Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Marcov on February 06, 2011, 09:33:07 am
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I'm looking to creating interesting crossover battles between different mods.
Actually, I've attempted to make crossovers via FRED (specifically the "-mod blueplanet -mod ASW" function in the FRED shortcut) but found out that only Blue Planet and another mod (say, BP and ASW, BP and TVWP, etc.) works. How do I make effective mashups?
For example, I can't combine ships from the Unification War and Inferno R1. It seems that one always overrides the other, and only Blue Planet ships can be "added" safely (without replacing the other). How do I actually combine them properly?
Also, what is the maximum number of ships and weapons that a mod can support?
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Mods don't work that way, because of the mix of standard and modular tables.
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Short answer:
Without a really good understanding of how FS2 modding works, you shouldn't attempt this. You need to learn about how weapons.tbl, ships.tbl, and all the other tbls work, and you need to develop an understanding of the way modular tables operate. I would suggest to look at BP2 and look at its tbls with a browser pointing at the wiki's modding portal for easy reference.
If you simply mash two or more mods together that were not explicitly designed to be combined, then there is a very high probability of you introducing tons and tons of errors.
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So instead of helping him learn how we reserve that right for us vets who had to do it that way?
It's not hard, but it is a pain in the ass.
First can you open .vp files to remove contents from them?
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I'm sorry, but I didn't have the time to type up a complete tutorial just then :P
Well, SW said, the first step towards creating your own mod is to extract the ships, weapons, whatever from the mod it was originally from. The corresponding tbl entries should be your starting point, as they will tell you most of what you need to know about a given weapon or ship. Copy them to your own weapons/ships/whatever tbl. Then you need to look up what these entries are referencing. Laser weapons or beams for example refer to effects, ship or missile models need their textures extracted (unless they're using textures from retail or the mediavps, in which case you don't need to look them up). Then you need to find out whether those tbl entries are referencing entries from other tbls, such as armor.tbl, objecttypes.tbl, weapon_explosion.tbl, and others. This is where you'll probably need to keep the wiki's tables page (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Tables) on speed dial.
During all this, you should use debug builds exclusively, and check and recheck with the debug build everytime you change something. If debug complains about something (and it will), fix it immediately. If you do not know how, the forum or the IRC channel should be your ports of call. If you do not do this, I can pretty much guarantee you that your mod will be an unplayable, buggy mess.
Once you have built your own mod out of bits and pieces from other mods (You should not try to simply reference a mod via the commandline options unless you really, REALLY know what you are doing), you can start FREDing, but be aware that the resulting mod will probably need some heavy balancing before it can be considered playable.
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Best way to balance things for something like this is in the tables. ie, TBP ships may be extremely fast and manouverable across the board. You wouldn't notice the performance enhancement because enemy ships are this way as well. But when played against "normal" ships, they are nigh untouchable. Same with hull strength vs weapons damage. These things can change globally from mod to mod, so you will WILL want to balance them in the tables. (i just had to do with a great number of ships for "censored", as they are all pre fs1, therefore pre Apollo, and when the Apollo comes out in that mod, it is the end all be all of fighters)
First things first though, go to the modding tools in the freespace wiki and get a .vp viewer. once you have it, come back and we will continue this. Personally I would recommend getting the vpview32.
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Category:Tools
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you may want to look into this as well:
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.109 (http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.109)