modding fighters

[MoFoQ]

Weapons, shields, armor, and other items all have what type of vehicle it can be mounted on....so is there a way to customize one's fighters?

[Suicide Junkie]

Launchable fighters come pre-fab, but you can completely customize a fighter if you're piloting it.
(See P&N - Border Wars)
Note: Piloting a fighter is very handy against ships with heavy missile payloads, since they can't target you Point defense cannons and lack of space for equipment are the downsides.

You can create new "enemy" designs to your taste and have components reference them as launchable units.

You could even make launchable ships, though you'd want the "Carrier" to be much bigger

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Do be careful not to create a carrier that launches carriers, that launch carriers, that launch....

Things would get out of hand quite quickly

[ December 18, 2003, 02:51: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Phoenix-D]

Actually, I doubt it would, since the recursive carrier probably would be launched with empty bays.

The only disadvantage to launching ships is that you have to use the Launch Fighter ability, so you can have one fighter OR one warship out at a time. Gee, I wonder what the average user is going to pick..

[MoFoQ]

Ok, I downloaded and extracted it to a dir called mods that I made in the Starfury folder.....now how to I run it.

[Phoenix-D]

It needs to go in the Campaign folder. Then you just start a new game and select P&N Border Wars instead of one of the stock campaigns.

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
The only disadvantage to launching ships is that you have to use the Launch Fighter ability, so you can have one fighter OR one warship out at a time. Gee, I wonder what the average user is going to pick..

Well, prefab warships are expensive. Not everybody can afford to have several just sitting in cargo!

(Though it does seem odd that a destroyer with lots of cargo bays could carry a battleship in storage were the battleship's tonnage in cargo equal to its hull tonnage - which doesn't seem to be the case with fighters )

Now this would be a good excuse for a Highliner mod... make a few Highliner hulls for each race, replace the standard hulls with them and replace the fighters with miniaturized (onscreen, not in tonnage) Versions of the standard ships... since the AI never warps, you don't have to worry about riders warping. Might also help to alleviate the "planets out of scale" syndrome

[Devilsbane]

I was able to add playable fighters to the demo. Playing from the point of a lone fighter is an interesting experience. Some of the problems I found annoying in the demo could be solved with the ability to command/launch other fighters (in the full game). I can see it now, my 5-30 fighter compliment squadron attacking the enemy starbase, convoy, or world (see topic ‘List of Oddities).

Now my thoughts on the idea of launched ships then launching their own fighters. Could you add ships in the 'enemyshipcomponent' (enemyshipconfig?) file that spawn with a launch bay installed and fighter ships in storage? So, player using carrier that launches destroyers who launch squadron commanders that then launch their squads. Just think of the carnage if we gave the enemy that ability.

Note: Fighters do have limited space and tonnage. So one way around this problem would be to mod fighter/satellite only components with realistic tonnage. Never understood why the cockpit was 1k (or was that 5k?) and the weapons were the same as non-fighters. The fighter/satellite only weapons then need to be nerfed compared to non-fighters. Nerfed Versions of mines and missiles could be added as a balance to the loss of fighter weapon damage.

[Ed Kolis]

You know, I think super-carriers might be possible even without a hardcode change... AI ships will launch fighters, right? And AI ships can be defined to carry cargo - the ones I've seen do when I scan them. So if you launch your ship from the super-carrier, and the ship is defined to carry fighters, then couldn't it launch the fighters? Of course the problem is you couldn't make it launch and recover the fighters when you want; you could only command it with the fighter commands. Not to mention the fact that (this is entirely hypothetical, I haven't tried it ) when you recover the ship, it will get its full complement of fighters again... infinite fighters anyone?

Though this might be a good way to implement Drones, as it still takes time to launch and recover ships... remember the Scatterpack Shuttles from SFC? Think of the launched ship as the shuttle and the fighters as the scatterpack missiles... now, it it possible to make AI ships INTENTIONALLY ram in Starfury, or do they just do so at random?

[Phoenix-D]

I'm pretty sure you could make them ram with clever use of the AI scripts..

[Phoenix-D]

a little testing, and yes, you can launch warships. And carriers, for that matter- and they do come loaded. Couldn't get it to actually launch fighters though.