[Andrew_Cluetain]

Recently came back to FS2 from not playing it for a while; Good times playing again.  That said I'm working on making a "simple" mod to make Shivans playable and flyable because the only mod that said it did this was for Retail FS2 and as far as I can tell, never finished.  Also I may have "dove in the deep end" without fully realizing it.  Since the Media VP's made Shivan Secondaries, that look VERY cool, I wanted to try to use those in this mod...  Rather early on I've come across 2 problems that I need advice / Help with.

The First one is an odd one, at least from my point of view.  When I go to the Ship selection screen the Dragon's small icon faces right and is seen from the side (see attached pic)  I don't know if all the shivan ships do this by default yet, haven't added "player_ship" to them yet.  I would like them to Face "up" and be viewed from above.

My second problem, so far, is since I want to use the media VP Shivan Secondaries I need the weapon tmb that I made to load LAST.  Right now that tbm is in a VP alphabetically after Media, but it doesn't seem to work yet.  I've attached the VP that I made and the ship tbm.  Be aware they are VERY WIP items at the moment.  (the tbm and VP are zipped so I could upload them)

Thanks!

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[AdmiralRalwood]

My second problem, so far, is since I want to use the media VP Shivan Secondaries I need the weapon tmb that I made to load LAST.  Right now that tbm is in a VP alphabetically after Media, but it doesn't seem to work yet.

Firstly, the name of the .tbm is more important than the name of the .VP (or... I think it is; I guess I should do some tests in that regard to verify that it works the way I think it does); secondly, priority works in reverse alphabetical order (so naming it later in the alphabet is making it so that the MediaVPs will always override it).

[Erebus Alpha]

I am doing much the same thing you are doing - making player-flyable Shivan ships. You should definitely give them a "player_ship" flag. The "default_player_ship" flag might also be useful, if you want it to show up in FRED automatically, and "in tech database" for easy proofreading of tech room details.

You should consider building a ships.tbl and a weapons.tbl - I merged all my scattered ship and weapon .tbm's to .tbl and I have experienced no load order issues whatsoever. It also makes your Tables folder nice and clean.

My dragon icon is a top-down view, with the nose of the ship pointed up.

I would post examples for some ships and weapons that you could copy & paste in, but I rebuilt everything to operate at much-greater-than-retail speeds, and a lot of my weapons use non-retail & non-mediaVP effects. If you need some working examples to play with to get yours operational, I can try packaging up a fighter, a couple of weapons, and the weapon effects. None of my stuff is packaged in .vp's at the moment.