[freespace2] Questions...

[Taylor Richards]

On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 10:24, Mark Brody wrote:
> * Taylor Richards (mtrs at bellsouth.net) wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 15:06, Dan Olson wrote:
> > > I'll admit I haven't looked into the issue yet, but I was under the
> > > impression that the reason the Babylon 5 and other mods did not work
> > > correctly is because the cfile code matched files in .vp archives case
> > > sensitively.
> > 
> > No it's the other way around.  I put them (B5 stuff) in VP archives to
> > get around the case sensitivity problems.
> 
> The table parser seems slightly confused by some entries in TBP 1.1's 
> ships.tbl.  It sometimes throws confusing warnings (labeled "Error:") 
> when it is expecting two floats (i.e. "10, 0.0") and gets them without 
> whitespace between the comma and the second value (i.e. "10,0.0").  
> This isn't consistent - most of the times it's perfectly happy.  I haven't 
> been able to track this down yet.  The missions still seem to play properly, 
> though, so it can't be that big a deal.

This is just a problem with TBP tables.  I believe they were hand edited
in whole of in part.  Some things aren't commented that should be, "no
collide" should be "no_collide", the WEAPON_LIST_TYPE warnings are
because they are using " " as a weapon name instead of nothing at all
and then of course the floats.  I did consider putting in some
workarounds for things like this that I've seen but I decided that was
stupid and the tables should just be fixed.

> Also, many mods are incorporating FS2_open features in their next releases 
> (the B5 folks really want fighter beam weapons, for example).

I haven't been paying a large amount of attention to this but I have
browsed the discusions.  For Release2, B5 isn't going to have fighter
beam weapons as far as I know.  Last I read R2 was going to incorporate
some changes (probably glow maps by my guess) but nothing major though
more features would come in to play with future releases.  Another issue
is that SCP apparently is developing in two branches and is working to
merge them and this will introduce other mod related changes (the DX
branch can play AVIs for example) that will probably be difficult to get
working.

What gets in and what doesn't isn't for me to say (thank God!) but some
mods are just going to be too Windows and SCP centric to get them going
without a lot of coding work.  Personally I'm not going to worry about
it until a mod comes down the line that just doesn't work and then go
from there.  But anyway, that's my opinion on the whole issue and I've
been wrong many times before so take it for what you will.


Taylor

-- 
Taylor Richards <mtrs at bellsouth.net>