Therax

At least with other data files, Sins seems to be far more tolerant of extra data hanging around than of having data missing. Have you tried just appending (a really huge number) zeros to the end? What sort of relative size are you seeing for this block? Would (# of vertices + # of triangles) do it? I'm afraid I'm not up to date on modern 3D engine design, so I'm not sure what to suggest for what other kinds of data the Sins engine might be looking for. Maybe some sort of hierarchic

[quote]The sad thing is, unless the modding suite will allow folks to add gun mounts to frigates, every ship would have to be a capital class, since just about every ship in B5 I can think of has more than one mounted weapon (Starfuries aside). And most of them aren't even frontal firing And, at least with TEC, capitals seem to be the only ships that are allowed to have more than one weapon type, as well as controlled placement..[/quote] Sins is perfectly capable of having weapons that are n

Let me boil this down: "We want the ability in a Buff entity to add/subtract from the player's current resource storage (credits, metal, crystal). An ability also needs the ability to check for (credits, metal, crystal) as prerequisites to activate the ability, as well as the antimatter level of the ship itself." That, plus the existing SpawnShip action, should give you what you want. Anything I'm missing?

Makes sense. There isn't a field that I saw indicating the number of filenames, so when less than 3 are used, the remaining ones are listed as empty strings (length 0). I've worked up a Perl script that I'm using to edit emitters. It's not very user friendly: I feed in a .mesh file, and it dumps out a text file of emitter information: [font="courier new,courier,mono"] Above;0,25.3130931854248,0;0 Aura;0,-37.4141960144043,0;0 Centered;3.00000010611257e-06,0,30.65166

Some refinements for you on the .mesh format: Everywhere there is a stringLength, it looks to be a long, not a char as your doc currently indicates. Textures look to be always composed of 3 DDS textures, as described by Major Stress here . The long you have listed as Unknown2 in the file header (at address 0x21) looks to be a count of textures. Then each texture is 3 Unicode strings, then 18 floats. The

[quote] Btw. if you change the following line in FrigateLaburacSpaceMine.entity ExplosionName "Fighter0" to, for example ExplosionName "Frigate0" the mines will explode and then vanish instantly and not linger around for some seconds as they currently do. [/quote] Thanks for the tip! As you can see, the space mines grab t

[quote] I'm pretty sure the .fx files are just shader files. Yeah, they may very well be that. Doesn't help me since I've no clue what the commands there mean. The highest programing language I know is C++ and even there I never made much with graphics... <img id="ImageResize_Image_15"

[quote] Are you sure about that? I don't think I've seen my planets take population, rather than infrastructure, damage. [/quote] From FrigateTechSiege.entity: [font="courier new,courier,mono"]BaseDamage 42.000000 BasePopulationKilled 2.800000[/font] The amount of infrastructure damage and population damage has changed over the various betas, as have planet (infrastructure) hitpoints and population growth rates. I'd have to retest beta 3 to see whether glassin

I know my way around a hex editor, so if you've got a file format doc already written I'd love it if you could send it my way. Glad to hear you're working on a friendlier tool as well!

I actually have this implemented in my Kin of the Stars mod. Your basic light frigate has a very low chance (around 0.5%, IIRC) to "overload" the systems of the target, disabling it for 10 seconds. It works quite well given the number of frigates you have running around. You'll see it happen from time to time, but it's not what you'd call "reliable."

[quote] If such a thing is supported (I figure we can rig up planet-invading troops by changing the projectile of the siege cruiser to some sort of pod), I'd totally be for it. I'm not sure if the "bang" of the pods hitting the planet are 1. dynamic (I can add more sounds if I want, you wouldn't want to hear the same gun/radio chatter every second) 2. changeable as far as delay goes (i want to control how long it plays), and if they are both we could play with that effect to simulate a plane

Do you specifically want to use the squad mechanism, i.e. for free auto respawn? You might have more luck with the SpawnFrigate buff type, as with the Sova's missile turret and the mobile space mines in my Kin of the Stars mod. Set the expiration time to something insanely long (or try -1 for the expiration time, that might work for infinite lifetime), and you can essentially build ships out of antimatter.

Code Herder, if you could give some documentation on how to modify the weapon hardpoints, I'd be very grateful. The inability to change the number of weapons on ships has been affecting how much progress I can make on adjusting balance in Kin of the Stars. Major Stress, I don't suppose I could prevail on you to make a few models for Kin of the Stars, could I? I don't really have contact with experienced modelers.

[quote] Can you elaborate on how this was done? I haven't peeked at the colony ship or siege frigate files yet, so it might be a easy 'oh just decrease this to 0 or change this to true' thing but it'd be appreciated. [/quote] Planets lose their ownership when their infrastructure is reduced to zero. In stock Sins, due to the way bombing damage is set up, you're virtually guaranteed to have killed off the entire population of a planet before you wear the infrastructure down to zero.<

[quote] Nice Mod. [/quote] Thanks! Glad you enjoyed playing with it. [quote] Though imho The Zolf Class is too powerful once you get lvl 3 Mobile Space Mine Burst. It launches 5 mines every 2 seconds for only 4 antimatter per cast (which allows you to cast it dozens of times) which do each 1200 damage. You can easily kill entire grav wells with defenses and enemy fleets with just that one ship. [/quote] So it goes when recreating source material. <img src="

I'd love to join in, but I rarely get home before 9 EST (0100Z). That's what happens when you live in -0700.

It would have been a low lvl research that would have increased tax income (which is sadly not changeable, so it would have changed population amount on a planet, which works very similarly) and decreased metal gathering rate. I thought there was an entry for this. Check Gameplay.constants for the following section: PopulationTaxRateIncrease ResearchSubject "RESEARCHSUBJECT_POPULATIONTAXRATEINCREAS

A look at the data files in GameInfo with something as simple as Notepad can be productive. In Gameplay.constants: planetBaseAllegianceAtDistanceCount 11 allegiance 1.00 allegiance 0.90 allegiance 0.75 allegiance 0.60 allegiance 0.40 allegiance 0.15 allegiance 0.15 allegiance 0.15 allegiance 0.15 allegiance 0.15 allegiance 0.15 In PlayerTech.entity: <fon

I think I've just concluded that Karma isn't interested in listening to anyone who doesn't agree with his point of view. To summarize, Karma wants a game where more micromanagement (what he calls tactics) are necessary. I don't care for micromanagement, and I'm very happy with the level currently required by Sins. Thank you for bringing up both Conquest: Frontier Wars and Nexus: The Jupit

That sounds like you tried to make a dead asteroid colonizable, and also gave it an ability (e.g. the Solar Radiation ability that regenerates antimatter). This is a problem, because when you colonize the planet, the button to buy upgrades for the planet is supposed to go into the same slot in the bottom-right control panel where the icon for the Solar Radiation ability already is. This is why, in stock Sins, all planet types with special abilities (stars, nebulae, gas giants, etc.) ar

IonBlast lvl3 has a CoolDown of 9 seconds with a duration of 7 seconds. It has an Antimatter cost of 65 while the Akkan has (at lvl 4 where you get the lvl 3 IonBlast first) antimatter reserves of 260+3*35=365 or about 5.5 shots. Lvl4 Akkan regenerates 1.15 antimatter/second. 5 shots * 9 seconds cooldown * 1.15 antimatter/second = 51.75 antimatter regenerated in the time it takes to shoot 5 shots, thus you get a total of over 6 shots. There

Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I just started up a new single-player game, and IonBlasted some pirates. No effect on shields, just stops the shields from regenerating. I don't doubt that your Marza's shields got chewed up, but it wasn't the Akkan doing it.

Full shields down? I've never noticed such an effect, and looking at the data files, I don't see it either. Novaburst listed all of the effects above in reply #4, and the only one that applies to shields is DisableRegeneration. Are you sure you're not confusing the IonBlast ability with something else?

I should have noted that there are a bunch of other changes in my mod, and battles with 10 capital ships on each side aren't uncommon, so in that context, losing the use of one of them for 10 seconds, while annoying, isn't cripping.

Duration of the IonBlast in stock Sins is 3 seconds at level 1, 5 seconds at level 2, and 7 seconds at level 3: [code="c++"] finishCondition finishConditionType "TimeElapsed" time Level:0 3.000000 Level:1 5.000000 Level:2 7.000000 [/code] It's really shamefully short. As I mentioned, I've bumped my durations to 10, 15, and 20 seconds, and it still doesn't seem overpowered. <img src="http://images.stardock.com/sd_com/smiles/Smile.gif" border=0