A few questions about editing entity files

from Sins Forums

Ok well i never much felt like capital ships packed enough punch for my taste they seem just a step up from a cruiser, the 3 capitals i might have with the average fleet are trivial compared to the 30 cruisers 2 or 3 of which basically eaqual a capital ship.

So i decided to basically multiplly my capitals by 3, weapon dammage, fighter squads, hulls and shields, and of course cost and build time, all times 3 of original value, i figured if i just keep the consistent factor of 3 i wont change any balance that capitals have against each other.

Anyway here are my questions

First and foremost would doing this create any significant balance issues or od ai behavior, other the of course shifting the power of the fleet more towards the caps which is the point?

Second i would also like to make the capitals appear larger, is there a simple numerical value anywhere that can be increased to make this happen or is the only way actually editing the models?

Third considering the new capitals i also wanted to increase the power of starbases to make sure they are not pushovers to the powered up caps. I found the weapon damage in the starbace entiry files but i cant see anything that refers to hull points or shields, so how would i go about increasing the hulls and shields of starbases?

This may be important. Im doing all this in the Distant Stars mod folder as that is the mod i want to play with these changes. But they have their entity files as BIN files, so what i did is i edited the capital entity files in the MS mod folder which has them as text files and replaced the DS files with the edited ones. Again not sure if this is important.

 

 

Edit

Of course briliant as i am i did not try to start the game after making the changes, and before posting here. So i get a mini dump. Im asuming this is because the files for DS have to be in BIN format. So if someone could point out the posible reasons for the error, and if it is indeed the format how do i go about changing the file format. So far all i have done is the capital changes, and i also cahnged the number of starbases to 3 in all the planet types that are the same for Mad Scientist and distant stars, also in the same manner editing the MS entity files and pasting into DS folder.

modding
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

there are other changes between mad scientist and distant stars, so you should have used one of the text-bin gui's eg dekanrik's or mine to convert the actual files to editable and the two main reasons for converting an entire mod to bin are quicker loading/play and reduce the number of varients of the mod in the field,

but I would suggest altering your user.settings file to have logoutput as TRUE and showerrors as TRUE. with these settings it is possible to find the exact cause of the dump.

regarding your initial questions,

1 no idea but not expected,

2 there is amesh resize tool metioned in the modding threads that can be used to re-size the mesh which is what the ship size is based upon,

3 starbase strength is in the starbase toughness entity's, the weapons are in the starbase weapons, the hangars are in the starbase hangers, and from my experimenting I have found that you can have UP to 10 stages in EACH of the starbase upgrades, but I found that after 5 tougness and weapon upgrades I NEEDED to increase the cap and fleet supply to keep balance otherwise the starbase became an imovable barrier.

it is also a good idea to create a personal mod folder and place a copy of the mod that you work on into it and keep the original mod un-altered

harpo

 

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Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks alot harpo, the info you provided has solved just about all my issues.

The only thing i was not able to do was change the capital ship size (luckilly it was the least important change i wanted), I downloaded the mesh resize tol and it seemd to work fine and created the new meshes in a folder i set up, but when i replaced the old meshes with the new ones i got a unspecified error. Again its not so important but any ideas what i did wrong?

A sligtlly more important item. Now that ive uped the power of star baces, i also uped the cost of the starbace builder cruisers for tech and advent, but vasari build their baces using their colony frigates, so i was wondering how can i increase the cost of building the starbase itself without increasing the cost of the colony frigate, beecause clearlly i dont want it to become such an expencive item that it prevent vasari player from expending, especially considering possible ai reaction.

But again thanks a lot, youve been a great help, hope im not bugging you to much with these questions.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

you need to TXT the meshes to resize them.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Aha ok makes sense.

On that same note only about 1/3 of the capital ship meshes are present in the DS folder, im assuming that the mod makes some alterations to these meshes but not the other capital ship meshes, how exactlly should i go about increasing the size of all  cap ships, copy the missing capital meshes change the size and put them into DS folder? Or can this cause an error?

Or should resize the meshes not present in DS seperatlly and put them back into the main sins mesh folder?

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

the meshes in the DS folder are modified to (I assume) have additional weapons hardpoints. The ones not in there are therefore not modified.

It is safe to assume that there will be no error if you create a copy of the original mesh you wish to resize, TXT&Resize it, and then place it into the mesh folder.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Ok managed to do that but now i have another problem, capital ships wont fire on each other.

I was playing as tech and ran into a small advent fleet the 2 capitals on eacha side kept shooting the frigates even though i ordered mine to attak their cap. When all the frigates have been wiped out the 2 remaining caitals just sat across from each other not firing, but they did use pecial abilities on each other.

Any idea what could be causing this?

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Ok managed to do that but now i have another problem, capital ships wont fire on each other.

I was playing as tech and ran into a small advent fleet the 2 capitals on eacha side kept shooting the frigates even though i ordered mine to attak their cap. When all the frigates have been wiped out the 2 remaining caitals just sat across from each other not firing, but they did use pecial abilities on each other.

Any idea what could be causing this?