Loadout Design

Linked weapons work! Whoohoo!

The idea of pulling the beam weapons off and then using the iMultiplay.LinkShipWeapons call worked! Now the player has a fighting chance against the AI. I have tested it on ships armed with almost all kinds of weapons, missiles, and beams. The missiles don't Link, but I can't change that.

But I guess that is the smaller bit of the news. I had a bunch of bugs related to the player base and saves not working right. Instead of coding yet more workarounds for that annoying base, I put the time into writing a new Loadout GUI. And it is almost done. I was most of the way there after rewriting the wingmen code to save subsystem damage.

It is not complex and there is no animation or anything, but it does let the player swap any weapons that are placed with the new hardpoints. And you can see the subsim information and the ships status, so heat and power are easy to view.

Animation could be added the same way it is in cargo purchasing, after the screen closes some drones could race out from the station and mess around the ship that had the loadout changed.

The next bit of work is to add a player equipment purchase/sell screen to get the player systems out of the standard economy. Then it will be easy to purchase equipment from the stations.

Wow! Nice work! That means we can likely include NPC ships with player AI, to allow linked weapons for the NPC's too. Which will help to make your 'single ship' idea work a little better. And the loadout is even better news. It will be so nice to be rid of that annoying base screen.

I hope we are not going to let the player keep a phantom inventory of weapons somewhere. If we are going to have this new loadout, we might as well go all the way and require the player to either sell old weapons, or have an actual place to store them. At a mining base or something perhaps. And we will be needing a 'repair/reload' ship soon, unless we plan to only allow refitting at stations?

You bring up a really good point about the inventory. Right now I am just using the standard phantom inventory because it was easy.

I was thinking of using the "must sell old to upgrade" idea, because it worked well enough for privateer and elite. But then I realized players would hate it because it won't let you swap weapons between wingmen.

So now, I think the best solution is to have weapons be cargo pods, just like all other player inventory. We will let the player sell at any station, so for those who don't have wingmen or don't want to horde, it will play just like Elite: buy a weapon, sell a weapon.

That leaves room in the future for the salvage of wrecks, stealing weapons from navy supply transports, etc.

Ammo is a bit tricky. The simple solution is allow resupply at any station. And that is where we will start. There are other more complex solutions that can be attempted in later releases if the simple one proves unhappy for some reason or another.

I have been thinking about this a bit more, and player equipment just does not work as cargo pods.

The player could not purchase equipment from stations without pod spewers. The player would have to have a ship dock on the pod spewer to purchase equipment.

If we place ship equipment around stations that don't have pod spewers, then the stations need to track inventory of player equipment.

Instead of 1 player inventory, we now have 1000 of them. That won't work.

So, it is player phantom inventory or no inventory. The player will have to make do pirating for general cargo.

It looks like I spoke too soon about the beams. You can have one beam, but two beams crash the game. Removing them seems to prevent replacing them properly a moment later. Not sure why, but I can't seem to work around it.

This only impacts the player ship. All player wingmen can mount as many beams as you like. But the player can only have one.

I think the easiest solution is to make the beam weapon mount point a special one, and then only put one on each player flown ship.

The weapon linking is too valuable to give up for multiple beam weapons. It is easy to build a single beam that does as much damage as two (and takes as much power and heat).

We could just limit beam weapons by making them extremely energy hungry and hot (as anyone would expect them to be). Of course you still need to limit them in the code, but at least this would make it logical.