Missing display hard points while in a unit. Why are they missing?

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Take the ivsgull for example. In both the original and my version when occupying the ship only the chain type gun actually appears in the lower right hand side near the ammo/health meter. The XSI and ODF have entries, yet the other weapons: cannon, rocket, and special weapons never ever appear though there are blank spaces where they should be below the chain gun thingy. Why don't they appear? Is it the ODF or the XSI model file? Oh, this is a 1.2 model and I believe Timevirus was the mod maker as it came from the ZTV death match map; one of my favorites as I get to interact as a sky pilot dive bombing and fighting in some aerial combat fun!

PS: Another model tank fairs much better with these weapons entries; I forget who made the model, it's basically a Sabre type with a cloaking device added along with self repairing armor. The weapons always appear correctly. Why does this work, but not other models like the one mentioned above?

[General BlackDragon]

In the lower right hand corner, do you see empty hardpoints for the other guns? If not, then it's a hardpoint name mismatch. Make sure the hardpoints are named hp_rocket_1 hp_special_1 hp_cannon_1 hp_special_1, etc.. and make sure the names of the hardpoints in the ODFs match.

If they are there and are just empty, it's a problem with the weapons your trying to put in them?

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Yes, they show up under the gun entry as blank areas for the other weapons and if I spawn crates they appear correctly under the cannon, missile, and special place holders when I pick them up, but I never see the little icon thingies and even though the ODF has entries for specific weapons only the gun part ever appears when the unit is spawned. Could this be that the aircraft class only supports one weapon? Are the hp's case sensitive where the ODF has upper case letters and the XSI has lower case letters? Tanks, BNG.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I think I figured out the problem with my Talon weapons not appearing even when the hp's are correct and the ODF has the proper weapons names. It appears to be related the following 2 ODF entries:

requireName1 = "cbtcen"
requireText1 = "Build Tech Center"

It would seem that some how that the missing weapons are some how related to these 2 entries. The cvtalon which is related to Cerberi weapons assets are the only weapons that will appear on my version. I tried this in my ODF version and successfully changed my versions missile from the default Cerberi FAF to the Cerberi Torpedo as the new default missile by looking at the assets via Pak Explorer. Hope this info helps other modders get a handle on designing and equipping new units.

So I'm guessing and will try changing the above 2 entries to another race to access other weapons that I want on my ship and they should appear as well; BNG crosses his fingers. It never really occurred to me before that the BZII engine uses this kind of information to affect whether or not weapons will appear on a unit. Hey, I guess we learn something new from time to time.

[Nielk1]

That, if the true cause, is certainly inadvertent.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

How Dependant are these entries on getting certain weapons on any particular ship? What I'm asking basically is how does the game engine go about reading information from both the model/ODF file and properly equipping a custom equipped unit? Does it search the Pak files that are in the CFG file to preload the proper assets? Please help all us modelers understand a bit more so that we can design better equipped customized units. Tanks, BNG.

[mrtwosheds]

As far as I know, the require entries have nothing to do with wether or not a unit can use a weapon, only wether that weapon can be built by the armo or accessed from the rec/fact.
The usual culprit for weapons not showing up are incorrect ODF assault/combat settings from the gun odf and/or the unit odf

classLabel = "cannon"
altName = "gdgunn_a"
ordName = "dgunn_c"
wpnCategory = "GUN"
isAssault = 0

The hard point names must be exactly like those found on stock units, check them in notepad to see if your modelling prog has decided to add some unwanted characters.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Truespace, has a nasty habit of adding a - 2 digit number at the end of each line in the object name thingy. I delete them in Notepad from the XSI that Threed produces afterwords. As mentioned earlier the Talon is a Cerberi advanced unit with a require statement in the ODF itself. The hp_ naming in my ODF are named correctly. I believe that only Cerberi assets are the only ones are allowed as a result of this entry. What I can do to check this out is delete the require statement out of my ODF and see what happens. I also realize that this is a bad thing as many units are built only after the require statement is met, but just as an experiment would like to determine if it makes any difference at all as some are not associate with any require statement, i.e, the cvclaw/cvtyrant for example. I would imagine there are quite a few other units falling in the same general category. Guess I just need to try it and report back on the results. BNG.

Apparently it does make some difference if a require statement is listed in an ODF file entry. I saw this behavior in the ivfight model which has a statement referring to ISDF assets listed in it's ODF file. Note that I only substituted the XSI entry in my cvtalon2 to use the ivfigt XSI rather then my original cvtalon2 XSI, but the ivfight does not have a hp_rocket 1 or 2 and instead uses an hp_cannon entry in the ODF. Even though my cvtalon2 had 2 hp_rocket entries in my ODF the rockets never appeared when the unit was created using my version of the ivfight.

[General BlackDragon]

I'd know more if I had the files, and could fix it probably within 5 minutes.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

More or less I'm just trying to get basic understanding about them myself. Does anyone know if placing my own custom modified ODF's in my BNG Assets folder under the addon folder is a good thing?

[General BlackDragon]

As long as they don't conflict with any stock files in the pak files, it should be okay. Oh, and you can't have any *spilo files, even if it's a new race letter.