Capt Byron
activating gunboats, and any other npc used ship, is one of the easiest things. There are just a few lines which need to be added to an npc designed ship to make it pilotable, then I just copyied and pasted those same lines for almost every npc ship on my own comp and they now are activated.
These lines were left out of the npc ships because they have no use for htem, just players; namely just the camera values. Also since npcs don't (normally) use shield bats or nanos those also need to be added in. And the shield link lines need to be added if you want it to have a shield for gunboats. For some I went into the cmp and made a new hardpoint with the utf editor, but the hp_cloak mount is as good a hardpoint as any to have a shield mounted on.
nanobot_limit = *pic a number*
shield_battery_limit = *pic a number*
max_bank_angle = 30
camera_offset = 25, 110
camera_angular_acceleration = 0.050000
camera_horizontal_turn_angle = 20
camera_vertical_turn_up_angle = 5
camera_vertical_turn_down_angle = 30
camera_turn_look_ahead_slerp_amount = 1.000000
cockpit = cockpits\*insertname*.ini
strafe_force = 22000
strafe_power_usage = 2
shield_link = cv_fighter6_shield01, HpMount, HpCloak01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_6, HpCloak01
also if you want to pilot it well the TYPE = GUNBOAT line needs to be changed, FREIGHTER works well.
then it's a simple matter of looking into the npc loadout inis to find what had been added on the ship and use that for an entry in the goods.ini, and sell it on a base.
Since it's the same thing your doing for everyship it really didn't take more then 5-10 min per ship, just trying to find it in the inis and transfering the loadout data to the goods.ini is the longest part.
These are pretty much just the basics and bare minimums for activating the npcs, there are some other things which can be done to improve them though
for instance since they tend to have trouble docking to just move the hpmount further up.
since no flyable ship is close to the size of the gunboats a new cockpit.ini for it should be made so as the values for the turret view are correct and lets you look around your ship in turret view better.
Also various values for gun firing arcs can be increased so as to allow better aim then having them left as fixed weapons. Actually the firing arcs can get to be the longest part to decide upon, but it tends to be trial and error to get the arc values just right, but still time consuming.
You can also addon some extras to them in the goods.ini, such as putting contrails on it and such just for the extra effects. I added contrails to some of the lights or the engines.
And you can do some modifications to the engines / powerplants for the ships if you want.
then some other things you can do is make custom made weapons for them, the whole point of EX 2.0 and the server wipe is for the new weapon reclassifications to allow for customizable weapons on the larger ships instead of leaving them as addons in the goods.ini. Cause a fundamental problem of addons are A) you can't change the gun, it's fixed
if it gets shot off your ship, you can't replace it unless you either kill yourself before landing, or rebuy the whole ship.
in the end, just activating the gunboats and any npc ship is pretty fast and easy, but once their activated and you want to refine them down and edit them to your personal specifications of what you want then you'll end up spending some more time on it.
Mon Mar 29, 2004 6:41 am 
I'm not at my computer right now and I don't remember what the problem is. But if you could help me with Ithaca I would sure appreciate it.
You need Freelancer Mod Manager, which you can get 
. If you e-mail me the files above I'll take a look at them, although it could be something entirely unrelated.