Additional Targets Mod

[skirich]

Is there a mod like FOTRS, or is there any guidance on extracting from FOTRS all the additional enemy ships?


I would like to add more variety to the targets I can go after without all the additional changes that go with FOTRS.
I can hack what I want out of FOTRS but its going to require a better understanding of the intertwined setings than I have now.


If there was a mod that just added a few more targets I could study that a bit faster and then go after the things I like in FOTRS.


Any thoughts?

[propbeanie]

You can extract anything you want without permission, so long as it is for yourself only. As soon as you want to distribute a "package", then you would need permission from the team, of which Rockin Robbins is team leader.

Now, as to getting the ships into your game, if it's the merchants, there are not too many that are different from other mods, except maybe the Conte Verde is NOT type=109.That is used for the Photo Target in FotRSU. Edits of that sort are easy to do though. The hard part is making certain that you changed 'em all... So what you need is the cfg file for the ship from the Roster folder, which is generally inside a CountryName folder, and then the Sea folder inside of that. You would also probably want to include a line for the ship in the Names.cfg file, found in the root of the Roster folder. Then you need the entire Sea / ShipName folder, and sometimes, that's it. The Type= lines in the two cfg files for the ship have to match, and that has to match the mis file(s) that "call" the ship in the Campaign. The ClassName= lines in both files have to match, and if you want a specific Class called in the mis file(s), those have to match also. Some ships, you will run into issues, such as what I describe for warships:

Warships are more complex, following the same general guidelines above, only you will run into Library folder issues more often with the warships, and might have to copy over files from some of the several guns.dat files, or even in the Library / ShipParts folders. You will need to trace through the files to see what is called, and which additional dat files you might need. You might also find that a texture is in the Texture folder, or sometimes something is in the Misc folder (rarely). Submarines of course, are the most difficult, having parts spread throughout the file system...

[skirich]

Thanks for the info.
Yep its for me, so not gonna make a mod for upload out of it.
At this point I have a combination of things I enjoy that took quite a lot of custom modding to make all work together, I can no longer use the Generic Mod program which wholesale copies files over other files.


Way too many one off tweaks to this and that, edits to alpha channels on textures and wholesale file replacements from various places to get just the right effects.


At this point I could no longer install any more mods using the mod program, I would need to do file compares and see what I need to change manually.


Good news is, I do this for other games, and have all the tools, so its not a hassle, just time consuming, especially when you add in the testing.


I'm not interested in the warships since that would require way too much effort for manual additions at this point for only a small change.


Merchants sounds a bit easier and with not too many overlapping edits that would cause issues.

[propbeanie]

Testing is the hardest part. If you're missing guns on a merchant, check the dates in the eqp file, and the links to the Library folder, but I've never missed NOT having guns on a merchant, since I'm not top-side very often when they're around...