Aircraft Weapon Layouts Question

[ezryder]

I'm trying to change the layout of the weapons on the Mig31.

First, I want to shuffle the missile hardpoints back to the wing areas and add a cannon to the nose.

Second I want to have the wing tip mounts only have light missiles, and heavy missile mounts closer to the fuselage.

I fiddled with the XML which yielded some success, but do I have to mod lua files to move/add graphics and mount points on an aircraft?

Edited July 5, 2012 by ezryder
Clarity. What the hell was I typing before?!

[Gauddlike]

It looks like the slot positions are in the aircrafts.xml file.

It is easier to see if you open it in excel or something similar.

Look for the slotpositions section and you will see a list of co-ordinates for each slot a craft has available.

I don't know how well the positions you choose will scale between resolutions.

For example the mig currently has 4 weapon slots and the slotpositions read 80;00;80;440;320;130;320;300

The f-17 has 3 weapons and it reads 340;275;150;50;150;400

These look to be x (distance from the left side of the screen, or more likely the info box) followed by y (distance from bottom).

I would assume the first two sets (80;00 and 80;440) correspond to the avalanche slots, which it would be easier to leave where they are and simply change the weapons allowed in them as they are wingtip mounts.

The third and fourth sets (320;130 and 320;300) would appear to be the sidewinder hardpoints.

Changing the 320 to somewhere around 140 might give the locations you want.

You could then change these to hold heavy missiles.

On the cannon I am unsure if you can have 5 mounts on a craft.

You may need to lose a missile mount to fit it.

*edit* to change the weapons that fit in the slots just change the order they are listed in aircrafts.xml

Edited July 6, 2012 by Gauddlike

[Gauddlike]

Looks like you have a limit of 4 mounts to a craft.

Any more and the game either doesn't recognise the extra slots or crashes if you force it to display them using the script files.

[ezryder]

I did manage to get 5 weapons by overlapping the cannon and one of the sidewinder slots. Problem is you can't change the load out (i.e. change the ballistic cannon for a laser cannon) or you lose the hidden extra slot. Also in air combat the cannon covers the 2 top missiles (sidewinders), so there's no way to hold fire on those. But it does fire 2 missiles, so they're under there. Somewhere.

Instead of staying with that, I went to a 4 missile setup on the Mig (2 normal slots on the wing tips, 2 heavy slots close tot he fuselage) and bumped the armor by 5 points and set CanEvade to 1.

[Gauddlike]

Yeah you can add 5 weapons, you can even add extra (apparently non functioning) slots but the UI doesn't work with them.

You may be able to tweak the air combat UI using the script files to make your cannon appear in a different place, probably not worth the hassle though as it could cause random crashes if the game has issues with 5 slots.

[ezryder]

After seeing there are art assets for the higher research level aircraft, I've been pondering modding those into the game (adding the research topic even). Maybe this week if I get a few days of uninterrupted computer time.

[Chris]

Ezryder - I'd rather you didn't mod the high level aircraft into the game. They're not there because they're not meant to be in the alpha rather than because they're not in the dev version of the game.

[Gauddlike]

Also you don't know how the devs have planned them to work.

If you aren't using them as they are planned to be then might as well just add your own and save the later tiers for when they are officially added.

[ezryder]

Ezryder - I'd rather you didn't mod the high level aircraft into the game. They're not there because they're not meant to be in the alpha rather than because they're not in the dev version of the game.

Understood. I'm content with the current state of the Alpha, was just looking at how much I could learn/teach myself about the modding.

[xilacnog]

Maybe you could remove 1 of the wing tip Sidewinder missiles and use it for the cannon?

keep both wing tips fire positions for the wing tips on the one you keep and put another in the nose for the cannon?

Put ammo count for the Sidewinder at 2x or 4x, so it keeps 2x in each wing tip, and the Avalanche Missiles at 2x ammo count on each mount.

Alternatively, modify the Avalanche missiles so there's only one mount for it with 4x ammo count, use the other mount for the cannon and put the ammo count for the Sidewinders at 2x each.