Attention: Any Successful Mac Modders Out There?

[DrBullwinkle]

Suggestions?

1) Skype (chat).

2) You're not trying to load a profile; you need to create one. Enter the paths to your X3TC folder and the X3AP.exe. Those are the only two things that you need to configure before you use the editor.

Now you can edit your own ships!

[Lemant]

Thanks to DrBullwinkle and several others' help in this thread, I am finally able to get the windows version of X3 Editor 2 running and edit the ships.

I have some questions editing ship stats with X3 Editor 2:

1. I am trying to edit steering rate but this is where it gets confusing. There's Yaw and Pitch. Then there's Angular acceleration. For a Terran Rapier (M5), those three values are 181 RPM, 14.4 RPM, and 40, respectively with 25 Steering extensions. I cross-referenced these numbers to those on Roguey's X3AP website: 16.5 to 57.8 RPM. How does the default stats on Rapier translate to 16.5 RPM???

2. If I want to increase the the Steering on a Rapier, which should I change between Yaw vs. Angular Acceleration?

3. Under the Performance tab in the editor, what does the Average Reaction Delay do exactly? I noticed that on all ships (that I've checked so far), that parameter is set to integer 1.

[DrBullwinkle]

Now that you have the X3 Editor running, you might enjoy: [TUTORIAL] How to edit the Tships file.

There's Yaw and Pitch. Then there's Angular acceleration.

Actually, there is Yaw, Pitch, and Roll. These are the usual three axes used to describe steering in space craft (and aircraft).

Those are the numbers that you would change to improve steering. As you may have noticed, Roll is not important to changing direction.

Angular acceleration is acceleration, not speed. It is the rate of change of steering speed, in the same way that acceleration is the rate of change of speed. Look at some other ships for reference: Larger ships have slower angular acceleration, which gives the feeling of "heavy" steering.

Steering extensions improve turning speed (yaw, pitch, roll) by 10% per extension. So 25 extensions would be like multiplying yaw, pitch, and roll by 3.5x.

The game reports only a single number for steering. I do not know how that is calculated, but it is an indicator only. The "real" changes will be made by changing yaw, pitch, and roll (and also steering extensions).

[Lemant]

Ah, perfect! Thank you for the link to the PDF tutorial on editing Tships.

[Lemant]

Whenever I fire Fusion Beam Cannon, I am practically blinded by its lighting effect, so bright is the beam. Is there any way to tune down the brightness level of weapons firing effect with X3 Editor 2? I know somebody out there has to know how to do this stuff. Please help me out.

[apricotslice]

Whenever I fire Fusion Beam Cannon, I am practically blinded by its lighting effect, so bright is the beam. Is there any way to tune down the brightness level of weapons firing effect with X3 Editor 2? I know somebody out there has to know how to do this stuff. Please help me out.

Well done getting this far.

It was probably me who said X3editor was straight forward. In the main it is, but not the first time you open it. It really does need a decent manual.

Guns fire bullets. So there is a tlaser file for the gun and a tbullets file for the bullet. I cant say for sure, but the firing effect is either on the gun or its the nature of the bullet.

What I suggest (which is what I do), find a bullet you like, find the gun that fires it, compare the stats. Change the fields that appear to be what you want, test.

The old PPC bullet in TC was a lag generator, so I switched it to use the HEPT bullet instead. In AP, they appear to have changed it again, so it doesnt matter.

[DrBullwinkle]

Whenever I fire Fusion Beam Cannon, I am practically blinded by its lighting effect, so bright is the beam.

Are you trying to fire a capital ship weapon from a Rapier?

That might have something to do with it.

Capital ship weapons are intended to be mounted on a frigate, carrier, or destroyer.

Colors are in TBullets, which you can edit yourself.

The actual effect itself is a model; see the Tutorials sticky for tutorials on 3D modeling.

[Lemant]

Would you happen to know which folder those two files are located?

[DrBullwinkle]

Would you happen to know which folder those two files are located?

Types files (TShips, TLasers, TBullets, etc) are all in the "types" folder.

[apricotslice]

All the t..... spec files are in the addon types folder, but you will need to first extract them from the cat/dats in addon. Thats what the modmanager part is for, looking inside the cat/dats and extracting or adding.

Since you only have 2 cat/dats, create an extraction folder and extract both cat/dats to it. Then you have direct access to all the files. After each patch, you do the same thing. I have sub folders for each patch, so I can see the different versions of individual files, but thats maybe more than you need to do.

For now, move the ones you edit to addon\types, but once you start getting a few of these, its time to make your own mod.

[Lemant]

Problem identified. The blinding effect from beam (instant-hit) weapons are not because they are capital ship weapons but rather due to what's known as Launch Effect parameter under the Bullet Data tab in TBullets.txt file. When the Launch Effect field is set to integer ZERO, glow effect is absent. Beam weapons such as Alpha Kyon Emitters, which are scout/fighter-based weapons, have ZERO Launch Effect.

[apricotslice]

Now your getting it !