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Adding Battleships as encounters

The general place to discuss MOD''ing Freelancer!

Post Sun Mar 23, 2003 5:10 pm

Thanks for the info Serpent ! It's much appreciated and I'll give this a try later today.

Post Sun Mar 23, 2003 9:58 pm

Hmmm, that crashes me if I try to launch into the system. Even if I don't have the encounter set up, just having those files in place crashes me to desktop. I triple checked to be sure I placed things where they belonged too.

Anybody else try this yet? Need to be sure it isn't just me fouling things up..

Post Sun Mar 23, 2003 11:14 pm

The engine is not very forgivefull, trying to add a battleship in a zone that was too small for it to manouvre crashed my server (still my best guess for the crash). And having 2 gunboats in a formation intented for only 1 gunboat, so they overlapped according to formation rules also crashed.

And I suppose you're not forgetting the ending in the files :-)

Post Mon Mar 24, 2003 12:33 am

What do you mean by "the ending" in the files? Fixing the bracket in a line like [Creation ? Did that. : )

No, I don't understand it either. I had it in a 6000 sphere which seemed like plenty of room. I did have it set with 4 fighter escorts. Could that have done it? Also, as I said earlier, it seemed to be something basic in the files. Even when I removed my "area_battleship" encounter from the zone it crashed simply because of something else in the files. Not a clue what though. I did go over the file changes and placement several times to be sure I had things where they were supposed to go.

I will try it again here, either today or tomorrow, because I really would like to have these Large ships out there.

Post Mon Mar 24, 2003 8:18 am

Hmm I meant "ending bracket" but I see it stripped my ending bracket symbol :-(

Post Mon Mar 24, 2003 2:43 pm

I changed the .ini files to add gunships and battleships (thanks ExoCraft for your help) but although it doesn't crash my server none of the clients seem to be able to connect, I've replaced the new files with my backup and am going to try just one area with gunships.

Do the client .ini files also need to be modified to match?

Post Mon Mar 24, 2003 7:05 pm

heres an idea since you got reiland *can't spell that bloody thing* cap ships and crusiers, we can try 'copying' thoses npcships.ini refrences *heres where i'm going with this* i have been adding zones for my new system, and my new faction and so on. In the factionprop.ini is the list of related npc_ships for each faction *along with a lot of other stuff* the idea here is to find the reihland cap ships npc refs names in that file, then open npc_ships.ini and copy thoes refrences, change the nicks and the arch ship type they point to, *may need to modifey the loadouts as well* then add in the liberty navy the npc_ship=our_new_ship_name then create an encouter based off that. I would work on it myself but i'm not quite at that point yet *still working on creating my new system right now* just a thought for all of you.

Post Tue Mar 25, 2003 12:03 am

After trying again today, it no longer crashes to desktop (probably something I fouled up) but, the cap ships still don't appear either. The gunship patrols I had used previously still work fine in the zones where I tried adding the cap ships.

I've tried different zone sizes ranging from 4000 to 10000 without seeing any results. That should have been plenty of room for them to operate in. And tried it with and without escorts or secondary ships in the zone. So I don't know what's wrong here. Which isn't unusual either..lol.

Anyway, if anyone has any luck with this, please post it so we can sort this out. I'll be dicking around with it a bit more but I'm not really expecting any breakthroughs on my part.

Post Tue Mar 25, 2003 4:09 pm

That happened to me too a lot of times, a few things I discovered since:
1) The toughness setting of the zone has to be equal or higher than the difficulty of the ship(s) you are adding. A cruiser with difficulty 17 will never appear in a zone with toughness of 10.
2) The max_battle_size setting of a zone is the maximum number of ships that can appear in a formation. A formation with more ships will not appear. So a cruiser formation of 1 cruiser and 6 escort fighters will not appear in a zone that has a max_battle_size of 6.
3) Above settings seem to be overruled by a chance of 1.000000 for an encounter (that's why I had my capital ships the first time but ran in problems trying to have more realistic appearance chances).
4) All these settings are truly server side supported, without clients needing any patches/mods etc.

I hope this will be of any assistance...
Serpent

Post Tue Mar 25, 2003 5:53 pm

Yeah, I double checked the difficulty levels to be certain the ships could spawn as well as max batle size. I set up my own zone out in bfe, to see if overlapping zones conflicted, but still no cap ships appear.

Post Tue Mar 25, 2003 9:26 pm

You could check the loadout's and pilot_story files the verify that the pilot and loadout used in npcships exists. But they are default values so I don't think this is the problem.
By the way to add liberty and britonia capital ships change their loadout in npcships. The default settings are for liberty/bretonia-nomad ships and doesn't seem to work. Just do the same as kusari and rheinland ship loadouts. :-)

Post Wed Mar 26, 2003 2:56 am

Im not a modder

and i dont know if this will help plus it doesnt explain the cruiser problem. But even in the single player game when you fight battleships they are stationary and dont move. so setting them to patrol is worthless unless you put an engine on it.

It would be a great addition to have cap ship encounters when your using a battleship. Even though it is cool disentegrating fighters with Flak guns

Post Wed Mar 26, 2003 11:37 am

The following WinRAR file contains the files I modified to have some capital ships. Don't forget to save your own files before replacing! To see some heavy action (if it works) go to the Frankfurt System and look near the Frankfurt->Sigma 13 jumpgate. The damage done by those capital ships is not much, so that still needs a little tweaking. Taking out 1 battleship with escort and 1 cruiser formation at the same time without even losing my shield was not much of a challenge last night. My testing environment is the server only install of Freelancer in \Freelancer Server, containing all the modified INI files and the full install in \Freelancer. Both running on the same pc, but using different INI files. And battleships do have engines and they will move through space, allthought they are very slow....

Download: Click here

Post Wed Mar 26, 2003 8:38 pm

Hope this thing works

hello
we is experts

Post Wed Mar 26, 2003 10:04 pm

WOOT : : ooo this be good! Got a Riehnland cruiser come into manhatan thanks very much serpent this will be a great thing to impliment into my expert mod i'm workin on . Oh one question maybe someone can answer... actually 2 questions, how do i make the battleships appear less frequently, and how do i make liberty and bretonia battleships/cruisers/destroyers.... ?

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