weapons vs. skills

[Mattn]

It's in rev. 1688

[Bandobras]

Indeed, it works. So, we moved back to trunk?

Mattn, could you please comment (with Yes/No) my whole last post, so that I'm sure we understand each other, before I start changing things?

[Mattn]

we can seperate them by primary, secondary and so on. no problem

Good. I've just noticed there is already the separation of human (bullet and laser) and alien (plasma and tachyon) weapons in the wiki. Is it sound wrt. the techtree? If so, then I guess I will keep the separation.

yes, alien and human should stay seperated in the wiki. as we included the skill types in each weapon article now, we can also leave the current seperation as is (if you don't have a better idea).

or we can seperate them [...] to skilltypes... what do you think is better?

By skilltypes is impossible, because some weapons have two different skills for their two shooting modes. I'm worried that we are again not understanding each other. Could you confirm what I've just said?

Yes you are right - does not make sense. There are and will be weapons(ammo) with different skill types

And: are you abolutely sure the complications with double skills for weapons are worth it?[...]

if we are talking about the same things - yes. they are already implemented and works great.

I'm talking about the fact that, e.g. Laser Rifle has two weapon skills, precise and assault (and not only precise, as you erroneusly stated in the wiki) and this is a complication. Right? And no, this is not fully imlemented in the game interface, because currently the player has no way of veryfying the skills for Laser Rifle, apart of code-diving. Right?

No complication - and as stated above already shown in menu now.

the skills says something about the hit ratio

Could you explain, please? I think this is very important. Please, explain.

Ahh, sorry, I misuderstood you. I thought you are going to explain to me the criteria of assigning skills to shooting modes, e.g. why there is "explosive" skill, while there is no "plasma", or "tachyon" skill. But I guess I begin to see this myself: "explosive" does not mean that the damage type is "blast"; it only says that the damage is mostly done with splash damage. Right? If so, I guess both Rocket Laucher and Grenade Laucher should be "explosive"? And I though the error was that they should be both "heavy"... :oops:

Yes, thats right, too.

[Bandobras]

Thanks! So I'm back to work. I'll upload a patch that undos my errors in weapons_human.ufo and tweaks some more things there, as soon as sourceforge is up again.

[Bandobras]

OK. So I uploaded the patch that corrects my errors in weapon scripts and does some more things.

This time weapons.ufo and weapons_human.ufo tweaked. I moved grenades to the former, as the latter is already too big. Now primary and secondary weapons are in weapons_human.ufo and misc equipment in weapons.ufo. I changed blades and stunrod to be secondary weapons, instead of misc equpiment.

After seeing the Kerrblade model (it sure looks nasty) I decided to leave the Kerrblade anomalous low stab  and high throw damage as is. This way Plasma Blade does not obsolete Kerrblade, while both obsolete Knife.

I've also uploaded a patch for a test_campaign that has lots of equpiment ready for testing from the beginning. Unfortunately I do not know how to load that campaign other than from the menu (where it does not belong). Moreover the game crashes as soon as I reload a saved game from this campaign (too much stuff).

[Bandobras]

A new patch is ready, subsuming the old one. This time I changed all the weapon script files. Not many serious changes, compared to the subsumed patch; mainly visual tweaks and some name changes. I see there is a lot of balancing to be done for the alien weapons (e.b. Tachyon Pistol), as opposed to the human weapons, which have seen much action and only require some small touches (that reminds me, I increased reload time for RPG for realism, and slightly lowered shooting cost to compensate; this may encourage camping, but should foremost encourage carrying and using sidearms, e.g,. SMGs).

That said, there are really some nice things among the alien weapons. For instance, the idea to use horizontal recoil for the plasma pistol is briliant. We should try not to spoil those by too brutal tweaking.

[Bandobras]

A this moment the whole Equipment chapter of the wiki is a complete mess, especially alien weapon descriptions. Please correct obvious mistakes and offer suggestions for total rewrites in Suggestion subsections. Then we will discuss the suggestions in the talk pages. Thank you. The mess is the result of my moving all weapon descriptions from src/doc/weapons.txt to the wiki. Please do not add any equipment descriptions to the game, without placing them also on the wiki, so that we do not have to resynchronize again and again. Thank you for your cooperation.

Mattn, could you remove the src/doc/weapons.txt file or at least add a note at its beginning? Thanks.