[NFSRacer]

Hey, guys!  I'm just curious if anyone had heard of any info on a Shivan mod for the FS2 SCP?  I've heard a rumor of one currently in development, but I haven't seen anything yet.  I mean, we've all seen the GTVA side of FS2 and (for those of you who are modders, like I am) the NTF side also, but not the Shivan side!  I do have an idea for a Shivan campagin mod, but what I require are fighters that the player(s) aren't able to use without weapons.  The only one avalible to the player(s) is the SF Mara and that only has two working weapons, so that's going to be a REALLY big killer!  If anyone can give me any info on this mod or can supply me with workable Shivan fighters and/or weapons, that would be great!

[Jeff Vader]

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,55031.0.html ?

[NFSRacer]

Hey, man!  Thanks for tipping me off to this mod!  You just saved me a lot of work!!! 

[colecampbell666]

And also, you can edit the weapons.tbl and ships.tbl to make Shivan ships flyable.

[Flaming_Sword]

That's how my mod got started. Then feature creep kicked in, and here we are.

[NFSRacer]

And also, you can edit the weapons.tbl and ships.tbl to make Shivan ships flyable.

How do you modifiy the ship.tbl and weapons.tbl and what program do you use to do so?

[ShadowGorrath]

The Universal Tool, the perfect modding program- NOTEPAD! Really.

[Stormkeeper]

Yea. He's serious. Just use notepad. Its free, and idiot proof.

[Flaming_Sword]

I wonder if anyone's hardcore enough to make missions in notepad...

[Goober5000]

Make missions, no.  But edit missions, oh yes.

[Flaming_Sword]

I remember once accidentally saving with a command brief or something that had a blank stage, which would crash FRED upon reloading until I went into the file and inserted a random character, and doing exact ship orientations by messing with rotation matrices. That's about it for my mission editing in a text editor...

[FreeSpaceFreak]

O.o Is it possible to FRED in Notepad? Got to try that...

[ShadowGorrath]

Well, by editing missions via notepad you can steal/take backgrounds from other missions and copy them to your own. And fully disable the retail stars.

[Flaming_Sword]

Of course, that import background button is pretty handy too...(was that only in newer FRED builds? I can't remember)

[Droid803]

I hate the FRED background editor.
Its so clunky and doesn't save properly sometimes.
I just add a number of generic nebula then play around with the coordinates in Notepad
Its also faster to fix typos in Notepad.

[NFSRacer]

The Universal Tool, the perfect modding program- NOTEPAD! Really.

...And the ship.tbls and the weapon.tbls are included in the VP file, right?

[Jeff Vader]

The Universal Tool, the perfect modding program- NOTEPAD! Really.

...And the ship.tbls and the weapon.tbls are included in the VP file, right?

Yes. Use a vp viewing tool such as VPView to extract the table files from the vp. Then, edit the extracted table files with Notepad. Then, place the modified table files to either \freespace2\data\tables or \freespace2\modfolder\data\tables to see if they work.

[NFSRacer]

Well, it worked!  That's a BIG start, but I've got to ask, I'm thinking about of doing that on several FS2 missions, but I'd like to know it there's a quick way of putting them in; using FRED2 or if they're already there because of the TBL files?

[Droid803]

If you tell FRED which mod you want to use, the ships from the mod will be in the ship list.

[NFSRacer]

OK, but, when I looked at the "root_fs2.vp" file's missions, I found 92 missions and two campagin files. I suppose asking for a list of mission from the FS2 campagin going by file names is out of the question?