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Gearhead 1 mod - changes to PV calculation to exclude noncombat items

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Paul:
I guess it's probably a bit odd that the first post I make on these forums shortly after registering is a mod to the game, heh. I've been posting about the game on the Bay12 forums, but figured for this I should sign up on the official forums.

The two things that I can't stand about Gearhead are the way noncombat items (food, supplies, etc) affect your PV and the way personal scale combat on your character (your ceramic armor, laser rifle, etc) affect your mecha's PV. This little mod changes both of those, so bringing along lunch or wearing armor inside your mech won't ruin your xp gain.

It didn't take a whole lot of work. The noncombat items change I swiped from the source from Gearhead 2. The personal scale change just took adding an extra boolean to a few functions to make it count everything SF 0 as 0 value when calculating mech PV.

I also changed the mecha electronics - sensors, ECM, targeting computers - to be SF1 and weigh 0.1t as a quick way to make my altered functions count them into the mech value. Another way could have been to check if they were electronics, but I think that counts all electronics and I didn't want cell phones and personal computers to be counted. The only effect of this that I've seen so far is that save games from the regular version will have SF0 sensors that weigh 0.5kg and don't count in the PV calculations of mechs.

I've been playing with the changes for a bit and haven't had any issues, so I figured others might want to try it out.



Also note that these files are based on Michael's "Christmas Edition" of the game, because I like the changes he made. I'm just uploading the changed source files along with compiled win32 binary for convenience. You will still need to grab Michael's release and just drop these files over it and will have to compile it yourself if you're not on windows.

The only file that he modified that I also modified was gearutil.pp. If desired, I could easily supply a version of that file based on the official v1.100 source release if someone would prefer that.


PS: I'm not real familiar with the GNU license. I didn't see anything saying "don't do this" in a skim of it, so I'm just assuming that releasing a partial thing like this is OK. If it isn't, let me know and I can do a whole package deal like Michael did.


Download ASCII version from Google Docs

Download SDL version from Google Docs


-edit- If you couldn't download, try again. For some reason Google Docs set the files back to private and the link was no longer working. I set them public again. Not sure what that was about...

Phil Munoz:
Doesn't that make SF 0 scale weapons installed in SF 1 and 2 mecha not count towards PV?  I remember there were a few SF 0 weapons that were still kinda useful in SF 2.

Paul:
Yea, it does. So if you plan on using a bunch of SF0 weapons in your mech this mod would be kinda cheaty, but I personally never use SF0 weapons in mechs anyway. I guess you might extract a small advantage out of it very early on, but I don't think it's that big of a deal. From my experience SF 0 weapons are mainly useful for the weaker SF1 mechs you fight early on, and once you're fighting tougher opponents they don't really do anything. I guess they might be handy for making pilots make a bunch of ejection chances, but I don't think you get xp for that anyway do you?

I updated the files with a minor change. With a little looking I realized that the game already separates phones and such from sensors (all mecha types are sensors, all personal types are electronics) so I just added a check for sensors and made them SF:0 again. The main reason is I was starting to play with robotics and it suddenly dawned on me that you can't carry SF1 parts, so I couldn't put a sensor into my robot :D

For those with save games made with the other version, this means you'll have a bunch of really heavy sensors - but anything in a shop will be back to normal. You can either edit your savegame to change them (that's what I did) or just acquire new ones.



If you're editing them back, the numbers in the save file are:
0 8 # # 1
That 8 is identifying it as a sensor. The 3rd digit is the type (1 for sensor, 2 for tarcomp, 3 for ECM), the 4th is the class, and the last one is the scale. So just finding that and changing the 1 to a 0 fixes it.

For instance, I fixed the class 9 ECM on my Argoseyer by finding 0 8 3 9 1 and changing it to 0 8 3 9 0.

Paul:
Hate to double post, but I don't want this to be buried under the other already large post.

Anyone know if there is some important reason for MaxShopItems to be set to 21? I'm not sure if that's some arbitrary limit, or if it was set that way because a higher number would cause problems, or what.

I set mine to 100 and adjusted the chance of mek extras to 1/3 instead of 1/7. I halfway expected the game to get corrupted data or crash or something from the extra items, but it seems to be working just fine with larger shops. It sure is more convenient. With those two simple changes in services.pp shops are far better. The weapon and armor shops in Wujung actually stock a decent stock of mecha weapons and armor, and finding sensors or wheels for sale in the proper size is far easier. As is getting personal scale gear without abusing the tutorial refresh thing.


I guess as long as my game doesn't suddenly blow up after shopping a bit I'll add this to the list of changes to my little mini mod, probably after I find something else to add since changing two numbers in a file hardly seems update worthy. I'd probably be willing to take some requests too, if anyone found something in GH1 annoying or tedious and wanted it changed. Joseph has the source really well organized, so finding and changing things has been really easy so far.


-edit- Well, the shopping change seems to be causing occasional crashes. Shame, it was really convenient. The weird thing is, it doesn't crash in the shopping screen - it crashes while attempting to train at an npc skill trainer after having shopped. I guess the game gets overloaded with all the extra items then blows up when you try to call the skill list for training? Not really sure why it does it, but I guess thats why the shops were limited. If I knew for a fact it was only this crash and it wasn't going to lead to other issues I might keep it and just live with crashing and reloading the game when I need to use a skill trainer npc, but if it can cause crashes on the skill trainer screen who knows what else it might do in other areas of the game.

Erathoniel:
Actually, if you have SF:0 weapons and Spot Weakness, you're just as well off as SF:1 or SF:2 without. I found that whenever I played Spot Weakness was *the* combat skill.

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