Not sure if its the answer but ur values are a bit screwed..
[Munition
nickname = li_gun02_mark01_ammo
... blah
hull_damage = 105
energy_damage = -33.5<------- Why is this -33.5? Shouldn't it be just 33.5?
weapon_type = W_Plasma01

Maybe thats just confusing it?

"But the Stunpulses and pulse weapons did not do this in the original game"

You're wrong, every weapon in FL has a certain energy damage, and that damage directly affects your ships energy once your shields are down and your hull gets hit..

Try it: tell someone to shoot at your starflyer with tizona del cids, youll see

I've always thought that pure-energy weapons being a "vampire" on people's gun energy was one of the slicker little things DA stuck into the game. Pity that DA then screwed up very badly by letting players access Nomad guns that don't use energy

Your problem is you used a negative value for damage.

Well, first off, that's not a typo -- that entry is negative for the Plasma weapon. The reason for this is that it is not supposd to be as effective against shields as it is against hull. If the energy_damage were positive, then I'd get a weapon that is the other way around, like Stunpulses, dealing more shield damage.
So when the game deals the damage, it deals 0.5 * hull (which is 105 in this case) and adds -33.5, giving a total of 19 shield damge. This is the ratio I was aiming for, and the game properly recognizes this, showing 105 hull and 19 shield in the info screen.

The effects are the same for positive and negative energy dmg values - whether or not the value is negative, my powerplant drains from enemies hitting my hull.

But so long as this is what the Pulse weapons in the original game did (as I apparently don't remember correctly Don't suppose I ever got shot by a Pulse), then I don't guess there is an issue. I do find it annoying that the addition of any energy dmg, be it negtive or postive, can render you unable to fight when you probably need to be able to ...

Anyways, thanks.



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- Ro9ue
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Wait. A neg number worked!?!

Now, this sounds like an assumption just waiting to be tested...

Perhaps the addition of energy draining guns as a new weapon class could be used to balance out the game. It would do very little hull/shield damage, but would be great for pirating in MP.

Uh, say what? I mean, you haven't tried negative numbers before? Well, I actually find this surprising that nobody's messed with this ... Nah, surely someone's already figured this out ... But, since they haven't spoken up, I'll tell what I've found so far.

Yes, negtive numbers work for weapons. Let me clarify - from my testing, negtive values work fine for energy damage, but the total energy dmg dealt must be greater than or equal to 0 -- no, you can't have a "medic" gun that does negetive shield damage on your target (like targeting a friend/ally in MP and pumping energy into his shield with yout gun). And total energy damage values less than 0 seem to just do the absolute value of the negtive number - that's where things get all hairy and messy.
But I don't think anyone would really want a medic gun anyways - there is no logical or reasonable explanation of such a ridiculous thing

Negative values do NOT work for hulls, however. I have tried numerous things, sorta like making powerplant augmentors that have negative power drain, which FL interprets as energy boost. But hull does not work that way apparently. I once tried to make a healing bay, which would be an area near a base that you could fly into (a little zone that had negative hull damage in it) and repair without having to dock and do it manually. But negative hull dmg doesn't work to repair. But I don't think that it does what neg energy dmg does, either (the thing with the absolute value, basically ignoring the negativity of the number).

And about the sapper-gun idea - it's a cool one, and one that's in some other good games (Freespace, anyone?), but this is not possible in FL. The gun has to deal a lot of shield damage to sap power. Oh, well, I take that back -- it is possible, but you will have inaccurate stats in the info screen. You'd have to make a gun that deals very little hull dmg and a lot of shield dmg, then make a modifier type (W_Sapper01 or something) that only does 0.001 the shield damage for all shields. This would mean that it would do the amount of hull specified in the ammo entry, then one-thousandth of the total energy dmg dealt, and then, theoretically, a large amount of energy loss by targets. I guess you might be able to test this by taking a Tizona and adding a new modifer for it, making it a sapper ...
And let me tell you - it sucks having 8 Banshees firing 3 Tachyons apiece at you - your shield goes down, then your power just goes zzzpf - and you're constantly trying to get off accurate and damaging salvoes at one of your harassers... So yeah, it works very well, but it is not something tha I want ALL of the weapons in the game to do.

I guess I could scale the powerplant stuff and weapon usage by 100 or something, making the powerplant capacities/recharge a lot larger, numerically speaking, but then everything still draws the same ratio of energy ... that way 500 energy amage is next to nothing for a 250000 cap/25000 rchrg poweprlant.

Well I guess I'll try that idea. Heh, hope that cleared up some stuff, for anyone who dind't know ...

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- Ro9ue
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Edited by - Ro9ue on 7/16/2005 12:14:08 AM

what happens when an explosion has a high negative energy damage and what would be the effect on that when lifetime is increased to a very long span like say 10 seconds i wonder....

so anyway these are the facts?

Shield busters drain power from the target after the shield drops,the shield is basically an extremity of the power linkages.

negative energy damage can be used to offset the weapon damage modDB 's values and still read accurately in IDS?(so why couldn't you use a positive #?)

just trying to make sense of this topic perhaps it could be renamed to something more inclusive of the dicussion

The reason I, and hopefully everyone else who knows about this, have not said anything is because there is a dangerous cheat made possible by this 'discovery' of yours.

Er, okay, this is starting to go the wrong way here. I think some people are seeing things that arent there or that I do not mean to imply at all. Lemme see if I can make some sense ...

First off, the topic is pretty much, uh, what it says - weapons that deal extra energy damage in the weapon_equip file, meaning that the "energy_damage = " a number other than the deault "0," also cause powerplant drain on targets when they impact the hull. I don't know what more to say about that ... Yes, these are facts - if you want a weapon equip file, I can send it to you to prove it. Go piss off some Rheinlanders, Liberty Navy, or Bounty Hunters, all of whom have weapons that will drain you powerplant.
And the reason I posted was because I was wondering if there was a way to prevent weapons that have such stats from doing this, from sucking away power when the hull is impacted. This was all I was asking.

I didn't start it up to see if we could develop a new cheat or something - besides which , even if someone were to get the bright idea to try to hack their files and go drain all theor buddies' powerplants in MP, servers would kick them because their files would be different, would they not? So that's not really an issue, is it?
In any case, thar isn't what I meant to do - cheating and lame abuse of the system is quite annoying and n00bish, IMO, - so that's what mods are for, altering the game in an organized and uniform manner, not secretly ubering up your own files and running rampant on servers

So, I hope I didn't give someone the wrong impression here - I was simply asking if anyone who might've messed with this type of stuff knows about this and if they have a way to fix this. I did not think that I'd made a new "discovery" - no, I just was surpirsed that some seasoned people actually asked acout whether it'd work - as in they'd not messed with it. I just figured all of ya had done this, that's all ...

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- Ro9ue
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Normally you wouldn't fly around in a starflier where people have Del Cid's to knock your power out, by the time you get there you should have a better ship with a bigger power supply so this 'issue' wouldn't be very noticeable. There are two things you can do: decrease the ammount of energy damage in your weapons or increase the energy capacity of all powerplants on all ships. There is no way to 'fix' this, only ways to minimize it.