Oh good grief. It's been a year?
So, for all the disinterested people out there, an update...
Is this mod still alive? What the heck happened?
Short answer: Yeah kind of. Expect a release (v1.6) for Btech v1.8 in a relatively short time frame.
Long answer: Hobbes poked me about it and with Heavy Metal coming out I got curious enough to dig around. I fell off the Btech train just before Urban Warfare due to family medical issues and so I'm not as current as I liked.
Coming back at this time with mods supported is an interesting time. The short form of it is, my mod still loads and works (mostly) under v1.8, and I was able to quickly adapt the stuff to go into the new Modloader standard.
Unfortunately, that's where things ran off the rails. The Modloader works... but that's not the only thing that HBS changed. One of the changes was ammo category enumeration, and combined with a sequencing error I made in the mod.json, gave me no end of grief. The net effect of the enumeration is that you can't declare new ammunition -- that's the ammo, not the ammo box. Had ammo enumeration been opened up for mod work from the Modloader, it won't be a problem, but currently it isn't; the Factions was the first, the rest based on HBS pirority. Ammo enumeration is the correct way to go IMO, so it's a matter of Patience.
The issue sort of starts with the ammo
boxes. We can declare new ammo boxes, but HBS changed a bit of the old behaviour, so there are some constraints now. previously, you
can declare an ammo box of say, missile, but the internal ammo category could be say, AC. The system doesn't care about the internal ammo category, it'd just take the ammo box and feed your weapon.
Now, the
combat system still doesn't care, but because the enumeration shifted some behaviour, the
Mechlab UI suddenly cares. If you had done the above (AC ammo hiding inside a missile box), the Mechlab now peeks into the ammo box and puts the ammo box not in the missile category, but in the ballistic category.
Why is this important? Because if your mech doesn't have a ballistic hardpoint, the mechlab UI automatically blocks any attempt so use that ammo box, so now you can't load ammo for your weapon. Bummer.
So now your new missile weapon have to use a pre-existing missile ammo. You have to start worrying about ammo sharing. If you put MRMs on the same ammo category as SRMs, you may end up sharing ammo between SRMs and MRMs, which can lead to quite offensive mechs. If you stupidly put "NotSet" on say, an UAC, then you end up with an infinite ammo UAC. Some of you might actually like these changes, but we sort of have to strike a balance somewhere... I hear the AI Mechwarriors are unionizing.
So that leads to a lot of weapon tinkering, and that gets weird too. In order to avoid having AMS ammo lookups, I changed my Rocket Launchers to Flamer ammo, and that lead to a fun "out of ammo" audio because the enumeration now have those in settings. Rocket Launchers are Flamers now, ho ya. Actually, I ended up putting them as SRM Infernos, because
that ammo has a new parameter to only use internal ammo (i.e., don't use bins... I think).
So yeah. Somewhat problematic, especially if you have a long history of new weapons that has been tuned. You now potentially have to go back and redo a lot of parameters and do retuning again, and that might not last very long, depending on when HBS will introduce Ammo Category Enumeration by Mod.Json.
(Obi-wan HBS_Ecks, you are our only hope.)
Yeah yeah, so what can we expect?
Short-ish answer: There will be a v1.6 rollout for my mod(s). This is primarily to keep things updated and users to have continuity in their saves. This is not intended to be a full blown update, just a technical bridge.
v1.6 will:
- Use the new Modloader technique.
- Ensure compatibility for Career and Campagin games.
- This is still to be tested, as I am now focussed on Skirmish to test out the bugs there.
- Ensure the new weapons are updated to work in the new environment.
- Currently I think all the weapons work -- and I've upgraded the LBX. I'd need to do more testing on those.
- Equipment I didn't test. They should still work.
- My Warhammer and Marauder are still FrakenMechs.
Following on:
v1.7+ will:
- Update Warhammer and Marauder to use HBS assets. I still need to maintain these mech jsons for continuity.
- Probably revise and update EW once I get to grips with the EW equipment from Urban Warfare. I won't replace my equipment, but probably update them with new capabilities that HBS introduced.
- Reach a decision how to handle DLC mechs. I probably will have to spin off a "Reseen and Retired" package to update all of these mechs for DLC holders, so that existing users of the mod can apply those and still have continuity in their save files.
- Maybe introduce more off-beat mech designs to replace DLC mechs. I would try to keep this mod at around 100 mechs, due to performance reasons.
Lastly, just to share...
My perspective of this mod is really an entry-level, simplistic (and in some sense safer) mod for users who aren't so keen to start with more complex mods. Think of it as a gateway drug.
