Modding Questions

[PaddirN]

I noticed in the kawangi and ravian hull files under one of the weapons there were some flags after the xy coordinates: 'hidden' 'nouse' 'trigburn'/'trigblow'. I assume these are fairly self explanatory, but are there any other flags? And also I was having problems in making a ship explosion that does damage to everything around it like the wp_kawangiblow. I want to keep the same idea, but use a different visual effect for it (a shockwave). I've been messing around with it for a few hours and its driving me crazy. These particle effects just confuse me for some reason.

[Fingers]

The weapon system flags are:
hidden - not shown in displays, can't install/uninstall
nouse - not used except when triggered by following flags
trigkill - trigger when the ship starts to burn
trigburn - trigger continuously while burning
trigblow - trigger when it stops burning and explodes

The way I'd do a shockwave-like death effect is similar to the Tchorak missile explosions... Make it shoot many small projectiles with a 360-degree spread, and use a single shockwave particle (like the one used for gauss cannon impacts) as a "muzzle flash". Note that this won't do damage to any friendly ships.

[PaddirN]

Aight, broke the cardinal rule and added a few things at a time before I checked...

getting an error whenever I explore a planet, found this in the stderr.txt file:

Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)

not exactly sure what that means, would the stdout.txt file have more info?

[PaddirN]

Oh, and before I forget,

is it possible to make a weapon that fires, explodes at a certain distance (a la the multi-missile), and releases a swarm of fighters instead of missiles?

I'm thinking of the way the ravian debris work, though I'm guessing it's quite a different effect since this wouldn't be a trigburn or trigblow effect.

[PaddirN]

Here's the stdout.txt file if it helps

[Phlagm]

I think the stderr.txt file would be of more use. It's generally where I look. I had a similar problem the other day with a credits.ini overflow. Most things, (like # particles in weapons) seem to just stop loading at some point if you overload them. I spent a long time looking for that error with the credits.ini. My suggestion would be to remember every seemingly silly thing you altered (credits.ini crashed the game only when I tried to fire up a simulator or a game, but not on the intro screen) and then look in the Engine Limitation on The Modmaker's Guide: http://www.digital-eel.com/modguide/engine_limits.htm
This is, at least, a start.

Also if you're having problems with the particle effects, the way I got my brain around them was to start with a weapon I wanted to make, and then strip out all the EMIT bits from the template weapon, leaving only the initial projectile part and its sprite. Then add more in one at a time.

I am not the expert on this, but I don't know of any way to load fighters without a fighterbay. If you figure out that there is a way, tell me about it. I could use it. YOu can do the following (which is in a weapon I have in my mod, but don't plan to release): Essentially make a version of the particle vortex cannon, only limit its firing arc, set it to homing, shut off spin, and replace the beam with a gun. It works well in some respects. YOu can make a drone that will turn and run down point defense rather well, and go up against fighters. The downsides are these: If you make it shootable, it'll last 3 seconds (though you can make it shootable, and make the target something really small SIZE 3 for example) because it can only endure one hit from anything. If you don't make it shootable, it's less realistic, but it'll gain you some fighter time. The next problem is more serious, though. If you don't make it "nocollision" it will fly straight to a cap ship and crack on its hull. Putting nocollision on them seems to defeat the point to me. You can stall this with prefpdef and preffter, but that will only buy you so much time.

-Jeremy

[PaddirN]

Well after poking around a little bit and examining the engine limitations I found that the max number of quests is 64, and apparently I had reached that limit... I think. Is that 64 quests listed in the game.ini file or is that 64 quests actually activated in a real game, because quite a few of the quests I have include KEYS with them that make them mutually exclusive, so I shouldn't think I would've reached the 64 quest max.

Whatever the case may be, after I took out a quest or two from the game.ini file it started working again.

[Fingers]

One way to track down what you've changed lately is by sorting files by date.

The max quests limit was increased to 128 in v1.2... Are you on a Mac?

Phlagm is correct, only ships can launch (real) fighters. The drone idea sounds fun though.