[vonhertell999]

put simply, i would like to add a couple of WOD and BP2 ships to a folder, to combine with regular fs2. im doing this because ive been making a campaign based off a 3rd shivan invasion and its quite a few years after capella with a bunch of fossils flying around. im not going to upload as a mod its simply for personal amusment.

[Droid803]

let me put it bluntly, there's no "simple" way that someone with no knowledge of FS2 data structure or modding would be able to do without massively ****ing up.
you copy paste the stuff you want together -> the required models, textures, effects, tables

then you have to make missions to put them all together.

good luck, have fun. though you probably won't have fun. Mashing mods together is pretty damned boring as you need to make sure you didn't miss some crap like an effect, or a table. Speak nothing of balancing. having ships just shoot each other really gets boring after a few minutes, and putting the whole thing together takes time in the magnitude of hours. In the end, you'll just have a bunch of ships you can ctrl-click in FRED...

If you want to have any sort of objective based play you're going to have to write that yourself...and at that point you might as well polish it and release it...

Every newbie wants to mash together a megamod. I'm rather thankful that in FS2, it isn't easy unless you know how to build a mod yourself (and in that case why aren't you?), and the result is utterly disappointing. Man, I've modded games where this was somewhat easy, and hot damn man, there were all these mishmash megamods, and by god they SUCKED.

Don't let this discourage you from starting a serious mod/campaign though. That's a worthwhile effort.
Random mishmash for personal amusement?
Probably not worth it. You won't get too much amusement out of it (at least, I don't, and I make campaigns not because I like to bask in the e-fame, but because I find it genuinely fun. Copy-pasting fifty different files into the correct folder/plaintext file? Boring.)

TL;DR
Don't bother.
It's a lot of work, and I bet you the result won't be as fun as you think it would be.
Make a real mod/campaign instead!

[vonhertell999]

well i plan to release it someday, its just much too clashy with all the other fs2 campaigns, and most of the ships are canon, with bp2 and wings of dawn music, (which have the best music ever heard) ive gone through a lot of trouble though (for example, for one mission, table editing a manticore to make it flyable in a mission. i do plan to release it.. just not for quite awhile.

EDIT: my god kill me this is a pain.

[Droid803]

hrm, well if you really want to do it...I suggest you start off by getting the required tools.
basically, you want a program that can open VPs, and PCS2.
You probably also want Irfanview to look at effects/textures to make sure what you're copying over looks about right.

Go into ships.tbl (for WoD) or bp-shp/rbm, and copy over the ship entries you want into your own ships.tbl (or tbm).
Then you go look at the $model file: ,and copy over that *.pof to your directory.
Then you open that *.pof, and look at its texture list. Copy every texture there over to your directory.
Then scroll down in the ships.tbl entry, there are weapons. Go open weapons.tbl/-wep.tbm and copy over the weapons you need.
Then you go look at the weapons and copy over the effects you need, and the models (for missiles) and their textures.
Then for any impact explosion effects, you're going to want to copy over the -wxp.tbm entries.
In the Weapons entry, you want to look at fired/impact sounds. They're a number. Open the source mod's sounds.tbl, and copy over the sound effect file, and add the sounds.tbl entry to your own sounds.tbl, but you have to make sure every number is unique (ie. no two sounds can be called 165 or whatever).
Then go back to your ships.tbl, copy over any HUD elements...
If the ship belongs to a species other than Terran, Vasudan, or Shivan, you'll want to change it to one of those. Or you can add new species to your mod via editing Asteroid.tbl, Species_def.tbl, Icons.tbl, and sounds.tbl...

This is to be repeated for every ship you want to move over. Sure, you'll have some overlap weapons/species stuff you won't have to mess with, but the first part isn't gonna get any shorter.

Grats, now you have some ships and weapons...
so make some missions...

And I bet I forgot some things crucial even, so you should probably run a debug build and see what it yells at you for.