I am setting out to make my own campaign. However, I am quite the modding newb, and I am having a few issues...
1: How do I get FRED to work with the new ship and weapon classes I add to the mod folder? By default, it only loads the regular FS2 ships.
2: The Inferno ships (particularly the large ones) have very fuzzy textures, even from a kilometer away. Unfortunately, the #1 thing I need for my mod is more Shivan ship diversity, as the plot centers around the Shivans creating a temporary wormhole from Capella to their home territory. I'd prefer to have the Shivans' new ships look awesome, like the rest of the SCP ones. Fighters, bombers, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, and super capships are all fair game. Since this campaign will start approximately three days after Capella went supernova, the GTVA will not have had much time to build new ships.
3: I also need high-poly, high-detail, Vasudan and Shivan installations.
4: Is there a way to make weapons fire, warp-outs, and explosions be obscured by nebular fog? One of the biggest graphical turn-offs in FS2 (and even the SCP) was seeing a destroyer obscured by the nebula, and watching its beam cannons shine through perfectly. It dosen't need to be perfect - but perhaps a way to modify the opacity of the beam along its length, proportional to camera distance? In fact, a rather cool lighting effect could be mimicked by drawing large, though mostly transparent particles on the screen, giving the illusion that the light was bleeding through a bit and shining on the nebular clouds.
5: Is there a way to make nebulae less dense? That way the max effective view distance would be something like four or five kilometers, instead of five hundred meters.
6: The campaign editor...how does that work? Anyone got a link to a tutorial?
7: AI. The AI presently has a max limit of active turrets according to difficulty level. I presently have a very nice, high-poly, high-detail ship that I wish to use in my campaign (the TSJ Amaderasu), and I need any turret with a clear line of sight to a target to open fire. I heard that the blue planet AI did implement this, but what do I need to do to implement that into my mod?
8: Skies - in at least one mission, I'd like to have an absolutely gigantic Shivan space station in the background, occupying like 40% of the sky. How would I go about doing this?
9: Flyable Ships - at some point in the campaign, the player is going to get to fly Shivan fighters and bombers on a recurring basis (after the capture of a destroyer/factory ship, most likely). Is this only a matter of opening the ships editor and adding "player usable" to the list of flags?
10: Lucifers will be back. Is there a way to import the shielded FS1 Lucifer into my mod, with the SCP mediavps to make it look good? Also, how do I program the Lucifer's shield strength after doing so? It's going to follow in the tradition of Shivan fighters and bombers, with excellent shields and not-so-excellent armor.
11: Anti-capship torpedoes, launched by capships. Is there an easy way to make these harder to shoot down, so that they will regularly strike their targets? The logical solution to me seems to be to increase their speed significantly. Would this work?
12: Is there a way to make ships regenerate hull integrity and subsystems up to a certain point, say, 75%? I'd like the Amaderasu to regenerate its hull and turrets whenever it becomes damaged.
13: Could the physical model of the Ravana be scaled up, so that it's more of a carrier? Primarily so that the fighterbay would be large enough to realistically hold and launch a corvette.
Thanks for the help guys...and for reading this far
