Modding help with fixed placed objects

Starbases

from Sins Forums

This is my first post, and I hope I'm in the right area. I've seen way too many people get burned for posting in the wrong spot lol. So here it is. I just got turned onto modding a few days ago after playing the game for a couple weeks now. A lot of the basic modding seems pretty straight forward "if you want different abilities on a capital ship, you change the abilities list." The problem I'm running into right now is that I'm trying to make a change that's a little bit more drastic. As you probably already know, the Vasari's starbase has the ability to move around within the planets orbit. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make this option available to the TEC's starbase too. I've tried playing around with mulitple settings that appear to have anything to do with movement, trying to use the Vasari's starbase files as references for each one, but I just can't seem to find the right option. To be a little more specific, if this is even at all possible to do, I'd like the starbase to be able to move towards enemy ships that enter your planets orbit, and once the targets been engaged and destroyed, I'd like to be able to have it move back to it's original starting postion. And if there's any way to do it, I want to give it the engagement range options as well; "hold, local, gravity well." I'm just not sure how to go about all of this. I'd appreciate any feedback whatsoever that could send me down the right path on this one. I've tried searching forums for awhile now for any modding help similar to what I'm looking to do, but compared to other games out there, the modding community when it comes to information, seems to be pretty small with this game. Thanks in advance for any replies I get

modding
6,961 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Check out the entries down the bottom of the SB's entity file;

Vasari

maxAccelerationLinear 40.000000
maxAccelerationStrafe 4.000000
maxDecelerationLinear 500.000000
maxAccelerationAngular 0.500000
maxDecelerationAngular 9.999996
maxSpeedLinear 325.000000

Tech

maxAccelerationLinear 0.000000
maxAccelerationStrafe 0.000000
maxDecelerationLinear 500.000000
maxAccelerationAngular 1.000000
maxDecelerationAngular 9.999996
maxSpeedLinear -1.000000

Copy the values that the Vasari SB has to the Tech's, if you want it to move like the Vasari's

Not sure that SB's will move back to a specific point, but they do move towards enemy ships and structures to destroy them.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

also you have to remove the frigate construction ability/module in the tech starbase as the movement control buttons WILL cause a minidump on a starbase that also can build frigates.

harpo

 

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

First, thank you very much for the reply. It helped me realize that I made a very noob mistake. The first thing I actually tried doing was what you suggested, and "at first" it didn't work for me. But after reading your post and knowing that I'd been on the right track in the first place, I kept thinking "there's gotta be something really simple here that I'm overlooking." Sure enough, there was. It turns out that somehow I managed to replace all my Entrenchment 1.51 ENTITY files located in my mod folder, with Entrenchment 1.5 files. Which apparently was just barely enough difference that some changes still worked, but others didn't, which caused my starbase movement problem. The fix was as simple as you suggested though, and thank you for letting me know that I was on the right path all along. I just had to rethink some things. It's amazing how some of the problems that stump us the most, can have the easiest fix.

 

Harpo: Thank you for the heads up. Any idea as to why it does that?

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Stacked buttons which you can both press? I don't know what happens when you give a capship a 5th active ability, but I guess that will minidump too ( as the "learn" button is in the same spot)

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

conflict between the movement buttons & the ship building buttons, unfortunately you have to choose between movement & shipbuilding. the sins engine appears to HATE having 2 different functions in the ONE location in the gui on the one item.

the simplest way around the issue is to have TWO different starbases for the tech one that can build ships and one that can MOVE both with different entity names and the modules that can be added/movement values and the deep space constructor having the two entities linked in.

harpo

 

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Makes sense. I wonder if there's a way to change the layouts of the menu's. Giving you the option of where to place different functions. It's not a big deal if there's isn't. I'm not trying to create a full working mod here, just experimenting and trying to figure out where the limits are.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

hmm as far as I know it doesn't cause any minidumps and the frigate construction button is above the movement button so you can still make ships. The only problem is that you get a constant error message while you have selected the starbase when playing in the dev.exe. It doesn't cause any problems in the normal version. 

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

it also lags the game as the engine is constantly adding to the error logs, and can also fill the HDD with the error log.

regarding the button placement, it might be possible as ironclad had to move the buttons for frigate construction  for entrenchment.

harpo