Fuse files

Um.... well... Basically, Fuses are called by Events. Generally speaking, the Event is a level-of-damage reading from the Ship / Station that has taken damage, or another Fuse. Fuses can "light" each other through the Light Fuse Event. Each Fuse can cause various things to happen, such as Effects, Hardpoints being blown off, or parts of a Ship (for ships that have defined sub-parts) being ejected from the Root. Fuses can either be Death Events (and every ship in FL has one, or uses the default) or non-death Events (such as the Fuses that start when a ship has taken damage). Basically... Fuses are one of the most flexible things in FL, and also one of the least-utilized modding areas, for reasons I´ve never been able to understand. Each Fuse has a certain length of time of duration. Each sub-Event is called after a certain amount of time has passed after the last sub-Event. The total time spent by each sub-Event should be the same duration as the Fuse. When the Fuse´s timer ends, if there are sub-Events still scheduled, the game will generally crash. Fuses can cause Explosions. Explosions and Fuses are inter-releted to some extent, because that is what DA mainly used them for- to create spectacular, staged destruction of their larger spacecraft. Explosions can spawn physical items (Debris) which can very easily cause severe lag if you call lots of them at once! In general, only use Debris if you must- generally speaking, Shatter is a more appropriate and less-laggy method of creating chunks of ships without causing needless client lag. Um... I guess that´s pretty much it. I am planning on including a bunch of new Fuses in XML Toolkit Mod 1.3, and have re-written practically every FL Fuse at this point, to make things work better for certain things. But I´d like to save discussion for that until I have released the mod- just putting out the Fuses without their contexts wouldn´t help people very much.

I´ve been actually working the opposite way (of course, we´ve already gone back and forth about this, so I´m not going to harp about it). I´ve removed all the subgroups and collision meshes so that Battleships can (finally) be equipped with both new SURs and properly-functional Shields. There´s no "right" answer to this one, really- either approach can have interesting gameplay effects. I´ve chosen pretty deliberately to aim for complete end-to-end compatibility and to get rid of errors.

Well... erm... the easiest way to do a self-destruct is to have a Torpedo with a ridiculously large detonation_distance ... then it detects the player´s ship and blows up immediately on launch. Give it a nice large blast radius, have players equip two of them (or put them onto ships without a Good entry, so that they´re "just there" when a player buys a ship)... and there you go. Why two of them? Because one, no matter how much damage it does, will not knock down both the Shield and Hull. Which, if you think about it... won´t damage the ship that sets it off, which won´t be very ... self-destruct-like...

lol... 1. I don´t use any chat software. No offense intended, but I don´t like chat. 2. I´m at work. Kind´ve inconvenient. Sorry.