I did look this up before I posted, but the last post I could find was in 2008, and things might've changed.
In essence, I'm looking to add an ability to the new Gunships I made for each faction; EMP for the TEC (very brief 'stutter' effect) Armor Reduction for the Advent and speed crippling for the Vasari gunships. However, I can't figure out how to make fighters do this; the game insists they can't have 'single target' abilities. Is there a way to somehow make this a 'splash' attack? Would that be a way around the hardcoded problem?
I don't know the specifics behind it, but the Distand Stars mod adds Gunships and EWS bomber that have abilities. Though those are not aimed at specific targets, but get applied to all enemies surrounding the squad.
Maybe looking at their files, or asking over in the DS thread might help you out.
I told you fighters are the biggest pain to mod in the entire game. The reason you can't give fighters target abilities or abilities that "ApplyBuffToSelf" is that the fighters themselves don't have abilities, the squads do. Squads do not physically exist in the game, they are just an obstruction that carries fighters and tells them how to carry out orders. Squads do have a position though so radius abilities do work as in DS.
so the corvettes could be pulled off as squadrons and probably be more balanced.
Hmmm. Radius abilities. Could I then make it something where if they're -close- enough they make the enemy ship fizzle out slightly? I can't get DS to download right now because my internet is behaving poorly.
You can make an AoE effect but take into account depending on what it is that the little zooming strike craft dragging a fast moving AoE with it and hitting and losing affected targets repeatedly may cause some cpu stutter or even crash the game.
Fifty fighters with an AoE affecting all the ships they pass can be a big problem.
Im verrry new to modding sins, Im actually going through the learning process right now, so if my idea is stupid then im sorry lol. But seeing how fighters arent "single" units but react as groups, would it be possible to take a frigate like the scout, modify the size of the ship down to a scale of what the fighters are on and give them the ability to dock. so instead of a group of 5 or whatever fighters, you instead have 5 or 10 mini frigates flying around. This could enable you to give your new "fighters" active/passive abilities and buffs etc. lol imagine having a fleet of mini capital ships flying around. If its stupid, sorry, but I thought itd be cool
Strikecraft are the only things that can dock because they are attached to another entity that creates them. But otherwise yeah you could make them really small and move like fighters, thats basically what the Corvettes in Rebellion are.
I suppose you could always make something that only applies a 1 second buff to a single owned fighter with a range of 1 which would allow you to give a single fighter an ability. You can't make the entire squad shoot glowy missiles of doom or something though since you only have the position of the oldest fighter in the squad.
The idea isn't stupid at all and is one several mods have used/tried.
It's just the luck of the draw that strike craft and mines have some peculiar, hard-coded qualities that aren't laid out by the developers for us and are very prone to crash if incompatible values are used in them.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
