Starfury & Moddability

[Taera]

I am debating whether should i spend money on the game, and heres a thought. Just exactly, how moddable is the game? Say, if i wanted to include some of my Taeran ships, say,

How do i do it? I modelled my ships in Moray/Povray.

Also is it possible to add whole new races to the game?

Enlighten me?

[ November 13, 2003, 05:33: Message edited by: Taera ]

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by Taera:
I am debating whether should i spend money on the game, and heres a thought. Just exactly, how moddable is the game? Say, if i wanted to include some of my Taeran ships, say, How do i do it? I modelled my ships in Moray/Povray.

It's going to be a lot of work. You have to import the model and the BMP skin (others here can give you a better idea of how to do that). Then you have to have smaller pic files for the shield display on screen, and for the ship purchase window. Then you have to "map-out" the ship's component layout in a textfile (i.e. how many component spaces it has and its' general shape). Then you have to hope you didn't key-in a mistake somewhere that causes the thing to crash. Then you have to work that ship into the random encounter files, the ship purchase lists, the AI tactics files...

That's all for one ship. Now do the rest of the fleet.

Possible? Yes. But it's almost a full-time job, at least for an 'amateur' gamer like me. You might find it easier, who knows? Ask Drake how he did on his BG mod.

[Suicide Junkie]

You need to get your model saved or converted into .X format.

You then plug the name into starfury, and do some stuff to line up your texture, scale and rotate and whatever.

Add some firing points by their XYZ coords and firing angles. Add some glow lights and blinky lights in a similar way.

Render yourself a couple of B&W overhead shots to use in the displays and inventory screen.
Creating a slot layout isn't hard with my slot modder. The easiest way would be to copy an existing hull, and then drag the slots around until they look good on your ship.

Copy the purchaseships entry from some other ship and edit the turning rate, acceleration, top speed, along with crew capacity & whatnot.

Then you should be good to go.
The one thing I can't help with is getting the model converted to a .X, and rendering the portraits and overhead views you'd want.

[Taera]

from earlier discussions, i believe .mdl/.pov files can NOT be converted into .x, nor can they be exported into any of the programs that can do it.

[Phoenix-D]

.mdl? I think Milkshape can open those, and Milkshape can export to 3ds, which can be then exported to .x if milkshape doesn't do X directly

EDIt: nope, different .mdl. Looks like Moray is a dead-end.

[ November 14, 2003, 00:22: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]