I've torn the exe apart, disassembled it, (vaguely illegally) decompiled it, analyzed it, used every editing tool I could find, but just can't understand why a couple of things work the way they do. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to determine:
1. Why only the 4 main "rebel" craft are available for selection in the combat chamber for missions and where and how this info is stored;
2. More importantly (and actually relevant to this thread's title) why the game categorically refuses to allow the player to choose two different warhead loadouts for craft like the missile boat; and
3. What the hell the dev's were smoking when they decided to put EVERYTHING in the exe file. I've been spoiled by games from companies like Paradox who take a hardcore UNIX approach, and put absolutely everything but the bare minimum of necessary code in accessible, organized, human readable, and well commented text and lua files (including save game data!).
1 and 3 are not likely to be answered here.
As to 2, I really don't understand what could be going wrong. It's apparent that provisions were not made in mission selection for allowing two warhead loadouts, which explains why things break when you try to choose any. It's also apparent that this was not the case for Tie Fighter either, given that mission editors do not give the option (neither did the game, for that matter). It seems that The Missile Boat was just set to use advanced missiles by default, and allowed the other racks to be customized. What I don't get is why I can't seem to do this in XWA. No matter how I set up the craft or its OPT file, the second set of warhead launchers will always default to ordinary concussion missiles. This simply cannot seem to be changed. Changing the hardpoints to SuperMissile does nothing. Changing them to Torpedo or SuperTorpedo does nothing. Changing the craft information in the exe from 287 to 292 (or anything else, really) does nothing. Leaving this information at zero does nothing.
Is this effort doomed? Evidently it somehow worked in Tie Fighter, but I just cannot figure out why. There is no obvious provision for this in TIE95.exe. The relevant bytes for warhead loadouts are left blank, and the hardpoints are simply Missile. Is there something in the mission files I'm missing? Is there any way to get the selection screen in the hangar to work? All I want to do is mess around with the missile boat in XWA with its full 40 advanced missiles and 30 advanced torpedoes or whatever, but I'm stuck with useless ordinary missiles!
