Help with adding abilities to Gravity Wells

Well after seeing your post, I did some fooling around and I can easily add the Asteroid Belt Ability to a regular asteroid. That works and when you colonise it the effect still stays but there seems to be no way of looking at the icon for the ability like you can on a uncolonized planet. Also I tried adding more exotic abilities to planets such as Gauss Blast, Beam Blast, and Antimatter Recharge but got a minidump everytime I tried to mouseover the uncolonized planet. I'm fairly sure only passive abilities can be added to planets so I would just try to take the asteroid belt ability file as a template and add your custom buff to it instead. It should work but you won't be able to see the icon for the ability once you colonize the planet.

I hope that helps a little. I just started on making my own mod and went straight to adding and modifying abilities on defense turrets and hangers. Let me know if you manage to add cool abilities to planets as I would definitely be interested.  

Ok, I'll reveal a little bit on what I am working on.

At present, planet bonuses are the only way to give other effects to planets. However, they are very limited, only 17 different effects. But, if you could add these abilities to certain planet types, then each planet could get a whole lot more interesting. I was trying to increase build rates for ships and buildings. Building rate for structures can be changed through a bonus, but not ships. This is what I am looking into. If you say that the ability effects remain, I will continue my effort, and change a few more things. My first few attempts ending with the bonus there, but not active for the owner of the planet, so I gave up (I know, bad example for others, but its not the only thing on my ever growing list of things to mod/do/include in Sins Plus).

Thanks for the reply, greatly appreciated and you'll get a credit mention

Happy to help! You're always replying to threads in the modding forum with helpful advice so we should all try to do the same for you.

Like I said, I added the asteroid belt ability to a normal asteroid and when I entered the system it correctly gave a modifier of -20% to chance to hit in the info card of my ships and when I colonized the asteroid and then looked at the info cards for the ships again the effect was still there so unless there was some kind of refresh issue the modifier still remains.

The credit mention, while not necessary, is greatly appreciated.  

Thanks. But after more faffying around, I can't get it to work. I have no idea why, it all seems proper, but none of the effects change anything for the factories when building ships.

I will try again tomorrow, sometimes sleeping on a problem reveals something you missed first time round. I just hope its doable. Thanks again for the reply, and no problem about the credit

A quick update, and I apologise for the double post, but this is worth getting noticed. I got it to work! For once the man upstairs cut me some slack

Copy the Ability and Buff file of one of the other Gravity well abilities (Plasma Storm, Asteroid Field, etc...), then alter what you want in the buff file to your effects.

Then, well, I'll post a screen seeing as tab-spaces don't seem to work on this forum.




Its all there, I apologise for the blanks, they are secret at the moment, until 1.2 is released

You'll see the important bit, that gives the ability to the planet, which in turn seems to effect the Gravity Well and all things built by the planet, and possibly everything friendly in the grav well.

Hope that helps someone, 'cause its helped me a lot and could make for some interesting additions in Sins Plus. You heard it here first

Cool, glad you got that sorted out Uzii. Looks like we'll be seeing some of those really interesting planet types after all!

Congrats! After seeing your first post there I tried to throw something together really quickly because I was going out and I tried something similar to this but I was trying to use "Apply buff to self" which should have worked like it does with the ability embargo (both would target a planet) but I got another minidump.  

Still, glad you figured it out in the end though. Keep those excellent mods coming!

That's an interesting idea, Uzii, glad you got it to work. It's a shame the neutral UI gets overwritten when you colonize, but does the effect still show in the planet's infocard?

Ah, good question, and fortunately, it does. When the effects are applied to the planet its self, it almost acts like a more complex Planetary Bonus. There is no nifty little icon, although you may be able to make one (mmm... gives me an idea :D), but the effects are listed in pretty much the same place as the Bonuses are, just under the Planets logo on its Info card.

This should now open up a whole lot more possibilities to planet bonuses. And although it can't be activated at random, a nice work around would be to make two identical planets (meshes includes), and put them in the same group as each other in the GalaxyScenarioDef file.

And you could also change the weighting values and all that good stuff, depending on how handy those abilities are. Definitely neat stuff