Can I remove the fist weapon from Mercenary Commando?

[Hazard]

The question is in the title. Merc Commandos cost a pretty penny, and I was thinking about freeing their inventory and removing the inbuilt weapons to make them more versatile. Making the inventory accessible and getting rid of the Boom Gun are easy edits, but the fist is not. Based on a quick look through the ruleset, it kinda seems like it might not even be possible to remove. I could simply change "fixedweapon" to false and move the fist item into another slot, but if a cleaner solution is possible, I'd gladly take it.

[Dioxine]

You cannot have a weaponless HWP. If you want to play them, why not make them a soldier race instead. I'd suggest a hefty price, though, if you want to keep them balanced. An example how to do it below, you can figure out the rest by yourself:

Code: [Select]

  - type: STR_MUTON_MERCENARY_SOLDIER
    costBuy: 300000
    costSalary: 100000
    minStats:
      tu: 70
      stamina: 100
      health: 110
      bravery: 110
      reactions: 60
      firing: 70
      throwing: 60
      strength: 70
      psiStrength: 30
      psiSkill: 0
      melee: 80
    maxStats:
      tu: 80
      stamina: 110
      health: 130
      bravery: 110
      reactions: 70
      firing: 80
      throwing: 70
      strength: 80
      psiStrength: 35
      psiSkill: 0
      melee: 110
    statCaps:
      tu: 90
      stamina: 130
      health: 140
      bravery: 110
      reactions: 90
      firing: 120
      throwing: 90
      strength: 100
      psiStrength: 35
      psiSkill: 0
      melee: 150
    armor: MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR
    armorForAvatar: MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR
    avatarOffsetX: 66
    avatarOffsetY: 43
    standHeight: 22
    kneelHeight: 14
    femaleFrequency: 0

[Hazard]

Thank you for the reply. That looks like a good solution; I had no idea adding new soldier types was so trivial.

[Arthanor]

Being able to hire Mercs (and pay a hefty price every month instead of only once) could be a cool feature for when you really need something mean to join your team and money isn't much of an issue.

Which brings the question: Are we going to see male Ubers, hybrids or other types of soldiers eventually?

[Hazard]

I admit, I started looking into the mercenary commando ruleset settings because I wanted to incorporate a bit of "serious male warfighting ability" to my squads (and I bet the gals would also like a couple of guys around... or perhaps not), but don't really like shotguns.

Male hands is obviously something I'd also like to see in the mod, although I understand making the assets would be a massive amount of work. It crossed my mind to try making one male variant of all the inventory images myself, but with the artistic skills I have, hell would probably freeze over in the time it would take to finish that job properly.

[Yglorba]

Being able to hire Mercs (and pay a hefty price every month instead of only once) could be a cool feature for when you really need something mean to join your team and money isn't much of an issue.

Which brings the question: Are we going to see male Ubers, hybrids or other types of soldiers eventually?

Well, technically there's the superheroes...  I'm not sure they count, though.

The fact that the pirates are all-female is sort of a plot point at this point (and referenced constantly throughout the game), so I can't imagine the core definition of the team is going to change.

[Dioxine]

Male hands is obviously something I'd also like to see in the mod, although I understand making the assets would be a massive amount of work. It crossed my mind to try making one male variant of all the inventory images myself, but with the artistic skills I have, hell would probably freeze over in the time it would take to finish that job properly.

This is basically the only problem. Graphic assets. It is a huge problem though. If it's somehow resolved, I plan to add male hands as well, somehow.

The inability to change Merc's weapon or look into his equipment is quite important. The message is, they're not YOUR people, you're only hiring them. Otherwise it would be the "MERCs" mod, not "Piratez" mod That's why I'm not changing how the mercs work (but, if someone wants to mod a game for themselves, it's their choice).

[Hazard]

Yeah, I understand there's a good reason for the inventory restriction. And now that you mentioned it, I'd gladly play a Mercenary-themed mod in the Piratez setting.

[Arthanor]

You know your master mod is mainstream when people start modding it..!

I understand why the crew is female (simplicity/theme of the mod/much nicer pixels to look at), but it does seem like there is potential in adding new soldier type with all the mutant variants there are.

Maybe one day. As it is, loading Piratez already takes forever on my computer, so I can't really ask for more content

[AncientSion]

I can do gfx.
What exactly is the "huge problem" that is being referred to ?

[Arthanor]

Take the large number of female avatars currently in Piratez, let's say to be fair we want as many male avatars. Then take the huge number of armors in Piratez, and multiply the two. That's the number of new inventory pictures you have to make.

Then, of course, you'd expect the battlescape representation of male piratez to be different. So you need to remake every playable armor sprites in order to show that. (each sprite sheet is made up of many tiny images, each of which would probably have to be tweaked)

There's also the corpse images, which need to be redone for men.

So you end up with a number of graphics needing to be redone that one could indeed qualify as huge Of course, once you've setup properly you can save some time (many armors are variants of each others, making it easier to change graphics once you have done the base one, etc), but it's still a punishing amount of work, all "just" to add men to the game when, let's be honest, especially with the many skimpy outfits, female pixel piratez are better to look at.

[AncientSion]

Yeah, i did see the sprite sheets. I can do very good 2d pixel art, but in reality its way too much of a time-investment for me to even consider doing it.
Thanks for clarifying.

[Hazard]

I just now got around to testing this and the game crashes as soon as I try opening an inventory screen with one of the soldier-style mercs. It's something to do with the "MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR" entry, since the new soldier type works fine with any other armor. Unfortunately it's somewhat beyond me to decipher what exactly the MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR lacks that the game needs to make it work properly for soldier-type units. Any further help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Nevermind, I got it working. Yay!

[ivandogovich]

I just now got around to testing this and the game crashes as soon as I try opening an inventory screen with one of the soldier-style mercs. It's something to do with the "MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR" entry, since the new soldier type works fine with any other armor. Unfortunately it's somewhat beyond me to decipher what exactly the MUTON_MERCENARY_ARMOR lacks that the game needs to make it work properly for soldier-type units. Any further help would be greatly appreciated.

    allowInv: false

^^
from Piratez.rul line 22998. 
This means you aren't allowed to open inventory with that armor.  If you are serious about it, clone out the armor and rename it, and redefine this setting.

[Hazard]

I tried that, but the game still crashed on inventory.

In any case, I set up a proper submod using the Naughty mod as a template (thanks for that too, Dioxine), and now it seems to be working fine. For some reason the game refused to start with an error message when the corpse bigSprite was named EMC0_b, but launched just fine when I changed it to EMC_0_b.  I guess there's something obvious I'm missing about the file naming system...