Topic: Writeing Spec Lines

[Vestras]

I've been attempting to write spec lines for several vessels I downloaded which lacked them. Its been arduous, but I finally worked out how to get the game to recognize ships and hardpoints and such, BUT...

Several thiongs elude me
1) Fireing Arcs: I understand teh basic science of how to execute them, but I am finding that when I add anythign except for 0_360 as the stat, the weapons do not fire, or even display their fireing arc. How is this amended? Are there preset specific Fireing arcs, and all others are thereby negated?

2) Ship Names: According to what ive been told by a friend of mine, my shipnames file is corrupted.
it should be:
USS ENTERPRISE
It comes out as
U S S  E N T E R P R I S E
There are also bug scripts, or marks the computer wont resolve with appere as black blocks. I have been opening it with Notepad, Word Pad, and MS word, none of which display it properly. Is there a way I can replace it, other than the CD, which appeares the same?  

3) Cross Race Weapons: more an Idol curiosity, If I were to add to the common files weapons settings that say Borg Cutting beams were now "FB" rather than "B", how adversly would that effect things?

I appretiate any help anyone can offer me on these sujects. Thank you for reading.

[awm3]

Hello.

Hopefully this will answer some of your questions:

Quote:
1) Fireing Arcs: I understand teh basic science of how to execute them, but I am finding that when I add anythign except for 0_360 as the stat, the weapons do not fire, or even display their fireing arc. How is this amended? Are there preset specific Fireing arcs, and all others are thereby negated?

You are correct, there are specific arcs which are used by the game, any others are ignored (the weapon is still visible and charges, but cannot fire).  To the best of my knowledge, the following arcs work for the unpatched version of the game:

Code:

300_360
330_30
0_60
60_120
120_180
150_210
180_240
240_300
165_195
0_360
345_15
210_270
90_150
270_330
30_90

In addition, the patched version supports the following arcs, but has no graphics for them:

Code:

300_60
120_240
240_360
0_120
180_300
60_180
270_360
0_90

Quote:
2) Ship Names: According to what ive been told by a friend of mine, my shipnames file is corrupted.
it should be:
USS ENTERPRISE
It comes out as
U S S E N T E R P R I S E
There are also bug scripts, or marks the computer wont resolve with appere as black blocks. I have been opening it with Notepad, Word Pad, and MS word, none of which display it properly. Is there a way I can replace it, other than the CD, which appeares the same?

I belive that the text files are in Unicode format, and so if you open them as such in Word or WordPad they should display correctly.

Quote:
3) Cross Race Weapons: more an Idol curiosity, If I were to add to the common files weapons settings that say Borg Cutting beams were now "FB" rather than "B", how adversly would that effect things?

To the best of my knowledge, that should work fine.

Hope this helps,

awm3  

[CFA_Admiral_Tige]

About the "unicode"..you need to get a program that can edit hexidecimal, better know as a "hex editor".  Open shiplist with this editor, and change the first 4 characters of code to FFFE...this will translate it so wordpad can read it.  

[awm3]

.    Depending on the version of Word or Notepad you are using, you can open the files without hex editing first.  However, CFA_Admiral_Tiger is correct, if your version does not support the appropriate format you can hex-edit the file to open it (just remember to change the first 4 characters back after editing).

awm3
 

[CFA_Admiral_Tige]

Thats an unnecessary step, changing it back.  Since I make so many modifications to the shipnames/sprites files, I just leave them alone, and they work fine.


Tiger