[Dark Hunter]

Just wondering how the Derelict folks accomplished certain things:

#1: The Auriga: How did they get it to fire over such an incredible distance? The "anti-beam" field, the self-repair, those can be FREDed quite easily... but I haven't seen a sexp for "increase-capship-beam-range" or something like that.

#2:Shivan Knossos: I checked, and the Shivan Knossos summoned by the Nyarlathotep is just a basic Knossos model, just reskinned red. I thought that if a model was reskinned.... then it would have to be counted as a brand-new model (like the Sapaph and the Artemis D.H.). But there is no Shivan Knossos model in the Derelict vp file. So how'd that happen?

#3:Gorgon Cannon: Did they use POFview or something like it to attch a beam to the front of the gas miner, but if they did, then why wasn't that counted as a new model?

Just answer these questions and I'll be a supremely happy person!

[Sesquipedalian]

1)  They probably used the fire-beam sexp.  That will fire a beam at the specified target regardless of the distance or whether there is a clear line of sight.  It also has the benefit of providing the Fredder with precise control over the beams, so if you are Fredding at all, it can be a very useful  one to get to know.

2)  It is actually pretty easy.  There are three main parts to every Freespace ship: the table file information, the model file, and the textures.  The table defines things like hitpoints and maximum speed, and references which model file to use.  The model contains the geometry data, including references to the names of the texture files to use for different parts of the geometry.  So all the Derelict team had to do was replace the textures for the Knossos with new ones that looked Shivan.  Because they gave the new textures the same name as the old ones, the model automatically used them instead.

3)  In Fred it is possible to change what weapons are assigned to different turrets on a ship.  They probably just changed the weapon for an appropriate turret.  However, if they did alter the model, all they had to do was to give their new model the same name as the original model and the table file would use it instead of the original.

[Dark Hunter]

I did wonder about the "fire-beam" sexp...... I just wasn't sure if that's what they used.

I'll have to learn how to reskin then.... call me a n00b, but I have very little experience in the area of graphics design.

You have been a tremendous help. Now some things I wanted to do in my campaign look doable.

[Mars]

The Gorgon cannon was a gas miner with a meson bomb behind it and four Elysium class transports around it, not docked in any way (called Beam Collars in the campagin) with beam cannons (BGreens?) assigned to their turrets.

[Dark Hunter]

Uhhhh....yeah I knew that.

Or most of it, didn't figure out the part about the switched weapons until reading Sesquipedalian's (wow that's hard to spell) last post.



So how about a new question? I'd preferably like to make my own colored beams for this campaign (like what Inferno did with the EA weapons), but like I said I'm horrible at graphic design so any pointers?

[Mars]

Oh... Sorry.

[Dark Hunter]

It's alright I know you're just trying to help. 

[Sesquipedalian]

Well, for that you'll need to learn at least some graphic design.  If you want to do some reskinning, you'll need to play around and practice for a while to get good at it.  If you want to make different coloured beams, that's quite easy.  It is mostly just a matter of taking currently existing beams and adjusting their colour balance (e.g. taking a red beam and shifting it towards yellow to make an orange beam, or towards blue to make a purple one).

You'll also need some programs to use.  Adobe's (Illustrator, Photoshop) is the industry standard, but I personally use Corel's graphics suite (CorelDRAW, Photo-Paint) on Windows.

[Backslash]

You wouldn't necessarily have to learn graphic design to change beam color... the game has a lot of beam colors built-in that are either unused or could be put together in different combinations than what is there.

Take a look at the Weapons.tbl BeamInfo  section.  Being creative with the various Sections is fun.  Change the Texture, or the Width, or the order of the Section list.

But if the color of the texture for the beam (or perhaps the muzzle beamglow) doesn't exist, you'll need to do what Sesquipedalian is talking about.  Fortunately the color shifting idea is very easy, especially compared to other graphic design tasks.  (It's the only graphic design thing I know how to do well )  If you want a free, simple program, I recommend Paint.NET.  In that program, you want to try (in the Layers menu) Adjust the Hue/Saturation.