Is there anyway to open a .brushes file in GIMP, I tried the generic "open with" GIMP but it came up with the error unknown file type?

Brushes are a text file, not an image file. You open it with notepad. If its not in the Textures folder, you don't use gimp.

Use the brush files from the reference files DL. The ones in the game directory are bin format and you want TXT format.

EDIT: Right click the .brush and choose "Open with" and set the default program to notepad or notepad++ is much better if you plan to be a modder.

Does setting SynchronizedTargeting to TRUE for ship entities do anything combat wise, or is it just for visual effect?

I believe it faces your ship to use specific batteries (I'm not sure what the rationale there is).  I changed it on my Yggdrasil and it started turning broadside to fire.  Changed it back and it stayed firing from front as intended.

QUESTION:

Can a siege gun be made to focus fire from the rear of a ship?

The ship will prefer to fire from the direction with the most power. If the gun on the side has more power than the gun on the front the ship will want to turn to do broadsides.

I can read this sentence, and it makes grammatical sense, but I cannot understand what it is trying to say or comprehend the problem that caused you to ask a question that way.

harpo

@ Goa/Harpo...

Stop making me laugh darn it!

I'm not going to implement it if it doesn't work but...

My "Yggdrasil mothership" is a starbased size model.  It has a rotating drill on the backend and the "backstory" is it grabs a planetoid and burrows in to extract metals.

Since the drill is a particle effect, it can pass through objects.  There are gripping claws above and around it as part of the main model so I just thought it would be e neat dynamic if when it was going to "eat" a planet it would rotate about and back into it to do so.  I'd just give the siege gun a very short range to facilitate this and if Krdax is up to it mabe he could even make a dust cloud effect for the drilling with Tim the Toolman going, "Ruuh! Ruuh!" while it drills..

I saw Zombie's "Plague Eggs" popping and thought, "I want some comic relief too".

It also as an actual play mechanic gives the opposing player time to try to stop it.

It's all good atmosphere darn it.  Maybe I'll add a "Nom-Nom!" sound effect too.

I would like to know if it's possible and I did notice how both of you cleverly avoided answering.

@MyFist0...

I don't have any guns on the mothership but if I put one on firing aft only you think that would do it?

Hard to answer a question if I don't know what its saying. But I would say it is possible if "NeedsToFaceTarget = True" takes the orientation of the ability point into consideration instead of the model itself. All the abilities I made and I can think of in Sins are forward facing anyways, so I'm not sure how smart it is about that.

Hmmm.  When making the weapon banks only to the rear, the ship turns sideways to focus fire. 

Now how to point an ability point? you dropped some tantalizing clues here Goa.

Can you look at the Phase siege frigate mesh and tell me what to change to make the bombing weapons shoot backwards (in theory anyway)?  I'm trying something now but its random guessing.

Guessing with the mesh I made the regular guns of the siege frigate not able to fire by changing some values.  Nothing changed on the rest. 

P.S.  Didn't mean to confuse things--was just seeing if I could get a siege gun to shoot backwards.  I'll try the ability now.

So anyone out there today has an idea how to face target with the rear of a ship let me know.

It's impossible. I submitted a request for info to IC a while back and they wrote back with a code snippet for auto-attack move prioritization, which was literally just "is the DPS of the side banks the highest? yes - turn sideways no - turn forwards". We have a ship with a high-caliber rear gun that basically can only fire it on repeated shift-click strafing runs. I would really suggest pushing for a fix for this or the greater fix, which would be moddable boolean control over whether ships turn to auto-attack at all. Given how poorly ships prioritize targets sometimes (stuff like prioritizing a side by adding up DPS on a weapon bank even when some of that DPS has no damage toward a certain class of ship) it would be extremely helpful.

The mesh needs P001-Bomb null (mesh) point somewhere on the rear of the ship with the direction facing rear as well. 

As a quick text fix, copy the Exhaust point and paste it in and rename the new Exhaust to Bomb and delete the old facing forward Bomb point. Your count should be the same and the bombs will come from the exhaust.

Thanks Carbon and MyFist0....I'll give the exhaust thing a try and see what happens.

I'd love a moddable boolean.  One can hope the alleged triggers in Rebellion might touch on things like this.

Looks like Carbon is right--swapping the weapon point for exhaust has no effect--they still fire forward.  I guess the trick is to make a model that always travels backwards.

FYI--I tried changing the firingTiltAngle to 180.000000 and nothing either.

Siege guns will not fire in a backwards direction, at least, I've never been able to make it happen.  I tried redesigning the Vasari Siege platform once so that it would have 4 siege guns all pointing a different direction and spinning.  Wanted it to look like a saw blade shooting at the planet as each weapon rotated around and faced it.  Regardless of orientation of the mesh point, the weapons would only fire when the model was facing the planet, instead of getting a chain of shots as the model turned, I ended up with 4 beams that would fire at once (right through the model in the case of the one facing out the back) and then stop until it came back around.  Would have been fun to give it to Ryat's Powerful Pirates but it just never would work right.

Yeah--the firing angle effects normal weapons--I got my frigates to wiggle their butts and shoot lightning out their are like William Wallace but no siege affect.  Bummer.

A giant virus drilling into a planetary crust would have been cool

Thanks for the thorough feedback guys.  Quite informative.

That would have been an awesome siege effect Stant. 

I don't know about the spinning part, but you could do the damage as an ability and have a constant particle effect look like 4 separate "beam blades". Actually you could probably just have the platform be part of the particle over a very small mesh.

Is it possible to change the Shift key amount for the blackmarket?

For example i did find the one for the shipbuilding amount ( i was able to change the the amount of ships that are build when you hold the shift key)

I found these in the "Gameplay.constants"

buildCountSmallPerButtonPress 1

buildCountLargePerButtonPress 5

But those are only for the ship building amount and not for the blackmarket amount.

I did however see this section in there aswell:

marketDef

  sellPrice 2.0

  buyPrice 4.0

  priceIncreaseAtMaxShift 2.22

  minTimeForMarketChange 10.0

  maxTimeForMarketChange 30.0

  minTimeToCrashOrBoom 2.0

  maxTimeToCrashOrBoom 10.0

  minLengthOfCrashOrBoom 20.0

  maxLengthOfCrashOrBoom 200.0

  normalMarketMinShift 0.2

  normalMarketMaxShift 0.5

  boomThresholdPerPlayer 400

  crashThresholdPerPlayer -400

  boomMinShift 0.8

  crashMaxShift 0.2

  netChangeForCrash -0.2

  netChangeForBoom 0.3

But i didnt find any option for the Shift key amount.

Any idea where i can find the Shift key amount for the blackmarket?

I tried getting my cylon capitals to siege from the bottom and found it couldn't be done too. Shame cuz it would have looked cool.

Encase anyone is wondering for their reference, it appears to be a mixture of both. It has a visual effect, and when set to TRUE that weapon will only damage the targeted ship. However, even if you have multiple targets per weapon bank, this will not increase the damage dealt by said weapon, even though all of the cannons in that bank are focusing on a single target.

I too had noticed on fast ships with multiple beam banks using fighter movement that it noticeably allows them to fire all beams one after another at the same target as it passed--rather than splitting them at different nearby targets.

Advent fighter (I think) does this.  Thanks for the follow up Lavo.

I just realized that my "modest" mod is going to have to really change diplomatic settings.  In short, the Yggdrasil don't negotiate.  Will there be issues with removing them from the diplomacy system?

I could really use advice here as I have no desire to mod diplomatic stuff.  Why must it be so painful--why!?

Oh I hate when he posts.

• I'm noticing in the Player entity files a "Player is Psi" true/false condition?  What's the significance of this?
• If I use an Entrenchment Player entity file as a template, will that work in Diplomacy?