Read by Council Weapons Replacement

[nightrune]

I know there are many other threads about this one, but I think this dynamic works for both Players and AI.

Please, If you have a thread post it here and I'll attach them to this one.

Problem:
Swaping out weapons systems on ships from a blueprint. You currently have to download, spawn in, build or download, change to a design and swap in your weapons.

This is not useful for the AI at all as it must have knowledge of the layout and use of the weapons to replace them. It also might not make sense in the future if the AI doesn't have access to certain materials for it to even have access to certain weapons.

Suggesstion:
Create a place holder weapon computer block, and a place holder weapon module. Allow the computer to be named (Purely for player interaction).

In your ship hull/template allow c/v linking between the modules.

In a blueprint/design in the shipyard let someone select what computers and modules should fill the spaces that are named and listed.

The UI could be a tree view of main computer and modules, to slave computer, and so forther, Even including Turret entities.

The Expected Outcome:
This makes it extremely easy to sell a ship hull, or create a template for systems and asign it to an AI faction. The AI they could fill in the weapons based on thier preferences or materials available. This also lets players to do this. They could even decide to not build it with the systems creating an easy way to start with a hull.

References:

 

[Dire Venom]

Very nice suggestion!
Might be a bit further down the track though

 

[aRottenKomquat]

I like the idea, it certainly fills the role of having a standard ship design that can be quickly customized for a different offensive role. But for ease of implementation, even a simple ship-wide Find/Replace Block tool would be very useful and accomplish almost the same thing, and could be generic enough to work in other areas. For example, I wanted to build a basic hull to be outfitted as a drone or fighter, then have differing weapons for different roles, and finally have different colored armor to allow for quick visual confirmation of the ship type/role when a bunch of them are in a hangar.

 

[nightrune]

I like the idea, it certainly fills the role of having a standard ship design that can be quickly customized for a different offensive role. But for ease of implementation, even a simple ship-wide Find/Replace Block tool would be very useful and accomplish almost the same thing, and could be generic enough to work in other areas. For example, I wanted to build a basic hull to be outfitted as a drone or fighter, then have differing weapons for different roles, and finally have different colored armor to allow for quick visual confirmation of the ship type/role when a bunch of them are in a hangar.

Find and replace works but not really for the AI players. We do have a find and replace tool in the advanced build section. If you are on your own server its pretty easy to change the max size to 100 and find replace everything, but it doesn't leave connections as far as I know. Its much easier to have swap this in here, and swap this in here with a drag and drop for someone.

 

[jgames666]

Yeah, this is actually an extremely useful idea. I'd love to see it get more attention.

 

[Sgtwisky]

as far as the suggestion. Having placeholder blocks for things isn't a bad idea. Especially if you could tell a BP what colors you wanted to fill the hull with. Like convert all yellow to red or something. As for weapons my only concern is the change in power cap/recharge that happens depending on the weapon system.

For example a missile could take more then a ships capacity to fire once, and even if the ships power recharge could power it up within its reload time, if you don't have the capacity (because the ship was build with cannon/cannon in mind) it could cause issues. This is only a problem on ships designed to use their power as effectively as possible though. A work around of course would to be have extra power capacity and recharge, but depending on ship size it may not always be reasonable.

I never thought of the AI using similar hulls but maybe changing out weapons to what that AI faction liked to use. Sounds kinda cool to me. Though I would still like the option for server owners to specify ships and not just templates. That way you could "trick out" the AI factions to your RP or PvP needs.

Other then that one possible issue with weapons, I really like the idea.

 

[nightrune]

as far as the suggestion. Having placeholder blocks for things isn't a bad idea. Especially if you could tell a BP what colors you wanted to fill the hull with. Like convert all yellow to red or something. As for weapons my only concern is the change in power cap/recharge that happens depending on the weapon system.

For example a missile could take more then a ships capacity to fire once, and even if the ships power recharge could power it up within its reload time, if you don't have the capacity (because the ship was build with cannon/cannon in mind) it could cause issues. This is only a problem on ships designed to use their power as effectively as possible though. A work around of course would to be have extra power capacity and recharge, but depending on ship size it may not always be reasonable.

I never thought of the AI using similar hulls but maybe changing out weapons to what that AI faction liked to use. Sounds kinda cool to me. Though I would still like the option for server owners to specify ships and not just templates. That way you could "trick out" the AI factions to your RP or PvP needs.

Other then that one possible issue with weapons, I really like the idea.

Tricking out a ship just means no weapon/effect placeholder blocks. The same as it is today.

 

[Master_Artificer]

I mean, it works among some select few weapon designs.

But it wouldn't work with replacing vertical launched missiles with cannons, or waffleboards with missiles....
and the sizes usually vary with what you want the weapon to accomplish, but for the causal builder, this would be a very helpful tool.