[Mod Release] Tetsuhara Heavy Industries Mod Thread
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It was missing ammo, but MRM ammo wasn't one of them.
EDIT: Oh hey, the Purple Enforcer still is purple. That's nice.
In other words is impossible for the UI itself to expand critical slots shown - that might be a bummer since I was thinking about creating equipment for gyros and actuators (that don't do anything except crit pad) to fill in those sections per record sheets, maybe someone will figure it out by decompiling or something.
Ah, yeah... I wondered about that. I was hoping to have my mech construction house rules give fewer slots to lighter mechs. Guess that's unlikely to pan out.
How do you bring overweight mechs into the game, and where do I download the mod that adds all that new equipment?
On that, here's an interesting:
We don't see anything, but it seems the Mechlab is respecting stated location sizing info in the files... just not displaying the number of slots correctly.
Meanwhile, signs of progress:
Still need to QA but here the game kicks in to help: I can use the mechlab to swap weapons for testing. Wee!
So how is LBX set up in your version? 2 Halfweight weapons or proper ammo switching?
Unfortunately, neither. You choose either the cluster cannon or solid slug cannon. At the moment I hadn’t seen any evidence that ammo switching is possible in game, so the whole weapon is one type or the other.
Cluster rounds are however something not usually found on auto cannons, and I tune the weapon stats to be more accurate and crit-seeking. With the individual darts, overall damage is a bit lower and spread out, so that config brings something different to the table.
QA testing of the weapons have began and the focus is shifting quickly to the two autocannons: the LBX and Ultra. The problem isn’t the backend data; that’s long established and in any event can be tweaked. The problem is actually in the Weapons Effect. In Beta I was forced to use MG effect because using autocannon effects either put all damage into one location - which is undesirable - or disable the mech’s damage for the entire attack which is even less so.
Fast forward to today and we still have the same problem of getting the damage concentrated into one location, which defeats the purpose of the LBX and makes the Ultra unbalanced. Well at least it’s an improvement over “no damage at all”... I really need to reenable logs to work more precisely.
In other area, pulse laser effects are very nice. Missile weapons are generally fine, but a thought struck me. What if we made Rocket Launchers AP weapons? Imagine if a Jagermech takes a swing at you and 30 rockets comes out at the same time. Ouch.
Fast forward to today and we still have the same problem of getting the damage concentrated into one location, which defeats the purpose of the LBX and makes the Ultra unbalanced. Well at least it’s an improvement over “no damage at all”... I really need to reenable logs to work more precisely.
In other area, pulse laser effects are very nice. Missile weapons are generally fine, but a thought struck me. What if we made Rocket Launchers AP weapons? Imagine if a Jagermech takes a swing at you and 30 rockets comes out at the same time. Ouch.
If we ever get the Periphery bug mech variants in that are packing RLs, I really like this idea.
How about both? RL10s as AP and then 15s and 20s as missiles? That way ridiculous mechs like the COM-4H and CN9-H can pack on the missiles in their numerous missile slots and lets other mechs with AP hardpoints to spare a way to fill tonnage.
Don't seperate them, make them different weapons.
I'd love to see energy hardpoint small lasers, ALONG WITH small hardpoint small lasers.
Just add two identical weapons in different slots.
Putting RLs as both missile and AP will confuse end user because in the mechlab if you don’t filter by type, you’d end up seeing two versions.
There are a couple of reasons to use RLs as AP weapon, mostly to increase its utility. It can still fire like a normal missile out to max range, but it now can be used as a last resort melee boost too - a big one. Balancing that is that it’s one shot. Hopefully with additional AP weapons, more chassis will get AP hardpoints, but from a modding perspective that cresates problems too... I’d need to think about this a bit.
There are a couple of reasons to use RLs as AP weapon, mostly to increase its utility. It can still fire like a normal missile out to max range, but it now can be used as a last resort melee boost too - a big one. Balancing that is that it’s one shot. Hopefully with additional AP weapons, more chassis will get AP hardpoints, but from a modding perspective that cresates problems too... I’d need to think about this a bit.
Yes, and since you can only put one on a slot, the user will figure it out eventually.
Good as any place to do an update on the progress.
First, the Weapons Mods are coming along ok. As can be seen in the screen cap above, the weapons previously released for Beta has already been converted to PROD standards, and can be used in the MechLab. I also ended up retaining my own version of Gauss, LPL, ERPPC, etc even though HBS has their own versions now. The reason being, HBS has sneakily locked those weapons out from the Skirmish Mechlab, and rather than messing with their JSONs, it's more appropriate for me to just release my own versions.
So am I going to release the Weapons pack? No.
Why? 2 reasons.
There's a serious problem with how mods and the mechlab will interact, as detailed here; Any modders should be aware of this problem, because while I don't really give a frag about screwing my own installation, I do give a big deal about forcing some unknown user to give up his campaign progress. It's a big no-no.
And what I want to release is the weapons options for people to build their mechs with. Of course it's going to hit the mentioned problem. So to be safe, I'm not releasing anything till I can be sure we can at least reverse the problem cleanly.
The second reason is that even if I do resolve the bigger issue, there are still a couple of odd bugs that requires the user to modify specific files beyond VersionManifest. One of them is to create a AMS ammo box, because... weird reasons. The other is to specifically tell the system to pre-load certain definitions. As you can see, both aren't exactly "good" things to do, so I'm sort of waiting to see if HBS will address some of these issues.
So, no toys for you guys. Sorry, but I'm not going to deal with a whole bunch of people complaining they have to reinstall their entire game and wiping their progress in the campaign.
Still, I'd take the opportunity to continue to add toys. Back in Beta, because another modder was doing some specific weapons, I specifically didn't overlap with his mod. Not sure if he's still doing them, but I figured.. well, might as well add to the collection here.
First, the Weapons Mods are coming along ok. As can be seen in the screen cap above, the weapons previously released for Beta has already been converted to PROD standards, and can be used in the MechLab. I also ended up retaining my own version of Gauss, LPL, ERPPC, etc even though HBS has their own versions now. The reason being, HBS has sneakily locked those weapons out from the Skirmish Mechlab, and rather than messing with their JSONs, it's more appropriate for me to just release my own versions.
So am I going to release the Weapons pack? No.
Why? 2 reasons.
There's a serious problem with how mods and the mechlab will interact, as detailed here; Any modders should be aware of this problem, because while I don't really give a frag about screwing my own installation, I do give a big deal about forcing some unknown user to give up his campaign progress. It's a big no-no.
And what I want to release is the weapons options for people to build their mechs with. Of course it's going to hit the mentioned problem. So to be safe, I'm not releasing anything till I can be sure we can at least reverse the problem cleanly.
The second reason is that even if I do resolve the bigger issue, there are still a couple of odd bugs that requires the user to modify specific files beyond VersionManifest. One of them is to create a AMS ammo box, because... weird reasons. The other is to specifically tell the system to pre-load certain definitions. As you can see, both aren't exactly "good" things to do, so I'm sort of waiting to see if HBS will address some of these issues.
So, no toys for you guys. Sorry, but I'm not going to deal with a whole bunch of people complaining they have to reinstall their entire game and wiping their progress in the campaign.
Still, I'd take the opportunity to continue to add toys. Back in Beta, because another modder was doing some specific weapons, I specifically didn't overlap with his mod. Not sure if he's still doing them, but I figured.. well, might as well add to the collection here.
Moving on to the other mod, which is the mass/ mess of mechs that I previously released, here's some updates.
1. Fundamentally, there's nothing to stop me from updating and converting the files for release:
(If you can't tell what's changed for this one....)
2. What is causing problems is, again, this is a variants release pack. Naturally users would want to modify these and play around, at least in Skirmish.
(BTW, all the stuff in my mods to date should be unpurchaseable, so they shouldn't show up in the campaign... I hope.)
Anyway, people would want to change the loadout etc. And BAM, we start a time bomb sitting inside the DB. Not fun.
The other issue is about the methodology used to get those mechs clobbered together. There are limitations to that technique, the one that would hit most would be that while you can make changes to the weaponry, the outward appearance won't change very much. You can swap a laser to a PPC and the model would still be a laser, though it'd spit PPC bolts in game. Some people are ok with that, some aren't.
The other issue is that the hardpoints are defined very narrowly as a result of that. Typically, a PPC will get only one Energy point, whereas in HBS, they can be rather generous with hardpoints. Again, some people are fine with this, others not so much. I can still tweak this but honestly, the intent of this mod was to release for stock fights, not building more variants.
For the time being, I'd continue to slow burn this as there's quite a lot of code changes I need to do to my script to make it compatible. Again, the main blocker is the mod/ DB issue, not so much the work (though it's quite a bit of effort).
1. Fundamentally, there's nothing to stop me from updating and converting the files for release:
(If you can't tell what's changed for this one....)
2. What is causing problems is, again, this is a variants release pack. Naturally users would want to modify these and play around, at least in Skirmish.
(BTW, all the stuff in my mods to date should be unpurchaseable, so they shouldn't show up in the campaign... I hope.)
Anyway, people would want to change the loadout etc. And BAM, we start a time bomb sitting inside the DB. Not fun.
The other issue is about the methodology used to get those mechs clobbered together. There are limitations to that technique, the one that would hit most would be that while you can make changes to the weaponry, the outward appearance won't change very much. You can swap a laser to a PPC and the model would still be a laser, though it'd spit PPC bolts in game. Some people are ok with that, some aren't.
The other issue is that the hardpoints are defined very narrowly as a result of that. Typically, a PPC will get only one Energy point, whereas in HBS, they can be rather generous with hardpoints. Again, some people are fine with this, others not so much. I can still tweak this but honestly, the intent of this mod was to release for stock fights, not building more variants.
For the time being, I'd continue to slow burn this as there's quite a lot of code changes I need to do to my script to make it compatible. Again, the main blocker is the mod/ DB issue, not so much the work (though it's quite a bit of effort).
Moving on, just to demonstrate what does take place from time to time, I was looking at the Dragon. The Dragon never made it into the Beta, and I had to cobber together parts to make a Dragon in Beta. I like the chassis, and as my avatar puts it, I serve the Coordinator, so the Dragon naturally has a place in my mods.
One of the things to do for the Dragon is to make it Grand Dragon compatible. PGI never released a Grand Dragon compatible model, as there was never a RT energy mount. So either someone has to make one, or I have to clobber one together from spare parts.
Putting together the JSON files for the Grand Dragon took maybe twenty minutes, because I forgot to do some referencing properly. But it loaded ok, in both Mechlab and Skirmish. That's when the problem starts, because the RT laser just plain refuse to load.
Why? Because Dragon. Specifically, the Dragon model itself has an elongated CT and shoulders/ ST set far back. That meant it didn't have the same frame of reference as typical humanoid Mechs, and that meant most of the parts couldn't mesh with the main body. When that happens, the game just drops the part.
But at that point, I couldn't tell whether HBS had updated the model engine or some such that would block my technique. So I had to do testing, and because Dragon, it was just annoying finding something that worked. The first successful one was IIRC a Locust arm weapon:
See that little pipe sticking out from the head? Yeah. That's the Locust laser. Basically the Dragon's geometry is so unique, it creates problems. So begins 2~3 hours of continual trial and error until I could find a good fit:
That, BTW, is the 1st laser of the Hunchback. Not a perfect fit, but believe me, that's about the best we get from what asset we have on file. Short of someone actually creating new assets, this is what I can get out of the system.
Does it shoot? Yes:
It'd also emit PPC, as I've went to the Mechlab and swapped the arm PPC with the laser, and tested that. A lot of effort for a single mount, but the Coordinator Expects.
(Which reminds me, I better go back in game and removed that Dragon build in the DB.)
EDIT: Oh incidentally, if you are asking... this isn't the version I want to release, because... by rights, the 2 extra heat sinks Luthien Armour Works added to the Grand Dragon is supposed to be in the engine heat sinks, but that doesn't quite work out in this game, because of the flat-10 rule. So I ended up jamming them in the legs for a quick access to the mech in the mechlab for testing. I do have a working solution to bring the Engine Heat Sink issue down to practical, so I'm not too worried about that one.
One of the things to do for the Dragon is to make it Grand Dragon compatible. PGI never released a Grand Dragon compatible model, as there was never a RT energy mount. So either someone has to make one, or I have to clobber one together from spare parts.
Putting together the JSON files for the Grand Dragon took maybe twenty minutes, because I forgot to do some referencing properly. But it loaded ok, in both Mechlab and Skirmish. That's when the problem starts, because the RT laser just plain refuse to load.
Why? Because Dragon. Specifically, the Dragon model itself has an elongated CT and shoulders/ ST set far back. That meant it didn't have the same frame of reference as typical humanoid Mechs, and that meant most of the parts couldn't mesh with the main body. When that happens, the game just drops the part.
But at that point, I couldn't tell whether HBS had updated the model engine or some such that would block my technique. So I had to do testing, and because Dragon, it was just annoying finding something that worked. The first successful one was IIRC a Locust arm weapon:
See that little pipe sticking out from the head? Yeah. That's the Locust laser. Basically the Dragon's geometry is so unique, it creates problems. So begins 2~3 hours of continual trial and error until I could find a good fit:
That, BTW, is the 1st laser of the Hunchback. Not a perfect fit, but believe me, that's about the best we get from what asset we have on file. Short of someone actually creating new assets, this is what I can get out of the system.
Does it shoot? Yes:
It'd also emit PPC, as I've went to the Mechlab and swapped the arm PPC with the laser, and tested that. A lot of effort for a single mount, but the Coordinator Expects.
(Which reminds me, I better go back in game and removed that Dragon build in the DB.)
EDIT: Oh incidentally, if you are asking... this isn't the version I want to release, because... by rights, the 2 extra heat sinks Luthien Armour Works added to the Grand Dragon is supposed to be in the engine heat sinks, but that doesn't quite work out in this game, because of the flat-10 rule. So I ended up jamming them in the legs for a quick access to the mech in the mechlab for testing. I do have a working solution to bring the Engine Heat Sink issue down to practical, so I'm not too worried about that one.
Today is a good day as progress was made, more so than anticipated;I was quietly dreading the amount of work needed to get the JSON formats updated from Beta to PROD, but that turned out to be rather fast and quite pleasant.
The upside to that is that we were able to move towards testing much faster than I'd thought. So much so that we ran into an unanticipated problem -- apparently, it's possible for a mod to load in Mechlab, but fail to load in the actual skirmish. The root cause of this was that I was using an older map of the assets used in the Quickdraw model, and the PROD engine had some disagreements with. Once I sorted out the issue, the mod was able to load.
So what do we have today? How about a.. reimaged Unseen?
A Phoenix Hawk in a Vindicator shell. The fun part is that I never handled the AP mounts properly, but the MGs still showed up, and in game they still function as MGs, even though they weren't on any AP mounts -- those were Ballistics mounts. The game did complain about it, but ultimately let it pass.
The one causing the problem turned out to be my Beta Grand Dragon, seen here posing with the Prod Grand Dragon:
Yup, that's a Quickdraw posing as a Grand Dragon. Come to think of it, my campaign game Quickdraw probably can be refitted to the same standards...? Anyway, the problem turned out to be that some of the blanks and hardpoint asset files had changed between Beta and PROD, and I was using Beta calls; once I adjusted, the model worked fine.
Not everything in the mod turned out great, but the whole point of the mod was to get functional, decent looking models of unknown variants into play. One ugly but working model is the Crusader:
Can't really say that looked good and yes, those are K-Cat arms merged in. The Hunchback missiles look good merged into the Jager legs though. I might explore using the Thunderbolt's shell as an alternative now that the Thud is available to me, but for the moment, I can release as is.
On the back end, because the game UI cannot display my preferred 12/2 critical slot, I sort of realign the system back tot he 10/4 critical setup. This would mean I need to go back and adjust my weapons so that the big ones can fit. Not too sure about that one. Incidentally all these are adjusted for Engine Heat Sinks, so these are performing more to book; some would run hotter, others cooler.
A minor issue is that I left the option for full back armour, and since the Mechlab doesn't appear to check armour allocation split fore and aft, it is possible to go beyond book limits on armour.
So what's outstanding? Well just a couple of minor things. First I need to update the blanks and hardpoints maps I'm using, nothing too serious but better to do for safety. The second is that annoyingly, HBS is using pre-equipment weight as a balancing tool in the Mechlab, and that information is surprisingly hard to get... I'm having to re-engineer the values, and with my datum of mech designs stretching the full width, that can get into somewhat exotic designs. I'm still working on that. I also *might* want to sort the AP mount problem out, simply to get it more in line.
But we've came close enough that the question of should I release this mod, even with the obvious risk to save games? These are variants that can be used in Skirmish, so it's obvious people would want to modify with weapons loadout (even though the hardpoints are quite restrictive), so the savegame problem will definitely occur. I'm leaning towards release, but I do have concerns about the problem.
The upside to that is that we were able to move towards testing much faster than I'd thought. So much so that we ran into an unanticipated problem -- apparently, it's possible for a mod to load in Mechlab, but fail to load in the actual skirmish. The root cause of this was that I was using an older map of the assets used in the Quickdraw model, and the PROD engine had some disagreements with. Once I sorted out the issue, the mod was able to load.
So what do we have today? How about a.. reimaged Unseen?
A Phoenix Hawk in a Vindicator shell. The fun part is that I never handled the AP mounts properly, but the MGs still showed up, and in game they still function as MGs, even though they weren't on any AP mounts -- those were Ballistics mounts. The game did complain about it, but ultimately let it pass.
The one causing the problem turned out to be my Beta Grand Dragon, seen here posing with the Prod Grand Dragon:
Yup, that's a Quickdraw posing as a Grand Dragon. Come to think of it, my campaign game Quickdraw probably can be refitted to the same standards...? Anyway, the problem turned out to be that some of the blanks and hardpoint asset files had changed between Beta and PROD, and I was using Beta calls; once I adjusted, the model worked fine.
Not everything in the mod turned out great, but the whole point of the mod was to get functional, decent looking models of unknown variants into play. One ugly but working model is the Crusader:
Can't really say that looked good and yes, those are K-Cat arms merged in. The Hunchback missiles look good merged into the Jager legs though. I might explore using the Thunderbolt's shell as an alternative now that the Thud is available to me, but for the moment, I can release as is.
On the back end, because the game UI cannot display my preferred 12/2 critical slot, I sort of realign the system back tot he 10/4 critical setup. This would mean I need to go back and adjust my weapons so that the big ones can fit. Not too sure about that one. Incidentally all these are adjusted for Engine Heat Sinks, so these are performing more to book; some would run hotter, others cooler.
A minor issue is that I left the option for full back armour, and since the Mechlab doesn't appear to check armour allocation split fore and aft, it is possible to go beyond book limits on armour.
So what's outstanding? Well just a couple of minor things. First I need to update the blanks and hardpoints maps I'm using, nothing too serious but better to do for safety. The second is that annoyingly, HBS is using pre-equipment weight as a balancing tool in the Mechlab, and that information is surprisingly hard to get... I'm having to re-engineer the values, and with my datum of mech designs stretching the full width, that can get into somewhat exotic designs. I'm still working on that. I also *might* want to sort the AP mount problem out, simply to get it more in line.
But we've came close enough that the question of should I release this mod, even with the obvious risk to save games? These are variants that can be used in Skirmish, so it's obvious people would want to modify with weapons loadout (even though the hardpoints are quite restrictive), so the savegame problem will definitely occur. I'm leaning towards release, but I do have concerns about the problem.