Ship/extras style

alot of people are working on Galtrek and what I would call, Gabylon 5 mods... there are a few others around....

personally I haven't tried any of them yet.


I have downloaded the files, but I haven't tried using them yet....

I am waiting for 1.2 and a truelly functioning mod folder...



what I want is more jewlery for the ships... there has to be a way...


I do not know how to do any of it, but I am willing to test if someone makes them.....

I think (and this is ME thinking, which is extremely hazardous) that the jewelry should be as "easy" to produce as it is to import a model from a bridge commander or what ever. The hard thing would be creating the parts and inserting the hard points in such way that they would attach straight and center.

With the jewelry creation one could produce say a Trek mod ships by splitting and cutting a couple of different models into a saucer-, engine nacelle-, those what you call them things which connects the nacells to the engineering part etc. into single sections. And voila you have the makings of pretty much every kind of ship seen in the telly series and them some.

In my opinion theres no point in making a mod with the models ready build, because the ship building part is a great piece of the initial gaming experience. Take that away and your mod loses a whole a lot of fun.

I am not a modeler (I would learn the thing if I had the right tools), so I have zero weight behind my words I said above. If theres anyone who would be willing to try (or perhaps already tried) modeling and inserting jewelry into the game, I would be most interested to hear their comments.

Yep it works just fine. I have been modding the game my copying some ships from other styles.

Such as giving the Arceans style "6" made from a copied selection of the other models. Just done this by copying all of one ship design cargo hull, and renaming the S1 to S6 for example. It should work in theory for new models too, just keep the naming convention the same way as the other styles.


However, bare some things in mind:

- Style 5 is actually the Dread Lord hull, so you can't replace that!

- In order to use the styles, you need to set the race files in My Documents/GalCiv2/Ships to use that style number. The game also has a habit of overwriting this, because the style will NOT show in the "Appearance" tab of the race in-game, although the model will be right if you don't use that tab. I have set all the race files to read-only just to be sure.

- In order to get the AI to use them, you need to do the same as above but change the file RaceConfing.xml in the Galactic Civilizations 2\Data\English directory. Of course, backup first!

- If you create new styles, any custom ships you save in them in the Shipbuilder are deleted every time you start the game. You can get by this by setting the files in you My Documents/GalCiv2/Ships folder to read-only.

Is it possible to make a new style, and have it selectable from the ship style menu when starting a new game?
I asked about this in a previous post, but nobody responded :/

-Stick

Yep it works just fine. I have been modding the game my copying some ships from other styles. Such as giving the Arceans style "6" made from a copied selection of the other models. Just done this by copying all of one ship design cargo hull, and renaming the S1 to S6 for example. It should work in theory for new models too, just keep the naming convention the same way as the other styles.

Well! That seems to have worked. Thanks. I think I’ll try for numbers past 100 next time, just to see if that works...

Is it possible to make a new style, and have it selectable from the ship style menu when starting a new game?

No, this is not possible. You have to hard-code the selection in a race file, either the stock races or a custom race. And the game WILL try to override it, but if you set the file to read-only it can't.

Thanks for that information Maverick. I'll give that a shot and see what I can come up with


-Stick