Problems with the Ship Installer ?

[lukemax]

Still a little jargon for me there, gonna have to explain in layman's terms.

I have the MOD managaer but still unsure how to add all the files needed. i added the F302.XSP or whatever the files called to the shipcreator but nothing seemed to off happened. (Ships im useing)

Thx
Lukemax

[lukemax]

I can add the cockpit mod fine. So thats in the game. But where to i put the F302 file MODS folder? i did that and added it to the shipcreator file but nothing

[GreyStranger]

Hey guys. I have a little problem with this manager.
I downloaded YT-1300 and X-Wing from Tensin's site.
Also I have ship manager 1.89, X3 version 2.0.0.2.
I installed ships, set Argon shipyards for them, but I cannot find them there. Also I tried ti re-select X3 directory in Installer, it gave not any result. What is it? How can I decide this problem?
I use standard mod package, but also I tried ships with xtended mod.

[Cycrow]

it could be several problems.

first, if you use LV's cheat scripts and use the Create Ship command, any installed ships will appear in this list. If its there, then u know its a problem with adding to the station, if its not, then it was a problem with installing the ships.

once you know which it is, it will be easier to find out where the problem lies

[GreyStranger]

Ok.. I've just used this scripts to spawn ships, and I haven't seen new ships there =(

[Cycrow]

that would suggest that the ships are either not installed or your not running them.

a few things to check, would be the directory is correct, it should point to where your X3.exe file is that you run the game.

make sure the ships appear in the installed list

make sure that you close the program and let it finish before playing the game. The closing of the program is very imporant, as its then when it rights all the shared files, without them, nothing new will be added to the mod.

finally, make sure u have the ShipCreator mod selected in the X3 Startup Screen.

u could try it in a new game, however, it should work fine in your saved games as well

[Kadatherion]

Cycrow, i was peeking with the editor at the Jobs.pck file to add my installed custom ships to the AI and... well by what i see i have the feeling that the AI should automatically pick those new ships once in a while. For each category there's a set of ship types/classes from which the game could randomly choose when spawning ex. a free trader or a military vessel. And, in the menu to select a single, specific ship, the new ships are listed, so the mod is recognized even from the editor.

However, in game, although they appear as they should on sale in various shipyards, they are never used, neither by the vanilla AI or by, as an example, LV's RRF. I managed to make them work with your scripts, it was just a matter of expanding the arrays of your random Mx libraries, but as of now i can see them only when doing your missions.

How could i make the AI use them? Since it doesn't seem to pick them for normal job entries as random Mx, should i make brand new entries with the exact ship selected instead of a random choice from a defined set of conditions?

[Cycrow]

tbh, i dont know all that much about how the job engine works or picks its ships.

however, it will defiantly take some time before you starting seeing custom ships in the game, starting a new game with have a better chance of them showing up.

basically, the reason for this, is that the jobs define a limit to the number of ships in game at any one time. Most of the time it will be at that limited, which means no new ships will be created when you add custom ships. You have to wait for these to be destroyed to make room for new ships before theres any chance of them being picked. And then as they are slowly replaced, the choise of ships is random, and as there are like 200 ship entries already in the game, adding a few custom ships actually has a very small chance of getting picked each time.

u could speed things up by going round destroying ships

as for other scripts using ships, it really depends how the scripts are made and select thier ships. And some might be hardcoded to use a set number of scripts, which one include the custom ships

[Kadatherion]

Yup, the fact is, I am in a new game, custom start explorer. I started the game some days ago 'cause i had uninstalled some scripts which however where still bugging the game, and exactly to see if that issue of the ships never appearing to the AI use was just a matter of restarting.

I am at about day 4 (game time), so i flew around the galaxy quite a lot by now, and with an HQ ready to begin spitting out my fleet of custom ships, but the AI never used a single one custom ship in the entire game.

Most of the ships are from your index, although i ripped a dozen ships from mods, and anyway the only mod I'm running is the one created by the ship installer on the standard game setting (except for a custom styled interface mod installed as a false patch, but it just changes the interface, it has no shared files with the ship installer mod, and i changed some tbullets and tlasers values inside the 08 cat).

I tried a bit of everything without any luck, changing the mod files to a "false patch", and even adding the jobs file to that .cat/dat just in case, for some reason, it wanted to have it in the last loaded package to work properly, but the result is always the same, no matter how many new games i start, being them full custom games, "named" custom starts, or plot games.

The thing i really don't understand is that everything seems to be totally fine, the editor finds the custom ships when browsing the jobs file, the ships are properly in game, on sale at the proper shipyards, modifying your libraries your scripts use them as they should, but the vanilla AI ignores them. And, having about 60 custom ships equally spread in class type and race owners, the galaxy should be full of 'em.

There's a thing, however, that i was wondering. Looking at the tships file generated by the ship installer, on top of the list there are a lot of N/A SHIPCREATOR_DELETED/DISABLEDSHIP/SPACER. I guess some of those are leftovers from when i was trying the various installed ships, and disabled/deleted a bunch of 'em for various issues, or uninstalled and then reinstalled after some rebalance. It doesn't seem so, but could it be that these leftovers are getting in the way?

[Cycrow]

there shouldn't really be a problem with the deleted or spacers. The spacers basically allow the base mod or standard TShips to increase in size without effecting the id's of the installed ships.

but like i said, i've not really done much with jobs yet, so ill have to look further into its use before ill have an answer

[bob hope]

my only recent problem i have had with the ship installer is the fact that since the latest update of ddrs, it no longer seems to work with it, theres something in the mod that is causing the combination of this and ddrs to kill the game on loading, and thats just getting into x3, not even trying to get into a saved game.

[tensin]

Yea. The ship installer has trouble with DDRS.

The ship creator has trouble identifying texture files (The G'Quan in DDRS, or BlueStar in MegaMod are good example).

[bob hope]

i actually had the bluestar from your site working, just the thing is a little too big, like a few other ships and it gets pinged off and damaged slightly when you dock to anything, mainly because the docking claw is in the centre of the cockpit instead of on the top of the hull i think

[tensin]

That's because I manualy put in the textures.

That's what's holding up me getting the complete DDRS updated right now. Tracking down and putting in all the texture files. I'll get to it, but it's a pain and time-consuming.

[Cycrow]

hopefully ill get time to look into the problems soon

[bob hope]

one thing, i am trying to add 2 turrets to a ship (basically trying to make the terran thor from ddrs but with a body, so its not invisible) ive managed to mess about to get the ship how i like, now just need to try and dump 2 turrets on, essentially making it another m3+

just not sure what to put in as the turrets, or even if i can through just you ship installer/creator

[Saint-Ashley]

just not sure what to put in as the turrets, or even if i can through just you ship installer/creator

They need to be placed inside 3DS Max or Gmax. Or... A lot of fiddleing with notepad it can be done by hand.

[bob hope]

oh fluff ..... i really am going to have to get gmax, even if blender is slightly more up to date, and has a fair few tricks, no one ever thinks of making stuff to go with it

actually, is it possible to cur the appropriate lines from the ddrs thor and add it to the one i am modifying? or will that not work because i dont have the correct scenes and the rest?

[Cycrow]

u can add more weapons to ships without editing the scene file. You can do it by adding more guns to the existing gun positions, so each gun position could fire 2 guns instead of 1, its not perfec, but its easy to do.

of course if you want each gun to be unique and placed somewhere on the ship, u would need to edit the scene file

[Saint-Ashley]

He wanted to add 2 turrets to the ship, not guns in the turrets.