Extension has beenc hecked and found to be all exactly the same! I copy-pasted the files 3 times..so except for filename and type of frigate it spawns, the rest is 100% identical!
Damn I really hit something bad here
Justin S.
Okie,
Just got back from school and saw your two posts. Okie, here is what we do. :)
The Mobile Defense was really my first try at this, and i based it off the frigatepsiscout. I renamed it frigatepsiscout2 and then changed the mainviewicons, picture, name and description to those of the psibeamdefense. I changed the hudicon, smallhudicon,infocardicon and minzoom to the distances used in the beam defense.
mainViewIcon "MAINVIEWICON_PLANETMODULE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE"
picture "PLANETMODULEPICTURE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE"
NameStringID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE2_NAME"
DescriptionStringID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE2_DESCRIPTION"
counterDescriptionStringID "IDS_COUNTERDESC_FRIGATE_NONCOMBAT"
I changed the mass from 2000 to 10000 to reflect the weight of the beam defense, and since there was no shieldmesh for the beam defense i left the line intact, but took out the value between the "" quotes. i added the meshname, this will actually call the image of the beam defense to use for the craft in game, the others up top are used for the icons to call the mobile defense. save and close. You can add abilities, but you have to be careful what you call.
ability:0 "AbilityDomination"
ability:1 "AbilityAdaptiveShield"
ability:2 "AbilityBoostMorale"
ability:3 "AbilityShieldRestore"
Some abilities have activate levels, like the ultimate abilities, they dont activate until 5th level. It will say minexperience and say 5.000000. If you change that to 0.000000 it will now not have that needed 5th level to call. I saved this as abilitywhatever2.entity, a copy so the original was unchanged. save and close.
Copy over a copy of the string folder. open string in notepad, open your changed scout file, and look for name and description at the top. Inside the string file, do a find, copy the name into the find window and find the scoutname line.
Copy it, both the string id and the value, at the end of that line press enter to make a blank line below it. paste your copy of that line there. now we have two entries for the same value, change the second one to scoutname2 and change the value string to say whatever you like.
StringInfo
ID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE2_NAME"
Value "Planet MobileDefense"
StringInfo
ID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PSIORBITALBEAMDEFENSE2_DESCRIPTION"
Value "A planetary mobile defense array of Beam Weapons that patrols and defends nearby structures and the planet from hostile capital ships."
If you use names that are too long, it will run over in the infocard when it displays, but that is just cosmetic. save and go back to top, change the number of lines, like 5353, to 5355 to reflect the two new lines you added. save and close.
In playerpsi.entity there is the frigate area page 0 and page 1, i added the frigatepsiscout2 (my mobile defense) to page 1 at the last slot listing it as entitydefname "frigatepsiscout2". Change the line number count something like 4 to 5 to reflect adding the new line for the mobile defense. save and close.
Okie, now the spawnable ships. I used the combatturret, that Blair pointed me to, nice tip, it was wonderful!! 
We use the abilitycombatturret.entity (the ability), the frigatecombatturret.entity (the ship) and of course the calling ship. I used the scout again. frigatepsiscout
Anyway, first thing, go to abilitydeploycombatturret.entity and rename it to abilitydeploycombatturret2, or whatever, Annatar is correct when they say that it makes it easier to understand what you are calling if you use an understanable name, like abilitydeploybattleship or whatever. inside the now renamed file, go to the top, where is calls the frigate, like frigatecombatturret and change it to frigatecombatturret2 or whatever. Change the mainviewicons and hudicons and infocard icons as we did in the mobile defense. add weapons if you like or change their shields, hull and restore rates if you like, the weapon ranges or damage values also.
Copy over the shieldmesh and the mesh for the battleship, or whatever, and change the speeds to match the battleship, instead of 225 for a scout, it is something like 100 for all the capitals.
maxAccelerationLinear 100.000000
maxAccelerationStrafe 10.000000
maxDecelerationLinear 500.000000
maxAccelerationAngular 1.000000
maxDecelerationAngular 9.999996
maxSpeedLinear 525.000000
the numsounds and enginesound comes from the battleship also, of course.
NumSoundsFor:ONATTACKORDERISSUED 2
SoundID "CAPITALSHIP_PSIBATTLESHIP_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_0"
SoundID "CAPITALSHIP_PSIBATTLESHIP_ONATTACKORDERISSUED_1"
NumSoundsFor:ONCREATION 0
NumSoundsFor:ONGENERALORDERISSUED 0
NumSoundsFor:ONSELECTED 1
SoundID "CAPITALSHIP_PSIBATTLESHIP_ONSELECTED_0"
NumSoundsFor:ONSTARTPHASEJUMP 0
MeshName "CapitalShip_PsiBattleship"
ExhaustParticleSystemName "Exhaust_PsiBattleship"
ExplosionName "CapitalShip0"
HyperspaceChargingSoundID "HYPERSPACE_CHARGEUP"
HyperspaceTravelSoundID "HYPERSPACE_TRAVEL"
EngineSoundID "ENGINE_PSICAPITALSHIP"
the critical part for me, was changing the top reference to the abilityspawnedship in combatturret which looks like this:
frigateRoleType "Lrm"
statCountType "FrigateSpawnedByAbility"
to this:
frigateRoleType "Scout"
statCountType "FrigateScout"
anyway, save and close. and for the turrets i didnt need any playerpsi.entity entries.
the scout calls the ability. Go to your scout and add the lines like this calling the abilities that call the turrets:
ability:0 "AbilityExplore"
ability:1 "AbilityCloneFrigate"
ability:2 "AbilityDeployCombatTurret2"
ability:3 "AbilityDeployCombatTurret7"
also make sure that you have enough antimatter to run those abilities, the scout originally did not use antimatter so i missed it, but then the abilities were grayed out, not enough antimatter to run them of course, so i went back and changed that in the scout and gave it 500 antimatter and 2.25 restore rate. The restore rates by themselves are very powerful. I once changed nothing but the restore rates upped them to like 25.000000 and nothing could touch the ships i changed. :)
Anyway, we have the abilitydeploy now, and the combatturret name or whatever you are calling, we changed the images and pictures and the shield and meshname to give us the right ship. We have the calling ship, in this case the scout. We changed the expiry time to whatever you like. -1 i believe as Annatar said will make it permanent. I used 1800 originally, 30 minutes, and left the cooldown at 50 seconds but it spawned to quickly and the game was too easy. So i lowered the expiry time to 180 seconds or 3 minutes, and upped the cooldown, to like 10 minutes. The deployturret does not need an entry in the playerpsi or playertech, or whatever, and also does not need a name or description in the string file, unless you give it a new name. if so, use the same technique we used to get the mobile defense name and description into the string file and change the line numbers at the top to reflect the change in lines.
Anyway, i think that is it, i have glanced over the files as i was trying to explain it, and i dont think i missed anything.
Please keep in mind that small errors in programming of course are killers, this is really not programming, but i added a weapon and accidentally cut out the
m_weaponIndexForRange 0 value. It kept crashing and driving me nuts. I only found it when i went back and checked each line against the original unchanged one. That is when i found it. I corrected it and it worked.
Also, lately with trying to merge so many changes, the mobile defense, the strikecraft mini mod, my shieldplanet mini, and the combat turrets there are too many changes and i am missing something somewhere, so i have decided one change per mini. :) Anyway, i hope this helps!! :) Let me know of course and good luck!!
Sincerely,
-Teal
Sins Forums
!
this would have been the cherry on the cake...