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You could always put one over and one under, too, right on the domes.  Then set the missile to the main hull and render it invisible.

If you go with under the saucer, BTW, bear in mind that you can flip the turrets so the mount still goes into the hull.

Hrm.  I should add a disclaimer about that.  It's probably on account of the fact that BTC changes/adds/disables so many items, I know I've had corruption issues even between versions in the past as I pruned items.

But thank you!

Another quick trails question as well, and then an unrelated follow-up:

The values for long_trail_x, are those then added to the base trail stats if trail is set to long?  And how does that affect medium trails?  I figured it might be something like:
short trails = regular trail_ attribute
medium trails = regular trail_ attribute + 50% of long_trail_attribute
long trails = regular trail_ attribute + 100% of long_trail.

Second question: the skill to raise consumable effect, that should work in conjunction with repair modules as well, yeah?  Since they actually start the same buff name on the ship, I figured.  My question would be if they also affect repair beams, and if the buff affects outgoing heals, incoming heals, or both.  I figured it'd be incoming only (if I have +consumable repair skill and someone else heals me, I get a bonus since the buff is on my ship), but I figured it was also worth an ask.

In vanilla it probably depends quite a bit on the hull you drive as well.   Larger ships are going to be more effective with armor overall because you can stack it higher and take better advantage of the flat reduction.  Also, in something like a Hammer you are unlikely to be able to dodge many shots, thus ruling out a shield tactic where you can disengage and allow for regen.

Ahhh, okay.  So the projectile type just feeds into the AI script in terms of how often it checks to see if it should fire/refire?  That's actually quite handy since my mod has a few rapid-fire weapons that were previously unsuitable for pirates given how long they took between shots.

Try the newest patch version in the main BTC thread now.  (The filename will be the same, but the file is now BTC 2.1.1)  The mod needed updating to work with VE 1.4 but real life kept me from updating it until now.

Quickie question:

When getting BTC up to shape today I noticed that there seems to be a new projectile type: #4, bullet.  Or maybe it's not new and I just never noticed it existed.   What's the diff between type-1 (direct hit) and type-4 (bullet)?

Awesome!  And yeah, it totally is.  If I was ever going to use something of someone's outside of their product I'd make -sure- to ask first.  My wife is a lawyer, she'd smack me around even if I wasn't an honorable, dutiful sort.

I'll be sure to post a screenshot when I have a moment, too.  I actually love how it turned out, with the flight deck along the underside it reminds me a lot of the TCS Tiger's Claw from the old Wing Commander games.  It's just lacking the heavy guns on smaller outrigger wings.

Awesome!  That'll work too, I don't have /that/ many additional trails to work with, even in BTC, since a lot of the effects share trails that are just scaled.   I just didn't want to break any existing systems, but you mentioned that if the new values are absent it just uses the existing system... so, hooray for legacy support.

I'll take a look at my particle count as well, I never really messed around with it all that much, but quite a few of them are set way higher than what you mentioned, probably because all the original trails from way back when, when I first stated working on the mod, were very short and thus the count didn't matter much.  I'll tinker a bit now that I know the system will be great going forward.

Thanks as always for being so responsive, this is a project I love and folks on Steam seem to be keen on getting a fresh version of it, from the messages I get.

OH.  Totally off-topic but pertaining to modding as well: does AT have any issues with us tweaking existing models as well as skins, if we're using them in mods?  I should have asked before I did my work on the dedicated carrier I have coming up but it totally slipped my mind.  (I basically took the missile cruiser, stripped the launchers off the sides and then gave it a custom skin that makes it look like it has flight decks on three locations.)  I know everyone seemed cool with reskins on stuff, wasn't sure if it applied to modeling as well.

Right, lowering the lifetime is what I tried doing originally; the issue with it, at least for weapons effects, seems to be that if I set it low enough to be workable with 'long' trails, then it has almost no trail at all when they are set to 'short'.

What I think I'll do is tinker with them to make them slightly shorter, since I'm adjusting them to make use of new 3D projectiles that Flessen whipped up anyway, so that they look nice at short-length, okay at medium-length, but are unplayable at long-length... and then just warn people in the mod setup that they need to set it to short or medium.

If you do tinker with it in the future, though, it sounds like it'd be a LOT of work to add an extra variable to every single trail just for the secondary coefficient.  Would it be possible instead to just save the desired trail length option in a brand-new XML included with core.cpk?  Something like trail_attributes.xml, and inside you just have three coefficient settings for long, medium, short.  Change the formula in the engine so that it retrieves the coefficient from that file instead of using raw values, using the field for the current options setting, and voila!  It'd even have the benefit of not breaking existing mods, because if someone hasn't updated and included a new version of their .mpk with new coefficients, it'll just use the default values from .cpk.

I guess what I'm looking for is a way to force a revision to the old system within a mod; as it stands right now anyone with medium or long trails enabled will find BTC completely unplayable, given how long the trails end up persisting on some weapon shots.  (Seriously, the screen looks like I'm playing with 80s vector graphics, and the engine rapidly lags out.)

So, any way to do this, or is it now hard-coded into the UI?  If it'd help, I could post an experimental version of my current version (actually loads with the newest VE) and you could see the effect and possible alter pointers.  If not, and if the trails are always going to be modified by the engine going forward, it seems like BTC may be DOA.

Sooooo... I finally got BTC updated in terms of skills to be loadable, and I noticed that the trail effects seem to be handled completely differently now.  Is there a global setting for things like the decay on particle effects for trails that I can tune back down to the original level, or can you offer some pointers on how to adjust the new values and what they represent?

Just curious as to if you have a straight conversion number (seems to be about 80x longer decay, give or take) and if I need to modify every single engine trail or not.

If you ever do, let me know.  I'd hope it'd be a small change if it were, really, just changing the hardcode in that portion of the GUI to point to an XML or TXT instead.

So, time to start some questions for 1.4 with the changes.

Big one coming to mind is this: are the overreaching skill categories hardcoded into the UI or are there XML files for it?  I was never able to find the data for them but it would be a nice aspect to be able to change via modding.  I've obviously been able to revamp the skills themselves but never the headers/categories.

Haven't had a chance to check out the hacking yet, but I did snag the new core and took a look at the new models and some of the new tech.  Nice job, with what I've seen thus far!  Also, I feel like I might have helped inspire the Spray ballistic weapons with some of the playing-around I did with weapon effects and timing.