PPC_V1.1

The aim of this little mod is to add two new weapons to Nexus:TJI... the light Pulsed Plasma Cannon (or PPC for short) and it's bigger brother, the heavy PPC.

All going well, when installed and fired, the light PPC will fire bursts of three to five shots of super heated plasma (colour coded red) while the heavy PPC is restricted to two to three shots (denoted in a yellow/orange colour) and both have a recharge rate of five to ten seconds. I had originally intended the bursts to be bigger, but seeing the LPPC fire bursts of upto fifteen shots was just too overwhelming :) 

Updated:=

Replaced original machine with Arparso's improved code, dramatically cutting down the file size and removing the limit to the amount of weapons availabe for use.

Right then, installation...

Well the first things to do are to copy the .ini file data into their respective .ini files (obviously, don't overwrite anything!). If you've already been adding custom weapons and effects then you'll probably need to edit the weapon/efx id numbers to prevent conflicts. This won't have any effect on the weapons, effects or machine so no need to worry. If this is the first new weapon you're adding, then you shouldn't need to.

Next up, place the PPC.inc file in your 'Mod_Missions' folder.

Finally, for each mission you want to have these weapons in, add the following two command lines...

' M:GetMachine("PPC"):ChangeState(Default,0); '
' #include "PPC.inc" '

And there you are, all good to go (fingers crossed);

Things to know...

As of this release, the machine can handle upto forty LPPC's AND forty HPPC's simultaneously. It'll also take into account any late arriving ships too.

I've had it running at full capacity (eighty weapons spread across twenty ships) on my laptop with no apparent lag, so with luck, PPC's won't cause you any lag either. The only thing that I noticed was that after three or four minutes of combat, the ships seemed to 'run out of steam'. Leading to some very sporadic firing as the survivors circled each other (though I had turned up the weapons energy to 200%).

If you wish to pull the code apart and try make it more streamlined and efficent, then by all means. If you succeed, then drop me a mail (draconicdreams@hotmail.co.uk) with the new machine, cause I'd like to learn how you did it. 

I think that's about it, so go forth and PPC whatever crosses your path to hell and back.

Special thanks to Arparso for refining the machine code.
And thanks to Mularac for giving me the idea and starting point for these weapons.