Yeah--it's not very practical but I was thinking a "proof of concept".

In some mods using modular construction by design, this might actually be possible to make as a built in mechanic.

The essential thing is there would have to be some buff that deactivated the first mesh when the second came in to replace it and that is tied to the damage cues.

So on my blown up Kol for example...the section I "blew up" could be one particle effect and the same section could be made "not blown up" and put in place on ship spawn.

When the damage effects were called for, the "blown up" section could be part of them--if a buff can be made that cancelled the first section.

Another good example could be the B5 mod's capital with the rotating section--it would be very easy to make an alternate with one of the "boxes" of that section ruptured or smoking--and it is already a particle mesh.

I've been plugging away at my little mod, and unfortunately I've tried to make a buff that I can't quite comprehend well enough to get working with Sins style buffs.

It's basically an AOE passive that increases the amount of armor the owning capitalship has based on how many enemy ships are nearby, up to a maximum amount. I've based it off of the Salvage Operations ability because of it's similarity, but I've gotten stuck. The capitalship unfortunately doesn't seem to receive any armor bonus at all, and I'm not sure what to do to fix it. I don't usually work with buffs bouncing back and forth between ships.

AbilityRUNFearlessness
BuffRUNFearlessnessSelf
BuffRUNFearlessnessTarget
BuffRUNFearlessnessRecourse

If any passing buffmeister could point out what I need to change to get it working, I'd be very grateful indeed.

Also, does anyone know of a cleaner way of draining a ship's shields completely without having to input some absurd amount of shield damage into an ability? Having 50 million damage show up in an ability breaks the textbox on Titan upgrades.

Pretty much like all of these concept Xathos.  I especially like trade ports growing into population centers.

Along these lines something I haven't had a lot of time to work on but I am working on a not-on-page factory that spawns from a combat lab.  It produces specialty ships that look like refinery, tradeships and module constructors but are actually decoy and surprise garrison/spy ships.  I'm calling it a black ops center.  Feel free to steal the idea.

I had hoped to be able to put abilities on refinery/trade ships themselves but so far it seems they don't work (I haven't had any time to really dig into this). I had particularly hoped to create a buff that allows a refinery or trade ship to work as a probe--no luck on that.   This way I could have a black ops trade/refinery that produced the buff and the specialty ships.

I haven't explored to see how far the options go, but trade ships will use passives.

 

I have two different functions running on trade ships right now, one is an attack, the other an event trigger.  You should be able to set up a cyclical nested function under a passive that applies and resets when the conditions are proper and maintain a minimal footprint on performance.

 

I haven't ported my work to Rebellion yet, I guess it's possible they neutered them further.  They have to have at least some functionality though, they have passive durability abilities in vanilla Rebellion.

Thanks.  I am mainly keen on doing the first 3.  The starbase idea would require much more work, but I'm also working on several other things at once.  My standard game of Sins is very different than the vanilla version.  Inbetween a laundry list of tweaks and balancing changes, I've also been looking for ways to enhance the game.  The last thing I did was add roletype passive buffs on all the capital ships, in place of the ultimate abilities, that can affect whole fleets.  Been having alot of success with it (and the AI has been happily using it to murder my fleets).

Anyway, my time is split inbetween playtesting and toying with a Tconfig compliant (finally) proper RPG mod for Terraria, and Dawnguard (Skyrim).  I honestly haven't done much work on those ideas quite yet.  I also have to a list of things I'm converting by hand over from Diplomacy.  That last part will take a good while.

On a side note, a cruiser with spy abilities would fill in the missing 7th cruiser in with the Vasari.  Could name it *insert Vasari sounding name* Sneaker.

 

Thanks psychoak and Goafan77, as always, your work is greatly appreciated! Works flawlessly now, and I understand buffs a little better now.

Generally speaking, you want to use the most recent file...if there is a diplomacy version, use that...if there is no diplomacy version, use the entrenchment version....if there is no entrenchment version, use the original version...

What I used to do before Rebellion was convert all the original, entrenchment, and diplomacy entity files....then, I'd copy all the original files to a new folder...after that, I'd copy all the entrenchment files to that same folder, allowing the entrenchment files to overwrite any original files of the same name...finally, I'd copy all the diplomacy files to the same folder, allowing them to overwrite any original/entrenchment files of the same name...this insures that whatever file is in that folder is the most recent...

For the most part, Diplomacy only provides files for the new content it adds...Entrenchment has a ton of files because starbases needed to be added to the target filters for a lot of abilities and some lines were added to certain files...

Seem to be using an InstantAction type that doesn't work somewhere. Like AlwaysPerform in a buff or OnDelay in an ability.

I made this passive ability, whose purpose is to give a ship an impenetrable shield. This works fine. Then I decided to expand this passive to make it so that once the ship loses it's shields, that it will X damage done to it, effectively making it so that the ship dies once it loses it's shields. Now, for whatever reason, the damage buff is being applied while the ship's shields are at full strength, and further more, once the ship loses it's shields the phase block buff doesn't go away, which indicates something is up. In addition, if I make the ability into a usual autocasting one with a cost, then it works as intended, which baffles me.

He is a genius.

Amazing, that did the trick. Much thanks, psychoak! With this ability done, true work on the Yuuzhan Vong, a race for whom shields represent the "real" health of their ships, can begin. The shield recovery and shield mitigation mechanics of Sins are perfect for twisting the Vong into something unique, however they still have to have a certain amount of hull strength due to various anti-hull abilities.