Fear not. This is an excellent opportunity to learn a very little bit about scripting. We can jumpstart the ship, drain the captain's bath water, and force them both to work for a living.
The first thing to do, if you haven't already, is to enable scripting. With scripting enabled, you'll feel like you have wings (forgive the pun). The topic on how to enable scripting is covered quite well elsewhere, so we will skip to the interesting information.
Requirements
There are two very simple scripts that you will need to obtain before starting:
- KillProcess - kill a running process by its Process ID (PID)
- ForceProtectSector - Force a ship to engage all enemies in a sector
[Note: you may need to right click on the links and save them through the popup menu - in Mozilla select "Save link target as" - don't remember what it is in Internet Exploder]
The Procedure
- Make sure you are not in the sector where the target ship is located. This is important. If you don't have any assets in the sector, then go in and drop a sattelite so that you can see the target when you are out of the sector. Then, get out.
- Now, we need to take away the ship's license to loaf around. That is, we need to terminate the script that is telling it to idle. Select the ship and get it's "I"nfo. As you page down you will see the scripts that it is running. You are looking for the script called "ship.cmd.idle.std". When you see that script, find it's PID (process ID) as shown in the picture and write it down.
[ external image ]
What a PID looks like. - Bring up the command console ("SHIFT + C") and select scripts ("S") and enter the script editor. Locate the "KillProcess" script, highlight it and run it ("R"). You will need to tell the script what ship it is to run on. Select the sector with the target ship, then select the target ship. Then you will need to enter the PID number, so select <number> and then type in the PID you obtained for the idle process. That's it. Check on the target ship and you should see that the idle command is no longer running.
- Now you need to enter the sector the target ship is in. When the game loads up the sector, part of the initialization will tell all the turrets on the target ship to attack enemies. You can see this if you go into the ship's info again. You should see a "turret.killenemies.std" process for each turret the target ship has. We're almost there.
- Now we do the real work - we tell the ship to attack all the enemies in the sector. This is done by forcing the ship to run the "ship.cmd.killenemies.std" command. The "ForceProtectSector" script that you downloaded will do just this. Bring up the script editor and run that script. You will need to select the target ship twice. The first time tells the script which ship it is to run on. The second time tells the script what its target is (in this case itself).
- If you have done this right, in the target ship's info screen, you should see these scripts running:
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Correctly run protect script.
One thing to note, is that this procedure will tell the ship to attack all enemies no matter where in the sector that they are. If there is a pirate base in the sector way off the map, then any time a pirate launches from the base, the ship will go off to attack it. If you don't want this to happen, then instead of the "ForceProtectSector" script, you can download and use the "ForceProtectLocation" script instead. This script tells a target ship to attack all enemies within a certain radius of a position. When you run it, it will ask you for the target ship (twice as before), a sector location (select this by selecting the sector and then the position within the sector with the crosshairs), and a radius. The ship will attack any enemies within that radius from the location you specify. Remember, the radius is not in kilometers, it is in meters. So mulitply the kilometers by 1000. A good number I use is 40000.
![[ external image ]](ftp://ftp.excelcia.org/x2/screenshots/PID_Thumb.jpg){kind=link}
![[ external image ]](ftp://ftp.excelcia.org/x2/screenshots/Protect_Thumb.jpg){kind=link}