Greetings all,
                    As some of you may know, I am making all of my planes available here for use, and I have adapted all of my planes for CFS2, however, I am not familiar with 'Hardpoint's and 'Payloads' in CFS2.  I would like some help in understanding how they are added to DP files, as I am in the process of fixing all the CFS2 DP files for my planes and I thought I would hard these features to my planes.

Can anyone help with either a tutorial or email some help?

Thanks

DieStaffel

here is my little version (part of it) of a .dp help file, its modified from Dennis Starr's

simplified reference >>>>|||  gunstation.0=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1d1*10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21

0 The first number after the (=) sign tells the game what weapon this is. The choices are 0 (machine gun), 1 (cannon), 2 (rocket) and 3 (bomb), 4 (AA), 5 (Torpedo). as noted above

1 This is the number that gives the name for your weapon. When you are hit and red messages appear on your screen this is how the game knows the name of what has been hit. You can change the name in the [Strings] section.

2 This tells CFS what button fires the weapon. 1 is (MachineGun) , 2 is (cannon), 4 is (rockets) and 8 is (bombs). If you don't want to fire your cannons with the secondary trigger you could change the number to 1 to make it the primary trigger. Notice that the numbers increase by a factor of 2 each time. In fact this is binary. An interesting and useful fact is that if you wanted a weapon to be fired by more than one trigger just put the sum of the two trigger numbers in the sequence.

3 This is the time between rounds (or 1 divided by the number of rounds per second).

4 This is the muzzle velocity in meters/second.

5 This is the time alive entry. In real life the bullet would continue in flight until it hit the ground or was stopped by something else. In a dogfight this is a lot of planes and bullets so a compromise is met. put the number (2) in this slot this tells your game to track the flight of the bullet for 2 seconds. 

6 this is supposedly how long the muzzle flash is, i have concluded that their are only four types/sizes of gun flash. I do not know what this does. 

7 This is the range at which the AI will open fire if this is an AI plane. I usually shoot at planes at 300m, bombers sometimes at 400m. I therefore set my AI figures at 400 for offensive guns (fighters) and 500 for defensive guns (bombers). 

8 This defines the sound you hear every time you fire. The choices are 0 (.303), 1 (7.92), 2 (.50), 3 (13mm), 4 (20mm), 5 (30mm), and 6(40mm)

9 is what % of your bullets is tracer. In most cases it is 40%, i.e. 4 out every 10 rounds. The higher the % the more processing power is used but you want a number high enough that you can see where your shots are going. (so if u want to simulate a Laser bump this up to 100 and this might kill your frame rate real bad.

1d1*10 The 1d1 bit is harder to explain. It stands for a 1-sided dice (or die) and allows you to enter a degree of randomness. If you change the figure to 1d6 it would now be a 6-sided dice and you have a 1 in 6 chance of causing damage. 
(10) This entry determines how much damage each hit causes. This is how many hit points are deducted from a system every time you hit it. for .50in machine guns (12) it is fairly accurate but this makes .303's far too powerful (8 points instead of 3.3) and cannon too weak if you calculate for explosive rounds. (which should roughly be 48 instead of 32)


11,12,13 These next 3 numbers give the location of the ammunition for the gunsystem. All figures start at the planes Center of Gravity and the numbers are positive for right, forward and up. The numbers are in the order: width, height and length.

14 This is the pitch of the guns above or below the centreline of the plane. + is down whilst - is up.

15 This is the rotation bank of the guns. I believe this changes so the gun (AI) can shoot at a bank or arc instead of a cone

16 This is the heading of the gun's flash, i.e. the direction they are pointing and this is an important number. - is to the left and + is to the right. This number can be altered to make the guns toe-in or toe-out. The stream of tracer will therefore cross the centreline at different distances from the plane depending on the direction the guns are pointing. This is harmonisation.

17,18,19,20 These 4 entries are really for AI defensive gunners as they give the constraint angles that bound the arc the guns can move in. They are the angles left, right, up and down. As this is a fighter and all guns are fixed these numbers are 0.

21 This is the weight of each round in ounces. Look at figures for the round and the link that holds it. As each round is fired the weight at the location of the ammo bins is reduced making the plane easier to fly.

Greetings,
                    Thanks for all of your hard work in explaining that.  However, I use DPED version 1.10c and understand how it all works.  What I am not sure of is creating hardpoints and armament for the hardpoints.  Anyway, it doesnt matter now as I am just about finished with AF99 plane making now.

Thanks

DieStaffel