Coaxial weapons rework

[amberlyske]

Anyone else feel like coaxial weapons are just too niche or not strong enough to be really useful? I suggest reworking them to be much more dangerous on a successful hit, but staying balanced by limiting other aspects of the weapons themselves and ships that mount them. 
- First, coaxial weapons should be able to be mounted on the sides of ships. They should still be locked to a side, but it's annoying trying to get a giant block facing forward for the actual weapon to be mounted on, and it often just doesn't work well on my ships.
- Coaxial weapons should use their own kind of hardpoint, now that we have separate independent and pilot operated slots, it shouldn't be difficult to add a unique "heavy slot" for coaxial weapons. Ships should come with 0 heavy slots by default, and equipment modules should only add a few, with massive power requirements so that only large ships can equip them. That can be combined with other nerfs, such as decreasing velocity or lowering independent turret slots. A ship should not be able to mount many of these without being incredibly slow or fragile. This would make for interesting gameplay; dedicated siege ships would have to be protected by point defense or ship-to-ship escorts. 
- Damage and range should be ramped up significantly. These should be siege and/or capital-killer weapons. Make getting hit by them devastating for all but the largest vessels. 
- To compensate, significantly reduce fire rate (or increase cooldown). Also, reduce projectile speed for physical coax weapons and have coax energy weapons draw from the ship's battery. 
- Vastly stronger coax weapons could also make interesting orbital defense emplacements for valuable sectors. Having them be a special kind of station that can rotate with thrusters but not move or jump on their own would be neat. Again, such weapons would be very vulnerable to smaller ships and fighters.

[FuryoftheStars]

Eh, coaxial weapons are just weapons in a fixed position. Fighters technically have coaxial.  Personally, I think they should have smaller ones available sooner (there’s really no reason not to have sized 0.5 iron coaxial).  But by that same token, I do believe they should coaxials on the power level that you describe.

 

Also, you can’t get coaxials on the sides of your ship?  I haven’t had a problem with this?

[amberlyske]

45 minutes ago, FuryoftheStars said:

Also, you can’t get coaxials on the sides of your ship?  I haven’t had a problem with this?

I meant coaxial weapons should be able to face a direction while being mounted on a block that isn't facing forward. Like how turrets can be mounted on a horizontal surface but still initially face forward before turning to shoot at something. Coaxial weapons can't rotate at all, so I figured that they would have to be mounted on a surface perpendicular to the one the user wanted the weapon to face. Is that not the case? 

As for the other thing, yes they're just weapons. I just wish there was more weapon variety. I made a mod for myself that changed some of the stats for turrets and I like it a lot, I just can't seem to figure out where coax modifiers are and can't for the life of me figure out how to make the mod itself work instead of just changing the file manually

[FuryoftheStars]

2 hours ago, amberlyske said:

I meant coaxial weapons should be able to face a direction while being mounted on a block that isn't facing forward. Like how turrets can be mounted on a horizontal surface but still initially face forward before turning to shoot at something. Coaxial weapons can't rotate at all, so I figured that they would have to be mounted on a surface perpendicular to the one the user wanted the weapon to face. Is that not the case? 

Oh, I think I get what you're saying.  Eh, it's a difference in style, really.  You can look at it as this is just the tip of the weapon sticking out from the hull of the ship.

Or, that the blocks of the ship that the coaxial is placed on are a part of the weapon itself.

2 hours ago, amberlyske said:

As for the other thing, yes they're just weapons. I just wish there was more weapon variety. I made a mod for myself that changed some of the stats for turrets and I like it a lot, I just can't seem to figure out where coax modifiers are and can't for the life of me figure out how to make the mod itself work instead of just changing the file manually

In turretgenerator.lua, I believe it's the "scale" function, coaxial turrets will get a x3 damage multiplier.

To get a mod to work, you want to place your mod in the (on windows) %appdata%\Avorion\mods folder.  Inside that folder, you create a new folder (name it whatever, but typically the same as your mod; spaces allowed).  Inside that folder, you'll need a modinfo.lua file (grab one from another mod if need be and change it for yourself), and then you can create a data folder and just mirror the games directory for whichever files you want to modify (I suggest looking at other mods for examples).  From there it's just a matter of enabling the mod in game (Settings -> Mods).  If using on an existing galaxy, just make sure to hit the little "Override galaxy's mods" checkbox before hitting the load button.

Edited July 17, 2021 by FuryoftheStars

[amberlyske]

1 hour ago, FuryoftheStars said:

Oh, I think I get what you're saying.  Eh, it's a difference in style, really.  You can look at it as this is just the tip of the weapon sticking out from the hull of the ship.

Or, that the blocks of the ship that the coaxial is placed on are a part of the weapon itself.

I tried that, and it turned out alright. I put the block near the base of the gun, and made it have clear line of sight through the barrel of said gun. Then used regular blocks to form the rest of the cannon. It turned out alright but I'd definitely like it if I could just mount them like normal turrets (though still fixed).

1 hour ago, FuryoftheStars said:

In turretgenerator.lua, I believe it's the "scale" function, coaxial turrets will get a x3 damage multiplier.

To get a mod to work, you want to place your mod in the (on windows) %appdata%\Avorion\mods folder.  Inside that folder, you create a new folder (name it whatever, but typically the same as your mod; spaces allowed).  Inside that folder, you'll need a modinfo.lua file (grab one from another mod if need be and change it for yourself), and then you can create a data folder and just mirror the games directory for whichever files you want to modify (I suggest looking at other mods for examples).  From there it's just a matter of enabling the mod in game (Settings -> Mods).  If using on an existing galaxy, just make sure to hit the little "Override galaxy's mods" checkbox before hitting the load button.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that file. As for the mod, I did that following a guide, but for some reason, when I ran it, it stopped any turrets from generating. Even the starting ones. It has the exact same code as the files I manually inserted into the proper directory so I don't know what's going on. 

Edited July 18, 2021 by amberlyske

[FuryoftheStars]

6 hours ago, amberlyske said:

Thanks, I'll take a look at that file. As for the mod, I did that following a guide, but for some reason, when I ran it, it stopped any turrets from generating. Even the starting ones. It has the exact same code as the files I manually inserted into the proper directory so I don't know what's going on. 

Most likely an error of some sort in what you put in there caused weapon generation to bug out.  Bear in mind the code in the game has changed a lot, so you won't be able to copy what a guide shows exactly.

[amberlyske]

11 hours ago, FuryoftheStars said:

Most likely an error of some sort in what you put in there caused weapon generation to bug out.  Bear in mind the code in the game has changed a lot, so you won't be able to copy what a guide shows exactly.

I meant that I had a guide for configuring the mod to work, not for the code itself. I don't think I was actually adding anything, just changing numbers around, and like I said, it did work when I just put the file in manually. I was going to wait for 2.0 to be out before attempting a fix