Stat tables¶

shipstats.bin, gunstats.bin, missilestats.bin and pilotstats.bin define every ship, gun, missile and pilot. The game ships two identical copies of each: one in LANCER.CAB and one in resource.hog.

sltool stats list <file>

lists a table's records with their field names, and marks the records the engine never loads.

Frame¶

Each file is an array of 352-byte (0x160) records with no header. All four use the same frame: a 64-byte name padded with NULs, followed by the table's fields.

Mod scripts can read and change these records (Scripting). The tables below list each field's name in scripts; the record name is name.

Each table has its own loader in the payload executable. It reads one record at a time into a buffer on the stack and copies the fields it needs into a runtime table. No loader reads the name, or anything after the table's last field, and in the shipped files those bytes are zero in every record.

Ships and missiles use the same runtime layout for their flight model: an object points to its flight model at +0x14, whether it's a ship or a missile. The flight model holds the max speed, the roll, pitch and yaw rates, the four inertias, and the max speed divided by the pitch rate, which the ship loader computes after reading the file. A missile's flight model only has its speed and rates. The word at +0x24 doesn't come from any file: the executable has a value for each ship type and missile, which sets how the AI turns the ship (Steering). The runtime layouts, with the source of every field, are in the modules of the files that load them: create.zig, guns.zig, missiles.zig and pilots.zig.

The gun and pilot loaders have no limit: a file with more records than the runtime table has entries writes past its end. The missile loader stops after 11, so the last five of the 16 missiles, Blazer, Iron Tooth, Death Claw, Brute and Hell Fire, are never read. They are all zero, and so is the eleventh, Stalker.

Where the names come from¶

The loadout screen labels ship and missile stats with strings from LANGUAGE.DLL. For ships, a layout table of eight 8-byte rows at 0x4EC020 gives each row on the screen a string ID and a display kind (a ten-segment bar or a number), and row r shows the ship's rth loadout value. The code that fills in those values shows which field is behind each label. Names marked Screen come from there.

Names marked Mods come from Starlancer-OSS stats-format.md, which found the fields by comparing known mods with the original files.

Ships¶

"Truncated" means the loader converts the float to an integer with _ftol.

The loader copies 0x40 to 0x5C into the ship's flight model in the order speed, 0x58, 0x50, 0x48, 0x44, 0x5C, 0x54, 0x4C: the three rates, then the four inertias, matching the pairs the mod comparisons found. It also computes 0x40 / 0x50 for each ship.

The loadout screen shows each stat as a bar scaled between the minimum and maximum of that stat across the ships it lists: the Alliance fighters the player can fly, and in a second list Coalition fighters (Loadout).

Guns¶

The loader stores 100 / fire_rate, the interval between shots.

gun_stats is indexed by the gun type in a model's muzzle, from 1 to 15, so the file's first record is type 1, and type 0 means no gun. The loader only fills +0x14 to +0x28 of each record. The first five words come from the executable, and say what a shot costs the ship (energy for types 1 to 7, a round for the rest) and which sound it makes. OpenReliant's copy of those words is in guns/stats.zig, which make gun-tables generates from the executable.

The two damage values are not a minimum and a maximum: in several guns the shield damage is larger. player_spectral_shields_set (0x00415430) only uses the shield damage: when the spectral shields are turned on, it counts each gun type among the nearby hostile ships, weights each count by that damage, and tunes the shields to the most dangerous type, ignoring the two capital ship guns.

Missiles¶

0x48 is the flight time, not the range: the loadout screen computes the range as speed times flight time. 0x54 is in hundredths of a second.

The screen hides the locking time for Screamer and Solomon, always shows Jack Hammer's damage bar as full, and hides Stalker's speed, range and damage.

Pilots¶

The record index is the pilot ID that missions use. The loader fills all 194 runtime slots with defaults, then applies each record it reads. Three fields are tier selectors: 0, 1 or 2 selects one of three presets for a group of runtime values, and any other value keeps the default. The four 32-bit words after them are copied with 16-bit moves, so only their low halves are used, and the high halves are never read. The shipped data uses tiers 1 and 2.

In scripts, the tiers are "level_0", "level_1" or "level_2" (or a number), and the skill is "low", "medium" or "high" (or a number).

The loader applies B, then A, then C; tier 2 of C also sets the last two values of A, to 50 and 100.

Unknown: what the runtime values do. Each group changes monotonically from tier 0 to tier 2.

Prior art¶

The record frame, the counts and the names marked Mods are from Starlancer-OSS stats-format.md, which builds on Userunfriendly's hexcheat mod pack. It treats the bytes after each table's fields as an undecoded tail; they are never read and always zero.