Deus Siddis wrote:
Why not reinstate the heavy/medium/light subcategories? It makes sense, especially since they restrict what you can mount on your mountpoints.
There's various reasons why these categories are problematic in my opinion:
1) It is redundant. Weapon sizes are defined independently in
weapons_list.xml.
2) It is a click-fest. Opening sub-categories and sub-categories of weapons that only contain a few items. And the interface greys-out weapons you cannot mount anyway.
3) Adding/changing weapon availability is a serious pain because of the number of station types times the number of weapon (and ammo) sub-categories.
I don't think any of those are worthy causes to scrap the subsections.
Click-fest? One extra click isn't a big deal, and it's informative (you see it's a heavy gun without having to read the very verbose weapon info).
Redundant? Maybe, but it doesn't take much to sync them up.
Changing availability is hard, but only because the separation gives you freedom. The freedom to manipulate prices differently for the various weapon categories. I think
this is one of the more compelling reasons to keep them.
Deus Siddis wrote:
4) Many more categories would be needed to fit all sizes of units and their turrets, capitals (and stations) in particular.
5) There's a lot more to weapons than hard point size.
However, these two are a good point. Indeed, subcategories alone are a poor summarization of weapon classes, or upgrades in general. They are indeed part of several classifications depending on what you're interested in.
And this also applies to the economy. You might want to manipulate prices based on size at some point, and based on firepower at some other. Or race at some other.
So yeah, this needs more thought.
However, I do not think removing all classification is a good thing, and breaking behavior we don't know how to replace yet isn't either.
With that in mind, I grepped for Heavy/Light/Medium on the csv (because there's that forbidden upgrades and cargo imports thingy), and I got:
Code: Select all
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Heavy
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Light
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Medium
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Heavy
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Light
installations.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Medium
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Heavy
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Light
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Beam_Arrays_Medium
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Heavy
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Light
vessels.csv:upgrades/Weapons/Mounted_Guns_Medium
weapons.csv:HeavyFlak
weapons.csv:HeavyIonBeam
weapons.csv:"Heavy_Ion_Beam__upgrades","Heavy
weapons.csv:HeavyTractor
weapons.csv:"Ion_Beam__upgrades","Light
That needs fixing if we remove the categories.