Better Pips – profiles and expanded buttons for ship power controls

Better Pips – profiles and expanded buttons for ship power controls

Better Pips is a complete overhaul for the system pips. Gone are the days of managing pips one at a time and here are the days of predefined pip profiles and dedicated keys. Currently Better Pips allows you to change your entire power system with one click to one of up to 5 predefined profiles as well as it has expanded functions to map increase and decrease power to a specific system to a single key for people looking to map all/some of the functions onto a button box or streamdeck as well as the ability to make specific conditional changes depending on your current power distribution.

This may “sound” like a simple AHK script like my previous SWPSS script but it is not. This completely tracks the position of your pip selector and tracks the values of every power system so when you request a change it can make only the necessary modifications to your pip systems in order to execute as fast as possible. Please consider endorsing because this took a lot of time to code and debug.

To run better pips just launch the betterpips.ahk file. To close find the AHK icon in your taskbar and right click exit.

To configure the profiles open the betterpips.ahk file in a text editor and change the values to your desired values for each profile. Don’t forget to set your max power value, Max Pips per System value and crew pips value.

You MUST unmap alt ship controls from the alt key in starfield settings. Don’t worry the script will still allow you to make adjustments to your pip distribution with alt+wasd like normal. DO NOT USE OR UNBIND ARROW KEYS.

Controls:
F1: This initializes Better Pips to your current power controls and sets your pips to profile 1 values and must be pressed every time you enter a ship
F2: Switch to Profile 1
F3: Switch to Profile 2
F4: Switch to Profile 3
F5: Switch to Profile 4
F6: Switch to Profile 5
F7: Remove 3 points from shields and put them into weapons 1 – For when your in a dogfight and your shields are reduced and unlikely to regenerate this quickly reassigns that power to something that may actually make a difference in the fight
F8::Increase Grav Drive
F9::Decrease Grav Drive
F10::Increase Shields
F11::Decrease Shields
F12::Increase Engines
F13::Decrease Engines
F14::Increase Weapons 1
F15::Decrease Weapons 1
F16::Increase Weapons 2
F17::Decrease Weapons 2
F18::Increase Weapons 3
F19::Decrease Weapons 3

More functions to come possibly. Let me know if you have any functions you’d like to see included.

Better pips is not a mod! It is a AHK script and requires the program AutoHotKey 1.1 to be installed to function.

PS if your familiar with script extender and want to help creating a script extender version or just help creating a hook for script extender to detect if the player entered a ship to help automatically calibrate this script please DM me.