Easiest way to get Capital Ship encounters

Tue Oct 14, 2003 3:20 pm by Strider - oTO

The hardest part about capital ship encounters (or any other encounter for that matter!) is placement. It pretty much comes down to having to edit them into every system you want them in. However, thru much experimentation, I have found a much easier way. See, certain encounters are found in every system. If you were to place the ability for capital ships in that encounter, they would appear wherever that encounter is used. I did this with the area defend encounter, and now capital ships randomly appear in every major system. Steps for doing this:

Create loadouts for the capital ships you want in loadouts_special.ini (as you would normally do)

in the \missions directory, open npcships.ini. make sure there is a new entry made for the capital ships you want. Make them levels 1 - 30 so that they appear no matter what level you are. (d1, d2, d3, d4, ............d29, d30 for example)

Then open up factionprops.ini, and place the nickname of the ship (the nickname from npcships.ini) in the list under the faction that you want to have them. For example, place liberty_cruiser under li_n_grp or li_p_grp (liberty navy or liberty police)

Now with these things done, go to \missions\encounters and find area_defend.ini Open this file and you will find an encounter that spawns 2 groups of fighters. replace the first reference sc_fighters to sc_cruisers. Make sure its 1, 1 sc_cruisers, otherwise you will have more than one appearing in the same group.

That should be about it. Let me know if you have any problems and Ill try and get back to you as soon as possible. Good luck!

~Strider - oTO

___________________________________________

"In space, no-one can hear you scream!"

Tue Oct 14, 2003 3:46 pm by Chips

That is a nice tip but, formations won't have enough room for the capships - and the real big one.........

Capships aren't supposed to be like fighters. I mean houses wouldn't be ablet o afford about 5000 capships that will eb needed for every single defend parameter in the systems.

Also - its for your audience that you have to think. Do they want to see capships everywhere they turn, or do you think capships are better placed at certain positions around the systems KEY points (planets and jumpgates). After all - what would be the point of cruisers patrolling the vast expanse of space - they shouldn't have enough cruisers for that.

However - why not just add them to the ambient population instead, that way you don't have to sort out all the problems with formations still - oh, and you won't have EVERYONE owning capships. Otherwise you have to either give EVERY faction your capships (unrealistic) or trawl through to find out which ones don't use the defend encounter parameter.
Just a thought for you

Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:06 pm by Strider - oTO

-"That is a nice tip but, formations won't have enough room for the capships - and the real big one........."

you may have to mess with the formations i.e. add cruisers in there, but i have not had a problem so far

-"Capships aren't supposed to be like fighters. I mean houses wouldn't be ablet o afford about 5000 capships that will eb needed for every single defend parameter in the systems. "

Thats the beauty of random encounters. by putting 1, 1 sc_cruisers in area defend, it will only randomly spawn one capship, and even that is purely random. Sometimes, none appear at all.

-"Also - its for your audience that you have to think. Do they want to see capships everywhere they turn, or do you think capships are better placed at certain positions around the systems KEY points (planets and jumpgates). After all - what would be the point of cruisers patrolling the vast expanse of space - they shouldn't have enough cruisers for that."

another good point, but I have found that area defend encounter is only used in key places already. You wont find capships wandering out in the middle of space. Just around jumpgates, planets, and bases.

-"However - why not just add them to the ambient population instead, that way you don't have to sort out all the problems with formations still - oh, and you won't have EVERYONE owning capships. Otherwise you have to either give EVERY faction your capships (unrealistic) or trawl through to find out which ones don't use the defend encounter parameter.
Just a thought for you"

Even though area_defend encounter is used by pretty much every faction, capships will only spawn if the faction has a capship in the ship pool located in npcships.ini. If no capships are defined for the Liberty Rogues for example, then only fighters will spawn for their area_defend encounter. Its purely up to the user who they want to have the capships.

Edited by - Strider - oTO on 14-10-2003 17:10:31

Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:18 pm by Chips

On that last point i am pretty shocked. I haven't personally tried it, but it doesn't crash the game as it finds that the faction doesn't have the ship?
Well - learn something new every day then, i was under the firm impression that if a formation had them spawning ships that the faction doesn't have you get a crash.

So if i give the lib rogues an encounter parameter for transports only the fighters will show up, and the game won't crash????

ie - area_trade_transports??

p.s - bold hurts peoples eyes a little dude - cannot you either use the quote brackets (same as bold - but instead of b put quote, then instead of /b put /quote , or use italics - that way we don't get dazzled as you highlight questions

Edited by - chips on 14-10-2003 17:25:37

Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:24 pm by Strider - oTO

Thats right! I stumbled upon it purely by accident. I had no clue that area_defend was used all the time, but since i had capships for the government factions only, they were the only ones to spawn capships. The rest just spawned fighters like normal.

Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:27 pm by Chips

Very interesting - thanks, could prove very useful like you say for doing stuff.

Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:31 pm by Strider - oTO

So if i give the lib rogues an encounter parameter for transports only the fighters will show up, and the game won't crash????

ie - area_trade_transports??

Im not sure what you mean exactly. A faction will spawn a ship if it has an encounter that contains the ship type AND if the ship is located in the faction's shiplist (npcships.ini) If the faction does not have the ship in its list, but has the encounter for that ship type, it will simply just not spawn the ship.

See, encounters are kinda vague in that they only define ship classes or types. So if an encounter contains the text "sc_cruisers" it will spawn any ship that is of a cruiser class. Randomly of course

p.s. Sorry for the bold!

Edited by - Strider - oTO on 14-10-2003 17:40:16

Tue Oct 14, 2003 5:20 pm by Nephilim

An even easier way is to simply convert the pre-existing gunboats/cruisers/battleships in npcships.ini (d21-d25) to fighter class. Least amount of work since they're already defined in faction_prop.ini.

Edited by - Nephilim on 14-10-2003 18:59:14

Tue Oct 14, 2003 5:32 pm by Chips

and don''t forget to give them a loadout in the loadouts.ini file instead of loadouts_special.ini otherwise you will be crashaholic too. As giskard mentioned, this is a way of getting these ships into the missions too

Mon Oct 20, 2003 4:42 pm by Strider - oTO

Chips:
and don''t forget to give them a loadout in the loadouts.ini file instead of loadouts_special.ini otherwise you will be crashaholic too. As giskard mentioned, this is a way of getting these ships into the missions too

Yes, if you do it the way Nephilim described. If you are doing this my way, then you DO need to place the loadouts for the capships in loadouts_special.ini

Just wanted to clarify!

Also on that note, making the capships all fighter class, is that the only way of getting them into missions? (you know, the missions you can choose to accept at bars) I haven't really experimented with making new missions, but that is my next project.....

Edited by - Strider - oTO on 20-10-2003 17:44:51

Mon Oct 20, 2003 7:06 pm by BlazeME

Hmmm... Have you seen Nephilims Cap encounter code? Is this better?

Tue Oct 21, 2003 2:25 pm by Strider - oTO

Personally, I think this way is better. If you were to make all capships have a fighter class, you would not have much control over how many spawn. You might get 5 spawning in one flightgroup, and that wouldnt be very realistic. Although I have not tried this myself, in theory this is what would happen. If you do it the way I described, capships still retain their cruiser class, and you can limit them to 1 cruiser per group. A bit more realistic from my point of view......

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