Yes it works just fine with the beta toolset

Yes look in reference data -> game info

And last but not least, yes, notepad will work perfectly.

look for the frigatepahseantifighter.entity, frigatepsiantifighter.entity, and frigatetacantifighter.entity files specifically.

Aye, the frig files will only effect the anti fighter frigs, look for files titled along the lines of CAPITALSHIP_PSICARRIER.entity etc... for the captial ship files.

Ah ok. For some reason I was thinking damage was calculated per hit or salvo fired off.

For autocannons, each burst consist of 3 projectiles, so 15 burst = 45 visual projectiles ingame.

PreBuffCooldownTime - Time it takes to reload and fire again.

Just to let you know damage it calculated for the full burst count.

A couple notes, to help you along here.

PointStaggerDelay 1.000000 means there is a 1 second delay between each "firing point" on a given side of the ship, so if you want to have all of them firing simultaneously, set it to 0.

Duration 10000 has no effect on projectile weapons that I have found. This is used for beam type weapons, controlling how long the beam graphic is visible, so there is really no reason to have it set at all for this weapon. To change effective durations for projectiles, see:
BurstCount 45 and
BurstDelay 0.060000. specifically, these affect how many bursts there will be emitted, and the time between the start of one burst and the start of the second. so with those settings, each weapon will fire for 2.7 sec(45 * .06).

muzzleSoundMinRespawnTime 0.000000 does just what it sounds like, though I'm not sure what effect it will have on your game setting it to 0.0. If it works and sounds OK, though, no sweat.

One thing you haven't modded that you may want to consider is
PreBuffCooldownTime 4.500000 which is the amount of time between the start of two firing cycles. This does actually affect damage, so you'll need to adjust DamagePerBank accordingly.

So... For continous fire, like you mentioned above, use this formula:
(burstCount * burstDelay) + (PointStaggerDelay 0) = PreBuffCooldown

But remember that any research that changes weapon fire rates will break the effect, and you'll see overlapping effects or even crashes to the game, so you may need to add in a gap to base levels so the research drops it to the desired cooldown time.

Somedeadguy, well that is cool. So the Ai can figure out which weapons are most effective. With out having to mod in new behavior to get a ship that is broadside based to use its weapons right instead of pointing at the the enemy with the front of the ship.

Thanks again for the help. It seems to work fairly well except for the occasional stops but I think that is due to the ship-to-ship angle though.

One other thing..

I'm looking at the Advent MBP and I'm wondering if it's possible to remove the lasers and missiles and replace them with beam weapons? The ship would end up having all beams at that point. I'm guessing the weapon stats and code will stick but the hardpoints on the ship won't match. I'd most likely have to swap sound effects as well.

One thing to note:

I have done this exact thing in my mod (The Mars Effect) and one thing I will tell you to *not* do is to change the PreBuffCooldownTime variable. It will affect game balance (requiring you to also change bank damage, which will in turn affect how much the tech bonuses increasing fire rate and damage affect your ships), and also have a much greater performance hit than adjusting the BurstCount and BurstDelay numbers. It's a major headache overall, and there is a far easier way of accomplishing this:

The best way to set it up is to look at the vanilla PreBuffCooldownTime number (let's call it 5.0 as on the Akkan weapon banks), and divide it by the number you want to use for BurstCount (lets call it 25 right now). You then adjust BurstDelay accordingly to evenly space it out (in this case 0.200000), so what you'd end up with is:

- Even game balance (you haven't made any damage changes thanks to leaving PreBuffxxxx alone.

- A weapon that fires pretty close to what a gatling gun would fire at; adjust upwards as necessary.


Thanks for the info on the PointStaggerDelay, I always assumed that adjusted weapon fx trail variance, this will be quite useful and might explain some thing for my mod.


Oh, and at the OP, for a very nice BS:G effect, go to the Sova .entity file (TECHCARRIER) and modify the second laser bank (left/right) into a medium class autocannon (I believe the Akkan [support] has a bank that you can use as reference), do the aforementioned changes, and see what happens ^.^ You can do it with a Heavy class autocannon, but the fps hit will be slightly higher.

EDIT:

In regards to changing weapon types, the readme for the Sins mod package actually walks you through on how to do this I believe; it's actually pretty easy--even easier if you use an existing template as an example to work from. The main things to watch out for is making sure to define duration(doesn't affect game balance btw), to change the soundfx to the correct one, and to make sure that you're defining the beam stuff at the end rather than the normal weapon trail. Again, it's really easy if you use an existing template as your guide.