[woodburner]

Alright. This is me again. I've settled down and made some missions, and now I want to make a mod or 2. But Where IS weapons.TBL????

Sorry, I've only had, like, 3 months of experience with FRED. I'm not the greatest game designer ever.

P.S. too bad you can't normally have chainguns or rail weapons in FS2. 

[Jeff Vader]

Root_fs2.vp.

And please stop expressing your emotions with a flood of smilies. Particularly with scrolling ones.

[blowfish]

Yes, its in root_fs2.vp, though if you want to base your mods off of current weapons, you might also want to look at the TBMs in MV_Effects.vp (assuming you have mediavps).  I would recommend creating your mods using a TBM ( insertsometablenamehere-wep.tbm ).  And you can probably create a chaingun or railgun effect with modified lasers (for instance, having an extremely high rate of fire).

[woodburner]

How do you open it? It tells me it needs to "use the Web to find a program" to launch it.

P.S. OK. Just it's harder to express myself in words.
"I feel... um... saddissapointedashamedofmyselfamaturishunhappyfrusturated." Got it?

[Wanderer]

There are several tools available for opening VP files. Like VPView as well as the more VP editor style VPMage, Maja and such.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/tools.html
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Maja

[Jeff Vader]

QuickVP is an option too. As is Maja, which you can get from Useful Stuff (link in my signature). That "Use the Web..." is some freaky solution that tries to find out a program for handling an unknown file type from a Microsoft database. And I assure you. That feature knows about file types as much as a baked potato knows about astrophysics.

[woodburner]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH!

I CAN'T EDIT IT, FOR SOME STRANGE REASON!!! HELP!!!

unless I'm overlooking something really obvious...

[Jeff Vader]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH!
I CAN'T EDIT IT, FOR SOME STRANGE REASON!!! HELP!!!

Yelling gets you nowhere. Please calm down.

Then, which one of the following did you skip?

1. Get a vp viewing program.
2. Use the vp viewing program to extract ships.tbl from Root_fs2.vp.
3. Open ships.tbl with Notepad or some other plain text editor.
4. Modify and save.
5. Enjoy.
6. Mmm.

[karajorma]

Probably step 4. He needs to save it to Data\Tables in order to get it to work.


Now who wants to explain that he should have been using a mod folder and/or a .tbm all along?

[haloboy100]

And please stop expressing your emotions with a flood of smilies. Particularly with scrolling ones.

would you rather see

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH!
I CAN'T EDIT IT, FOR SOME STRANGE REASON!!! HELP!!!

or

*insert reason why pissed here*

?

I prefer a wave of smiley faces then massive text. And there is this little button under "additional options" when you post called "don't use smileys". I think it's a profile option too.

[Jeff Vader]

I was thinking more along the lines of just saying 'Me sad' or 'I am not amused', instead of three lines of shouting or 30 smilies in a row.

Then, to business. woodburner, do the following.

- Open your \freespace\ directory
- Create a folder called 'mybigmod' to your \freespace\ directory
- create a folder called 'data' to your 'mybigmod' directory
- create a folder called 'tables' to the 'data' folder inside your 'mybigmod' directory
- Once you've edited your new ships.tbl enough, save it to the \mybigmod\data\tables folder you've just created

I'm not that big a cheese on FREDding so if someone wiser wanted to explain the command line hassle to him...

[karajorma]

How can I get FRED to accept a mod?

FRED now accepts mods in a similar way to FS2_Open. Since FRED doesn't have a launcher you have to make a shortcut and give that a command line option pointing FRED at the mod using the -mod flag.
If you don't know how to do that I'll explain.

   1. Open up your FreeSpace2 folder and right click on your FRED2_Open exe.
   2. Choose Create Shortcut.
   3. Right click on the new shortcut and choose properties.
   4. In the Target box type -mod Your Mod's Name after all the stuff already present (It will read something like F:\Games\FreeSpace2\Fred2_Open_r.exe -mod someMod once you're finished)
   5. Click Okay
   6. Use the shortcut to run FRED.

I find it best to make a folder full of such shortcuts on my desktop. That way I can run FRED for any of the several campaigns I'm working on with a couple of mouse clicks.

Slightly edited from the FAQ.

[woodburner]

Oops.

Thanks so much! I was really depressed, sad, confused, frustrated, amateurish, disappointed, and desperate-for-redemption because my old computer, a windows ME, was screwed and one day I opened Notepad and I couldn't write anything. that was why I was E-screaming and using excessive smilies (or should I say angries). Why shis is moving is because if it wasn't this would be a million lines long. Thanks!

 

[Jeff Vader]

I was really depressed, sad, confused, frustrated, amateurish, disappointed, and desperate-for-redemption

Yes, yes. We all are. But seriously. Numerous smilies, all-capital letters, exessive use of exclamation marks and writing lengthy responses with the scrolling function are all Neddy No-Nos. If you keep up with this, I'll be forced to track you down and drag my ass up there to do unspeakable things to your mailbox.

[woodburner]

sorry. I didn't know moving messages were annoying, I just wanted to save space and make it less dull.

[karajorma]

Scrolling messages are about the biggest way to make certain 90% of people don't give a **** what you have to say while the other 10% flame you for it.

[haloboy100]

Scrolling messages are about the biggest way to make certain 90% of people don't give a **** what you have to say while the other 10% flame you for it.

Can't argue with that.

[nubbles526]

*Cough* going back on topic...

Is there a program which is made specifically to modify tbls? TBLView can only view them, not edit them.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH!
I CAN'T EDIT IT, FOR SOME STRANGE REASON!!! HELP!!!

Please calm down.

Hehe, kind of having a flashback on Lt. Ash, and Riviera saying 'Sir, it's going to be alright' Probably woodburn would be like 'NO YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! YOU WERE NOT THERE!'

[Jeff Vader]

Is there a program which is made specifically to modify tbls? TBLView can only view them, not edit them.

Notepad.

[haloboy100]

good ol' notepad.