Defaults per-weapon would be nice. I have a habit of using some small and medium weapons in ways they aren't quite supposed to be, like AA railguns.
I like that idea!
Manually setting up tags on big fleets can be somewhat tedious.
One could argue that it's already kind of in the mod via suggested modes, though to be fair from a user-perspective the feature is a little bit obscure (at least customizing it).
Let's start off by exploring the status quo:
As of now, there is a file called modSettings.json in the folder data/config (
github link).
In that file, there is a list of weapons with suggested tags for them. Some mods (off the top of my hat I know that Iron Shell does this, but I believe most mods don't) include similar lists in their modSettings, allowing weapons from their mods to receive tags this way.
When you click on the button "Suggested" in the in-combat GUI, those tags get applied to weapon groups. Alternatively, in the campaign-GUI, you can hold the SHIFT-key and click "Apply suggested modes" to apply those tags for all weapon groups for your entire fleet.
Now, as a user of the mod you can obviously go into the mod-folder and open the modSettings.json in an editor of your choice and adjust the suggested tags to fit your preferences.
So, technically speaking at least, I believe that there is already support for default modes.
Let's explore how this could become more user-friendly:
I feel like the first step here would need to be to implement some way for users to customize suggested tags without having to browse through the mod folder and editing json-files.
The first idea would be to simply add a button that saves the currently set tags as suggested tags. This would be relatively simple to implement (I think) and probably fairly easy to use at first, but I feel like it might get confusing pretty fast, because there would be no way to optically verify which weapon type currently has which suggested tags.
So the next idea would be to implement some kind of GUI that lists all weapons available in the game and let's you set up suggested tags in a similar way to how you currently set up weapon groups for ships. This would be considerably more effort to implement and potentially slightly less convenient for the user in the short term (since you have to go to a different GUI for this), but probably be more convenient in the long term. Of course, these two options aren't mutually exclusive.
Last but not least, there should probably be an option to automatically apply suggested tags without having to press a button (ideally as an in-campaign option, similar to simple/advanced mode).
I'll try to have a look to figure out how much of this is feasible. In the meantime, please let me know what you think!
Edit: Note that for the current solution (modSettings.json), it is possible to use regular expressions. So, for instance, if you see ".*flak", that means "all weapons where the ID ends with flak, i.e. dual and single flak.
Author
Topic: [0.97a] AdvancedGunneryControl 1.18.0 - Updated for 0.97a (Read 220328 times)