aurumgallente wrote: ↑Wed, 25. Nov 20, 09:46
It's a lot of work for each ship. I don't know how many hundreds times it's more difficult than porting ships to X3. To realize amount of work you can check
this guide. It shows the basics of creating S/M ships but doesn't cover all aspects of it like texturing, additional parts of the ship, properties of component files, etc. L/XL ships are relatively easy to do and because of that you can see many mods adding L/XL ships and quite a few with S/M ships. For example, to make X2 Pericles after X2 Demeter I had to only delete some parts of Demeter but it still took about 6 hours of work, mainly because you need to close and start game again to see changes in your file. And making my first X4 ship, which is X2 Mercury, took about month.
Short answer is: it's possible but takes a lot of time and requires some knowledge of 3D modelling and programming. But you can't write some script that will do it for you, each ship has to be ported manually and requires unique approach.
In case there will ever be full modding tools that remove current limitations, it will be much simpler.
If there was a way (idk if there is) to have components (esp. engines and shields) not display on the model but still apply as stats, it would be much much simpler. Because then you wouldnt have to cut holes or mod the ships themself to fit the module models. It would be so much easier this way.
And if there is a way to get around the need to have walkable interior it again would be orders of magnitude simpler to port 'legacy' ships.
X3 ships also have components (guns, turrets, engine effects, hangar modules, animated model pieces) so in that aspect its similar. A replacement for components would technically be automatable - as long as you create models for the components that share dimensions/design with X3 equivalent turrets/guns/hangars. X3 didnt have other event based things however (interactable pieces in cockpit etc) - those would still need manual placement.
At this stage however, to me, the amount of work doesnt justify the gains. One can still gate a lot out of X3 - and likely less time consuming and more fun to write features that interest me most (economy simulation, faction dynamics) inside X3 than it is to port X3 content into X4. It also would look totally off with X4 designs side by side with X3 designs - like a cartoon character next to a soldier from a WW2 war movie. So a total conversion to X3 graphic in X4 engine would be the better option (visual consistency!)... but again, cost vs. benefit and limited time (in my case anyway).
XTC mod for X3TC already had race specific stations built from modules like we have now in X4, before X4 even existed
- except non editable ingame. They even had a look at our station models when XRebirth was still in production
So converting those to X4 could be a "walk in the park" comparatively.
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