouldn't have the docking icon flashing but probably won't have any cockpit sway anymore either.

Both solutions are IFy/cludgy as far as I am concerned. [V]

We would need a icTurret avatar to test the second possible solution.
Who wants to make one?

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No, not at all. I love the idea of custom cockpits. I think the plan was that I was going to do half of them, and Hot4 was going to do the other half. But he never got back to me on that, yet.

And why make it so complicated? I don't think the player can switch ships during play, can he? So just literally swap in the custom model in place of the original. Copy the original cockpit files to a backup folder, than copy the necessary custom cockpit files into the avatars\cockpit\ folder. Then let flux do all the standard cockpit effects; sway, etc.

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Originally posted by Second Chance


And why make it so complicated?

Because in EOC all ships are hardcoded to have the same cockpit. Thats the one in avatars/cockpit.
None of the setup scenes for the ships have a null object for the/a cockpit. So, there is now way to get the game to use a custom cockpit file even if you have one. (i.e it would use you custom file for all ships in the game)

[OT]

btw, If your method would work, it wouldn't be necessary to back up the original avatar folder and replace the cockpit drawings there.

Lesson 1: How the SW mod works

The SW mod works by setting the search path in flux .ini. Then the folder StarWarsA1 has preference over the resource folder for all client applications. Therefore, whatever is in StarWarsA1/avatars, is used by the game instead of what is in the resource/avatars folder.

The only files that are backed up and switched out are the one used excusivly by the server application. Because the server is hardcoded to use a specific path.

That is why I keep saying the mod cannot mess up your SP game. Now that you understand this, does it make a difference, so that you will be willing to load the mod and try some of the stuff out instead of just talking about it theoretically?





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That is why I keep saying the mod cannot mess up your SP game.

But if you recall, it did. After I ran the de-install, then ran it again because it didn't work, it tried to put the original flux.ini back. But since there was no longer any backup, it replaced it with nothing, effectively deleting it. Not to mention hiding my mods so I couldn't find them because it failed to rename the mods folder back to normal.

I'm not really concerned with running it. I can usually figure out how to restore it. It's just annoying that I can never play it more than once without having to fix EoC and re-installing the mod. But, you may have fixed all that stuff while I was gone, so I'll try it today.

I see your point about about the cockpits. The real problem is, that we have no way of knowing which cockpit belongs to which ship. Otherwise it would hardly be difficult to say; "Ok, the player selected ship X. So copy ship X's cockpit into the avatar\cockpit\ folder. The game will then automatically use the right cockpit. In fact, why not make it work? But not as a subsim. Why don't we put the custom cockpit for each ship in that ships avatar folder with its other model files, then have flux look in the avatar folder for the cockpit files and copy them into the avatars\cockpit\ folder. Then, anytime we add a new ship to the mod, as long as we put the cockpit in the avatar folder, it will automatically load the correct cockpit. And code it so that if there is no cockpit found, the default is used. Sound reasonable?

I'm going to post this over in the cockpit thread to let this one get back on track.

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Originally posted by Second Chance


I'm going to post this over in the cockpit thread to let this one get back on track.

I put both of the 2 subjects in the appropriate threads and commented on them there.

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