Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Non-FreeSpace => FringeSpace => Topic started by: Guibaesa on August 29, 2017, 06:12:32 pm
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Greatings everyone.
I have played Tachion the fringe for a very long time and followed fringespace.org as well. Though I never became a member of this forum, I do now because I have a request to make.
Back some years ago, fringespace had two files that were called "Ship pack 1" and "Ship pack 2", as I recall they were made by Devilsclaws and as the name implies, they are mods that added all of the ships to the main game to be piloted in single player.
Im looking for this two lost mods everywhere but I wasn't able to find them. Therefore, My request is that if anyone has these two mods or know where i can find the files that made them, please, post them here in this topic, or send them to me. I'll be grateful to the one that answers this simple request.
Thank you.
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You are remembering that a little wrong, Sonic made Ship Pack 1 and 2, not DC.
DC or Bloodstar released a couple small 3 ship sets. Sonic was more prolific with maps and dozens of ships.
When I made service bay, I tried taking the most popular parts from all the previous packs and combining them.
In some cases adding ships to the campaign can break the flags that allow you to progress too, or make it crash, I would consider all mod packs fairly buggy with the campaign.
http://dropcanvas.com/y078g
You can get both of sonic's packs there for the next 6 hours (link expires), our ability to host files is sort of limited currently.
As far as old files go, I have all of Sonic's files, most all of everything DC released, but not his private stuff. Blood's ships I have.
Razor's files mostly were lost to a hard drive dying. Slippster's released stuff on his old site I mostly have from the later years.
There are some unreleased map editors that Deckor and Mystica have, but they aren't letting them go.
Shadows Lament from when I found her at Star Citizen, doesn't have anything anymore.
There were a few people that had mod tools or cheat tools that gave me their stuff.
So bottom line is that I'm the last bastion of Tach files. As far as what was released to the public, I have what remains, if people are looking for it.
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You are remembering that a little wrong, Sonic made Ship Pack 1 and 2, not DC.
DC or Bloodstar released a couple small 3 ship sets. Sonic was more prolific with maps and dozens of ships.
When I made service bay, I tried taking the most popular parts from all the previous packs and combining them.
In some cases adding ships to the campaign can break the flags that allow you to progress too, or make it crash, I would consider all mod packs fairly buggy with the campaign.
http://dropcanvas.com/y078g
You can get both of sonic's packs there for the next 6 hours (link expires), our ability to host files is sort of limited currently.
As far as old files go, I have all of Sonic's files, most all of everything DC released, but not his private stuff. Blood's ships I have.
Razor's files mostly were lost to a hard drive dying. Slippster's released stuff on his old site I mostly have from the later years.
There are some unreleased map editors that Deckor and Mystica have, but they aren't letting them go.
Shadows Lament from when I found her at Star Citizen, doesn't have anything anymore.
There were a few people that had mod tools or cheat tools that gave me their stuff.
So bottom line is that I'm the last bastion of Tach files. As far as what was released to the public, I have what remains, if people are looking for it.
Thank you, thank you very much. If anyone in the future looks for those files I shall help him now.
As for specific files, the ones that Im looking for specifically are the ones that belonged to three ships. the cinder station GAR, the demon pirate ship and the star patrol Enforcer. precisely, the custom hud and cockpit files. (DES,BOX,PCX ETC...)
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What are you really trying to do then? Of anything the Sonic versions are the weaker versions of the various mods.
Ship pack 1 has the demon and enforcer, not sure about the gar.
You're not going to be able to just port these over to another game or straight up open and use them. There's quite a lot of issues in the files.
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And this is all before talking about the grey area that is asset licensing.
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There's quite a lot of issues in the files.
After a lot of try and error, I manage to fix some of the problems, or at least make them less troublesome. The main problem (for me at last) was located on the CFG files. I made some progress in preventing the game from crashing when you are exiled, as well as successfully added a new ship (The Enforcer) to the game without the need of replacing another ship with it. thanks to those files that you posted I manage to gain access to all the files I needed (With the exception of one single menu PCX file for the demon pirate ship). Now im focusing mainly in two things how to fix the bug that prevents Armaan Patrioli to show up in Dark space so I could sell him my contraband and finding a way to make the enforcer and the demon land on a pad properly without entering inside of her (The most difficult problem of all DX).
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Mission events there is no means of editing that I am aware of. We don't have an editor for the Novalogic format that controls that.
As far as ships dipping into the landing pad, I fought that with the Nighthawk in my mod pack for like 2 weeks. It's based on increments in some value, so there's very little range that it moves.
I can't remember if it's in the ship itself DES or the overall player ships file, which may be a BIN I think. I'm trying but I really can't remember. That's going back 3-4 years.
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Yeah. As I said, I haven't managed to fix some bugs but make them less troublesome. Inside the enforcer DES file, on the [CONNECT] line, if you set LAND_POINT to 2, the problem doesn't go away, but it makes it makes some improvement on it. The ship still enters the landing pad but now it doesn't reach the camera point. The weird thing is that when I tested with other numbers (1,3,4,7 etc...) the problem persists or even gets worse. I have no Idea why.
As for the BIN files, Im still looking for a tool to decrypt them. If I manage to modify one of this files that are encrypted in RTXT, such as SHIPTEXT.BIN, I would be able to do something about it. At least, I could add custom ship biographies for the new ships I'm working on.
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That sounds right on LAND_POINT, try a float, like a number with a decimal place.
I have the hawk at 25, but my own guess is that after looking at the dummy points most likely there are only so many markers in the model files (say 8 for example)
that were built in for the purposes of docking, even if the ship wasn't going to be a player ship. It was probably just part of the model process for them.
When you combine the various points, it makes a docking path, and the engine just moves the player ship sequentially. Which is probably why they yank the controls from the player.
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I tried up to 99, only 2 works, somehow DX. Wanna know something weird when I edited the landing point on the demon pirate ship it works almost perfectly when I set it to 5, but when I set the landing point of the enforcer to 5 the problem gets worst. I managed to find 12 different landing points from 0 to 12. beyond those, nothing seems to change.
As you can see, it make almost no sense, it's been maddening. >:C
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I'm still missing a file. It is called "demonup.pcx"
Does anyone have it?
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there https://expirebox.com/download/c60f6423844cff3bae1d228992d0595b.html
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there https://expirebox.com/download/c60f6423844cff3bae1d228992d0595b.html
Thanks. If you need anything or any help with this mods or the game in the future just ask.
Thank you very much
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Hey, does anybody know how to fix the bug on drake station?
Every time I try to trade my spare parts, and land on the station, when I return to Alpha starbase the spare parts are still in my inventory. I go and land there again and again but this problem persists.
I wonder where is the problem, in wich file. The ones of the starbases, the ones of the menus or the one that has the types of cargos.
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That would be anyone's guess. Again we don't have access to all files, or the scripts that control functional progression. We deemed it better to move engines than try to
crack Tachyon's hardcoded system where much of the functionality is housed.
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Fair enough. Thanks for the answer.
Here is something to show you my appreciation for all your hard work.
This are the crates that I managed to find in the game. Use it as a guide if you want.
Please tell me if I missed anyone that you know:
Crates:
SOL - Ganymede - 1 - Trade Goods
HUB - Alpha - 1 - Food Supplies
- Scrap Yards Sector - 2 - Contraband and 250 cr
- Star Patrol Farpost - 1 - Medical Supplies (Bora Only)
Frontier - Atlantic casino - 1 - 777 cr
- Void Runners - 1 - Illegal Narcotic (Galspan Only)
- Slaver Sector - 1 - 13 cr
- Foothold - 1 - Bora Mining Equipment (Galspan Only)
- Hajod Barony - 1 - Lost Artwork
- Furry - 6 - Contraband and Credits
- Onrald Barony - 2 - Lost Artwork and Illegal Chemical Compounds
- Venture - 1 - Medical Supplies (Bora Only)
Galspan - Arteris Fleet Array - 1 - 500 cr
- Ceriphilon Production - 2 - Spare Parts
- Prpmetheus Production - 1 - Bora Mining Equipment
- Nereus Research - 1 - Food supplies
Bora - Poranis Nebula - 1 - Spare Parts
- Haven - 2 - Food Supplies
- New Dawn - 1 - Medical Supplies
Ripstar - Draconis Ripstar Field - 1 - 1000 cr
- Mercenary - 2 - Lost Artwork and Illegal Chemical Compounds
Twilight - Deep Fringe Array - 1 - 5000 cr
- Dusk - 1 - Illegal Chemical Compounds
- Silicon Hive - 1 - Spare Parts
- Cassitor Station - 1 - Lost Artwork
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Fair enough. Thanks for the answer.
Here is something to show you my appreciation for all your hard work.
This are the crates that I managed to find in the game. Use it as a guide if you want.
Please tell me if I missed anyone that you know:
Crates:
SOL - Ganymede - 1 - Trade Goods
HUB - Alpha - 1 - Food Supplies
- Scrap Yards Sector - 2 - Contraband and 250 cr
- Star Patrol Farpost - 1 - Medical Supplies (Bora Only)
Frontier - Atlantic casino - 1 - 777 cr
- Void Runners - 1 - Illegal Narcotic (Galspan Only)
- Slaver Sector - 1 - 13 cr
- Foothold - 1 - Bora Mining Equipment (Galspan Only)
- Hajod Barony - 1 - Lost Artwork
- Furry - 6 - Contraband and Credits
- Onrald Barony - 2 - Lost Artwork and Illegal Chemical Compounds
- Venture - 1 - Medical Supplies (Bora Only)
Galspan - Arteris Fleet Array - 1 - 500 cr
- Ceriphilon Production - 2 - Spare Parts
- Prpmetheus Production - 1 - Bora Mining Equipment
- Nereus Research - 1 - Food supplies
Bora - Poranis Nebula - 1 - Spare Parts
- Haven - 2 - Food Supplies
- New Dawn - 1 - Medical Supplies
Ripstar - Draconis Ripstar Field - 1 - 1000 cr
- Mercenary - 2 - Lost Artwork and Illegal Chemical Compounds
Twilight - Deep Fringe Array - 1 - 5000 cr
- Dusk - 1 - Illegal Chemical Compounds
- Silicon Hive - 1 - Spare Parts
- Cassitor Station - 1 - Lost Artwork
The only one i miss on this list is the 100 cr crate you can find in Ganymede.
But instead on this list is one, that even i did not find in my YT playthrough.
Actually i was always curious about, when the Opportunity Trade Ship in Dark Sector appears. Because it never did and so i was never able to sell all my Contraband.
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Indeed, that is one major bug that was never fixed, perhaps if someone that knows how to properly use the "Tachyon Map Editor" (Which is not my case DX) could fix this problem.
PS: 100 cr in Ganymede? Where is it? I could only find the "Trade Goods" in that sector.
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The map editor that we have is a not quite last version that was made by Shadows Lament ages ago.
After she got out of Tach modding at some point she suffered a drive failure and the later versions were lost.
None of these versions has the capability to edit scripts or events, missions.
There was one other editor by Mystica and Deckor that supposedly had more functionality, and while Deckor was ok with turning it over, Mystica was not, thus it never came out.
It's somewhat doubtful that either it even existed or did all they claimed it did, it could have been a joke. There's little supporting info beyond a short lived web page for it.
So the bottom line is the community never has had the ability to edit the scripts and events. Only Novalogic and now THQ (maybe) have had that ability.
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So the bottom line is the community never has had the ability to edit the scripts and events. Only Novalogic and now THQ (maybe) have had that ability.
I guess that inability would also be applied to the weapons and missile files right? I mean, some time ago I tried to modify the weapons attributes (Damage amount, lazer fire rate, energy use, guided/unguided missiles etc...) by decrypting the ITM files, but none of that was inside the ITM files.
Is that also the case or did I focused in the wrong file type?
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The weapons and such are coded into the exe, no one has a good idea of where they are buried.
To get the data I used for our mod, I ended up buying the Mars Guide and that is based on pre release information, and in many ways, wrong.
So I spent a good month or so running tests in game, trying to measure the weapons.
What I came up with is that Tachyon uses it's own armor system, which is based on factions, what weapon is used, how fast it hits a target, it has a chance to bypass the shield.
It got to be so complicated that I reached out to one of the devs to confirm my suspicions and he thought it was even more complicated.
Pretty much all you can do to the actual weapons is freeze the memory values, giving you infinite ammo/energy/burners/shield, or there's a old hack that was called a "godrail"
where you edit a capital ship beam turret into a weapon slot, which has infinite range, infinite damage, and mostly fires instantly. The graphic used in the various
capital beams is also so large, it blocks your view. For a variety of reasons I can't give the godrail out.
...and before you try it, I spent a ton of time trying to get a capital ship playable. There were rumors that someone did it, but I figured they probably model swapped their ship
instead of actually ever making it work. The game does some trickery with the training rings files and builds a base or cap using a OCF file as a multipart object.
Ultimately the closest I got was a "almost" flyable base. See the base lasted about 3-4 seconds as a playable ship, then started self destructing, which soon after crashed the game.
Been there, tried that. Sounds good, doesn't work.
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You tried to make a capital ship playable? Wow (0_o). Don't worry I won't try anything like that.
The only thing that I ever tried but without success was to make the tachyon mega-gates that are in the game selectable, so that I could open them. The plan was to make a "Bonus Mission", so when I finally finished the game, I could do a "Free roam" through space and all of its sectors, just to pass the time. I would only need to enter the the Letzer ring training course mission in the HUB, I would only need to target a mega-gate, type the cheat code and enter it. Unfortunately I never knew how to make those gates selectable in the game (Only one can, the one in Neptune).
Is that even possible?
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PS: 100 cr in Ganymede? Where is it? I could only find the "Trade Goods" in that sector.
Right in the middle of the station itself. In the upper metal column of it.
(Only one can, the one in Neptune).
Yeah, interestingly it is a SOL Gate within SOL :lol:
Actually even if it would be possible, i think the effect would be the same as you try to fly through the Gate in Neptune... your ship freezes and nothing happens.
Maybe this targetable gate is still a left over from the Beta Demo from 1999 where you actually did have a Free Roam feature.
Whole SOL seems to be a left over of all the plans Novalogic did have with the game. For example the "Security Breach" mission where you have a whole side quest in Luna... a sector you would not fly to for your main objectives.
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Right in the middle of the station itself. In the upper metal column of it.
Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, interestingly it is a SOL Gate within SOL :lol:
Actually even if it would be possible, i think the effect would be the same as you try to fly through the Gate in Neptune... your ship freezes and nothing happens.
Yeah, quite funny a gate to SOL in SOL XD, I believe it was left there so that the cutscene when you are exiled played properly.
As for what happens when you cross the mega-gate, I made some tests, and the results where many:
1: If you try to enter the HUB mega-gate in Neptune (I edited the def_vars file to make that possible) when you are in a mission that is NOT the one that you are exiled, as you said the game freezes and crashes. When you do it when you are the Neptune mission the gate supposedly teleports you to the HUB region, but there is no space station, no gates, nothing, only emptiness.
2: If you try to enter any mega-gate to a different region, BEFORE you have visited it the first time by a normal method (Example: Try to go from the HUB to the Frontier just moments later you have been exiled), the game again freezes and crashes.
3: If you try to enter any mega-gate to a different region, AFTER you have visited it the first time by a normal method, the gate works perfectly fine with no bugs ore problems, except when you look back to the mega-gate you just came from, and you realize that it is closed and you have no way to go back DX. I tested this successfully on a mission with the Bora, the one that you have to kidnap a Galspan frigate. For a brief amount of time the mega-gate to the Frontier region opens, and if you are fast enough you can cross it with no problems, and if you want you can even dock at New Vegas station (Still you cant go back and you have to go back to Bora space and restart the mission from the beginning DX)
I could further look upon those problems in the future, but first, someone has to tell me HOW to make those mega-gates targetable.
That's all I ask.
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Well there's a few things here since we're talking ancient history.
Novalogic as a company and management, I'd venture to say that they had no particular love for Tachyon. It was a business, the end.
The dev team was the ones who were passionate about Tachyon, and as the story goes they were inspired by the other games coming out, the sci fi of the time, and
literally sketched out some ideas on a napkin, went to their boss to get moderate funding, and went from there. Novalogic cut the project short and demanded it ship,
by which point many of the key devs were looking to greener pastures, and moving away. A couple devs stayed behind long enough to make the 3-4 patches to fix the worst
of the problems of the time.
None of them expected Tachyon to get such a cult following as it did and get such large international appeal.
By the time Novalogic started on Delta Force Angels Falls, they'd already spent a few years hawking the game library digitally over GameTap and a couple other early Steam Store wanna-be's.
Based on what I heard there was only one or two devs from Tachyon's dev team still at Novalogic by 2008/09 when we inquired.
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As to the gates, the beta is one potential solution. The SOL gate is the way it is because it was used for that cutscene. They didn't create a dummy gate to replace it post intro, so it's literally a leftover.
The gate that dumps you into a void, is because that gate doesn't have a target map file if I remember correctly. You can replicate this in multiplayer maps by not picking a destination gate in the editor.
As to free roam, I'm pretty sure I remember after you finish the campaign you can just reload the game and it goes back to before the final battle, you can free roam that way.
For several months RK hosted a multiplayer server that had all the HUB areas accessible. I didn't look into it, but I think that's just something where you'd you'd simply setup the acessory files to use whatever campaign map, and the rest of the game doesn't care. Since the host system controls it it would work. The troublesome part is if you modifiy the map files then you have to distribute them to all players.
This is why TSB exists, because if you load a multiplayer player into a server running a map they don't have, or a background they don't have, it'll either crash, or they'll get in game but they can't see anything.
But yeah ultiamtely 11 sector multiplayer maps were a thing, I want to say either 11 or 13 was the highest. It just didn't play well, it was more for ****s n giggles.
1, 3, 4, 5, 7 were what we stuck with for playability. Doesn't mean that you couldn't do more. RAM used to be a limitation, but that's hardly a concern anymore. There were also server tools made by modders
that allowed you to ban by IP, kick players, etc. But they were all exe based, so they were mostly dropped after the lobby moved hosts and the IP became too long.
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My only guess on making mega gates targetable would be that it's a separate class of object, which isn't targetable at all. The cutscene gate remember too isn't a actual "gate" that works per say in game.
It's a prop, that looks like it works thanks to how the cutscene plays out. I kinda wonder if this isn't why every time you change regions, you get that auto pilot cutscene, to keep the
player from figuring out the mega's are just props.
The only way might be to copy the one animated gate to every location and target other maps. You'd either have to check if you can change the Mega in place on a campaign map, and it works,
or you might have to hex edit the gate in it's entirety between map files (which being they look like gibberish ought to be fun) and then open the map and set a destination. Either way I still
don't think it'll work because the gate isn't anything more than a prop. Megas just aren't setup like regular gates on the backend.
I don't know. You'd have to do a ton of work to swap the map entries for gates, the gate files would have to be swapped from a regular to a mega model file, the animation wouldn't work
properly because the shape is different, and the largest problem of all is I don't think all the necessary files are accessible. ANIM and SCRIPTs can't be modified if I recall, and some of that is going to
be in the exe.
I really don't think it's possible with the resources we have.
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I was thinking a more simple way.
The main problem to me seems to be in the files that compose a ships targeting system. It is program to target enemies, friends, neutrals, crates, nav buoys and gates. If we managed to add a new target option to identify the mega-gates, or at least edit the mega gate files to make them be identified as normal gates, then we would solve this problem. Since the SOL gate in Neptune, when targeted, it actually has the signatures of a normal gate.
As for the coordinates of where the gates should take you, I found that they are already set inside the map files, so there is no need worry about that.
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I just found a little problem in the Bora story line, I hope there is a way to fix it:
In the Twilight region, there is an option to use a megagate that goes from there to the Ripstar region. The problem is, this gate could only be used when you are following the Galspan storyline, when you are playing as a Bora, the option to use that gate never appears.
If I could, I would edit, or create, a script in the game that would allow the megagate to Ripstar´s Liberty starbase available in the job board there, after the conclusion of the mission you perform for the Bora with Cassitor, since Anna tells you to proceed there once you complete the mission. Also, once the mission is completed and you receive the debriefing message, I would have to modify the script of the text to show a message saying the line that a new regional gate is available.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to do it.
Does anyone knows how to do it and what files need to be modified?
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Again, we do not nor have ever had the means to edit the scripts or mission files that dictate how a campaign mission works.
If we had, there quite likely would have been a lot of modding campaigns, much like FS2 here enjoyed.
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Again, we do not nor have ever had the means to edit the scripts or mission files that dictate how a campaign mission works.
If we had, there quite likely would have been a lot of modding campaigns, much like FS2 here enjoyed.
Ok, thanks anyway.
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That's odd, I install both ship packs on my game in order to have access to all of their files, but when I open the tachyon.pff file, extract the files that I'm interested in and decrypt them, I found out that they remain unchanged, I mean, they remain been the originals, with no modification (O_o). Weird.
Anyway, the only thing I was trying to do was something that was already been done, still, I needed to check it out on the mod to know how exactly to do it.
Turns out that those mods, somehow managed to make the game identify the new ships in the hangar by name. Everything name is correctly placed in every ship, with no issues in no starbase hangar. I tried to replicate this simple thing in my personal modifications, but every time I try, something goes wrong or simply nothing happens.
On the place where the name should appear, it only shows a weird text saying "!Ship Desc"
How can I fix that?
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Sonic's mods if I remember correctly used a launcher or patcher if you will that loaded the mod files directly before launching the game.
What I ended up doing to get at his files was create an empty PFF (duplicate PFF and strip all the files out of it so it's a container) and let the launcher
place files into it. Then you have just his mod files and can tell what the changes were vs. stock.
Multiplayer and single player availability of ships are two different things, other than maybe one or two areas.
You've not been super clear on what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to mod Sonic's files into campaign somehow differently?
Multiplayer you can only add so many ships before the menu system breaks if I remember right. Campaign, granted you "can" add more than the default
number of ships, but it doesn't work at the ship select menu then. You have to scrap ships, and even then there's a bug where the stock ships won't actually
go away after you sell them, so you can never select the mod ships. Few modders figured out how to add ships to campaign, and in doing so it breaks the mission flags
as best I can tell. Like if you remove or change the Mako, you will break the game right away when you are exiled to the Fringe.
There's another one where you can't progress later on in the fringe, an event won't trigger to pickup something. Then there's the one with the freighter going to the GS base
being attacked by Daggers where the freighter won't spawn in the last sector if you have a modded ship.
It isn't as simple as it seems to get things working.
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You've not been super clear on what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to mod Sonic's files into campaign somehow differently?
Im only trying to make the game recognize the new ships by name, you know, when you go to the hangar and you look up, you see the name of the ship displayed (Pegasus, Orion etc). In my case instead, the extra ships I managed to put in the hangar only shows "!Ship Desc" in the text box. I only wanted to know how to fix that.
Regardless, after many tries and errors, I managed to locate and extract some of Sonic's modified files I needed to start looking for a solution, with the exception of the "SOLPTRLF.des" file. Can you post this file here please ?
I'll keep you updated if I managed to find a solution.
Edit: There is no need to post the des fille anymore, I already found him.
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No the weapons settings are in the EXE. Those also are not accessible. Although you can use a memory freeze tool to change your stats like energy, ammo, etc.
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No the weapons settings are in the EXE. Those also are not accessible. Although you can use a memory freeze tool to change your stats like energy, ammo, etc.
No worries, I already found a solution using Cheat Engine XP
Anyway, thanks for everything.