MOD -- new ship classes

[Samurai]

Hi,

One of the things I find annoying about SE3 and SE4 is having to use the same ship picture for different types of ships.

For instance, say I design and build a cruiser predominantly fitted with beam weapons. Then I design and build a cruiser sporting missile launchers. They look identical, which hampers, in my opinion, the ease of tactical combat, organizing and reorganizing fleets, etc.

A little while ago, I realized SE4 provides a work-around by affording the possibility of adding new ship classes.

Because I like to play the game starting out will all techs available, almost all of my ships are of the dreadnought size. So I went into the vehiclesize.txt file and copied the section for dreadnought and pasted it four times. I then changed each of the new ones to:

DreadnoughtB
DreadnoughtC
DreadnoughtD
DreadnoughtE

I left all stats unchanged, so there wouldn't be any advantage or disadvantage to using any of them.

Then I added appropriately named mini and portrait photos for the new classes to my race folder.

So far, this is working great. Because I like using a Trek-based shipset, I can now choose from five Dreadnought-sized ships that look like the Enterprise-A, Defiant, Excelsior, Enterprise D and Enterprise E.

I have one major concern: Can this in any way screw up the AIs' ship-building (by adding in ship classes to the main vehiclesize.txt file)? My guess is no, because --I believe-- the AIs will never give orders to build ships using the new sizes.

Am I right?


[This message has been edited by Samurai (edited 19 January 2001).]

[Tenryu]

I'm not absolutely sure, Samurai, but I doubt it will bother the AI as long as it has reference to some picture named the same as the original bitmap.

It would be rather ironic if it noticed something as subtle as new ship class pics when it cann't even figure out that black holes and mine fields eat ships.

[Tampa_Gamer]

I don't believe so. As long you didn't make changes to the AI_Design files, it should be fine. In terms of the complaint, yeah I would like to have different picture variants of the same hull type available too (similar to MOO) where you could cycle up/down for hull-size and right/left for variant pictures within the hull-size. This ideal was forwarded to MM awhile ago, but obviously this is not a burning issue right now.

[Atrocities]

You can do that you know? You design the bitmaps, and place them in all the race folders. Then edit the ShipSize Text, (I beleive) and add your ships and stats there.