[halcyony2k]

I am playing around with the Babylon 5 project Ships tables and made several capital ships flyable. I already read here on the forums about how boring they can be so I am understand that. My questions are two things: 1. How do I add primary weapon banks to the capital ships? I can't fly them in multilayer because I can't find out how to add primary weapon banks. 2. Is there a way to enable the wing commander style mouse movement? Thanks guys!

[General Battuta]

You should play 'The Blade Itself' from Blue Planet 2 which is right now the definitive capship command mission. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz2T3U1DnKg

You should be able to add primary weapon banks via PCS2.

[halcyony2k]

Yeah, I have heard a lot of good things about bp. Downloaded it a few weeks ago but could never get it to work even after reading the readme and reinstalling fso.

[General Battuta]

Should be an easy fix. If you want to talk about it here or open a thread in the BP forum I bet we can solve the issue in no time.

[Dragon]

Generally, both your requests can be done with scripts. There's an improved mouse script in the scripting board, and my edit of the Capship Command script will allow you to have the same control as over the Karuna in TBI, but much easier to configure and somewhat more tolerant regarding turret names.

[General Battuta]

There's a lot more to good capship command than the turret script. The new dynamic waypoints code will also let you do amazing things with enemy warship AI.

[halcyony2k]

All this sounds awesome. After mid terms end this week I will come back to the boards and see what I can do to fix blueplanet, and then check out these amazing scripts. Thanks guys, good to see the space sim community isn't dead.

[halcyony2k]

Where can I find the walkthrough for PCS2? It seems pretty cool. I have been playing around and added primary banks to a corvette but the game crashes everytime I try to launch the mission. I have been looking on google for walkthroughs but can't find any. THanks!

[Droid803]

Adding primary points in PCS2 is as simple as going to the Gun Points section on the left, and then hitting the "NEW" button on the right.
Since you probably don't care where it's placed are going to give it a dummy weapon anyway that's all you need to do.

of course you also need to edit the table, but I guess you did that already.

i don't see why it should be crashing then.

log file/run debug?

[halcyony2k]

It's all good, when it seems like an easy fix I like to figure things out myself. If you play around with the VP files too much they become corrupt and you have to replace them (learned the hard way.) This was my problem. I fixed it and have been editing cap ships all day to balance them. Now on to blue planet. I am trying to get the first blue planet to work. It starts up and says there are 49 errors or so and I thought I already did a fresh FS2 open install. The first error I get is

"Could not load in 2_CommandBrief-mb!
ntdll.dll! ZwWaitForSingleObject + 21 bytes
kernel32.dll! WaitForSingleObjectEx + 67 bytes
kernel32.dll! WaitForSingleObject + 18 bytes
fs2_open_3_6_13r_INF_SSE2-20111215_r8095.exe! <no symbol>
fs2_open_3_6_13r_INF_SSE2-20111215_r8095.exe! <no symbol>
"

I am going to try re-installing it again to another folder to see if this helps.

[General Battuta]

Whoa, uh, why are you modifying VP files? You don't need to alter them at all to do modding - they're just containers. Do all your work in /[yourmod]/data/ and the appropriate subfolders, and only package into a VP when you want to release.

As for that error, it looks like you don't have the 3.6.12 MediaVPs installed. For Blue Planet to work properly you MUST have the following:

-A full FreeSpace 2 install
-MediaVPS 3.6.12 located in a subfolder named (DO NOT CHANGE) mediavps_3612
-An up to date Blue Planet 1 install located in a subfolder named (DO NOT CHANGE) blueplanet
-Finally, Blue Planet 2 (if you want to play that) located in a subfolder named blueplanet2

It sounds like you might be having issues with folders being in the wrong places or having the wrong names.

You should also play with a recent build. Try this one: http://www.mediafire.com/?lc9f01f75nmp8n7

If you keep having errors please generate and post a debug log as per the instructions in the Support forum. BP is totally stable when you've got it installed right but it can be annoying to get everything in the right place.

[halcyony2k]

Yeah it's fine now, my media vps were messed up, thanks for all the help guys.

With the babylon project I haven't been able to get fred2 to load my custom ships and tables from my mod so that's why I was messin with the VP files.

[Droid803]

Well if you couldn't get your custom ships to work you are a derp and don't know how to multimod and couldn't even look it up on the wiki we have.
Seriously guys, we have a tutorials section on the wiki. Read it please?
Or if HURR WORDS READING, WE HAVE VIDEOS TOO.
never edit the contents of VPs because as you said, it makes them corrupt.

Even extracting everything then deleting the VP and editing the loose files is better practice than editing the contents of VPs directly.

God damn it if we just had a moderator for this section we could clean up that horrid mess of stickies up top to actually useful things.

[halcyony2k]

The custom ships worked fine. I read those links you posted weeks ago and they are how I learned to create the mod folders. Getting TBP fred2 to load custom mods is what I am looking for in the forums. I still appreciate you posting the links though.

[General Battuta]

The custom ships worked fine. I read those links you posted weeks ago and they are how I learned to create the mod folders. Getting TBP fred2 to load custom mods is what I am looking for in the forums. I still appreciate you posting the links though.

I think for TBP FRED2 you'd have to create a custom shortcut to FRED and add -mod (whatever) to the command line. Modern FRED builds just inherit the mod settings from the launcher but TBP might not do this.

[Droid803]

Oh right, TBP is based on some old, outdated, obsolete FSO build before FRED was smart enough to read from the launcher settings.

hurr eye'm a standarooone forrrk coooode

...wait wasn't that just WCS?

[Dragon]

You'd be better off using the latest FSO build to run TBP, and using Zatharas to fix compatibility errors.

[MatthTheGeek]

Oh right, TBP is based on some old, outdated, obsolete FSO build before FRED was smart enough to read from the launcher settings.

hurr eye'm a standarooone forrrk coooode

...wait wasn't that just WCS?

IIRC TBP was originally released on a small fork, and then Zathras ported it back to... 3.6.9 was it back then ?

[Dragon]

Zatharas ported it (at first) to 3.6.10, IIRC. TBP didn't really fork, but added a launcher flag "Enable TBP features" to 3.6.9. By the time I came around, regular 3.6.9 had this flag, though I don't know if it was initially the case.

[halcyony2k]

Adding the "-mod" command to the shortcut fixed the problem. I am reading your suggestions on using the latest FSO build as well and will do that within the next few hours after I finish studying. Thanks for the support guys.