You all are welcome.

I didn't thank you.  =|  Remove steam and I will. 

I thought corvette spam killed bomber spam.

Um no, not really.

Would if I could.

I know...  =\

Hi everyone,

First time poster and wanted to start off saying I love this mod. I just have two quick questions since I decide to check out some of the mini mods that come in the DS Efficiency - AddOn Pack. Question one is about the DS LASERBEAM group of mods, I like this mod but I also like to play as the Vasari how hard is it to add them to this mod (do it myself) or has someone already done so?

My second question is about special stacking order for DS Leaserbeams in the read me. If your using DS Laserbeam DMPP (For Dynamic Movement and Powerful Pirates) near the top of the order why would you need to use DS Laserbeam PP ( which is for powerful pirates) near the bottom of the list.

 Is it better to copy DS 1.00 Efficiency to Distant Stars folder or keep it above DS as a mini-mod?

Thanks for your time

Hi.

Welcome to the forums and thanks for showing the love.

The Vasari don't use lasers so they don't get the changed effects.  Do note that I said effects.  The files that are changed do not change anything other then how the lasers look and behave.  It's fairly easy to change up their files to give them something similar, but there's really no point since their primary weapon is the phase missile and should be used liberally against those TEC cockroaches and their mutant witch sub cockroach counterpart species.

Because of the way the game reads modded files.  It reads them top down according to the stacking order.  The reason why I have you stack them that way is because in the laser beams powerful pirates folder, lots of stationary pirate objects are given the laser beam change treatment as well as the ships.  The ships, however, aren't set up for dynamic movement.  The DMPP one has the pirate ships with the laserbeams and dynamic movement.  So by enabling the DMPP above the other one, the game reads the ship files from the DMPP and uses those, and ignores them in the PP folder but still uses all the other files for the stationary objects.  It's just the simplest way I could make it all work out without including duplicate files in every single folder.  Small download sizes are more important to me and to everyone else who wants a quick download.  If I didn't give a rat's ass about download sizes, I'd just include everything in each folder so all you'd have to do is enable one single minimod to get what you want.  Realistically, as long as the DMPP one is above the PP one, then it will work.  It doesn't matter if there are 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 other minimods between them.  Trust the stacking order I listed though, I spent a lot of time working it out so that people could play with any combination of the minimods they wanted.

It's mostly personal preference.  I personally overwrite the DS files with the efficiency ones so I have one less minimod to think about when I change things up to play the type of game I want to play.  However, that means if I want to play DS online, everyone else has to have it done the same way too since the checksum is changed.  So if you like to play online, it's better to run it as a minimod and not mess with the core DS mod so that you can turn it off easily and play with someone who might not have it.

Thanks for the reply

The Vasari already have the pulse beams, but if you want to change the pulse-gun and/or the wave guns into lasers, that is pretty easy too and shouldn't change balance at all (wether the projectile hits the fraction of a seconds sooner or later won't matter).

With missiles though it might actually impact balance, since they travel for several seconds and in rare cases even slower than the craft they chase (enabling the craft to jump out before taking damage, or being repaired, ect.), so I wouldn't change missiles into beams.

Now to the technicallities for projectile to beam conversion.

Each weapon has two lines labeled "WeaponType" that determine which of the three kind of weapons it is: PROJECTILE, BEAM or MISSILE.

You need to change both lines from projectile to beam (if they don't match up, the game will mini-dump before getting into the main menu).

Since projectiles have a duration of 0, you want to change that line to something long enough to be seen (ligh lasers on tech and advent ships in my mini-mod have 0.1 duration for example). Also the travel time should be set to 0.

Last you need to replace the actual graphic of the shot. For projectiles you'll find a line "projectileTravelEffectName" at the very bottom of the weapon block. That needs to be replaced with the following lines, defining the looks and sounds of the beam:

        beamEffectSounds
            soundCount 2
            sound "WEAPON_PHASECAPITALFLASHBEAMHEAVY_TRAVEL"
            sound "WEAPON_PHASECAPITALFLASHBEAMHEAVY_TRAVEL_ALT1"
        beamGlowTextureName "PhaseCapitalBeam_Core_Light"
        beamCoreTextureName "PhaseCapitalBeam_Core_Light"
        beamWidth 50.000000
        beamGlowColor 5affffff
        beamCoreColor ffffffff
        beamTilingRate 9.000000

This particular example is the Vasari Evacuater's pulse beam, so it will produce a small, green beam with a wavy pattern (looking a little like the beams, the ghost busters fire come to thing of it).

You can also get away with making the beamEffect Sounds empty (leave the two "sound" lines and set the soundCount to 0), but the other lines are mandatory. If they are missing, the game will mini-dump.

After you finished, take the time to carefully proof-read the whole thing, since at certain places a singe wrong character can make the game mini-dump (especially a comma instead of a dot can be hard to spot). If you edit just a single ship, it's obvious which file has the error, but if you edit several ships and the game crashes on startup, tracking down the error can be a real pain.

If you want to change the looks of the beam, you can fiddle with the color codes. The last six numbers are RGB code (Red, Green Blue) in hex numbers, though since the used beam texture also impacts the end-color, the ingame colors might look different from the actual RGB defined color (ffffff for example should be pure white, but the Vasari beam will be a bright green anyway for example). The first two digits are the intensity, changing them to something lower makes them less visible.

Beam width, is pretty self explenatory and what exactly beamTilingRate does, I don't know myself. That one value I just took over from the DS source files.

For the reasons Stant123 already explained and so you can start over again, if you can't track down the error that crashes the game, I suggest to drop any modified files into their own mini-mod folder and put it on top of the list, when enabling the mods, rather than overwriting existing files.

Actually no as all weapons technically are recorded as hit the second the ship fires. The effects (which we can control) have no bearing on this. Try using only LRFs and watch as the damage will go down before the missiles even reach the target. Or better yet, as the target runs away with the missiles chasing it, by the time they reach and impact the ship it will receive no damage as the damage has already been calculated.

*reserved*

Thanks -Norbert- for the info

And so Rebellion is released, we've already started work during the beta on the Distant Stars release for Rebellion so it shouldn't be too long now before we release the first iteration of DS for Rebellion, how stable this is going to be I'm not sure just yet but it should at least allow you to complete most games (otherwise whats the point! ).

We'll also be releasing an update for Diplomacy around the same time also which should merge quite a few of the changes Stant made in to the standard variant of DS as this is how the final 1.00 should really have been released however due to time constraints on myself at the time the release was pushed out with a few bits missing.

Just wanted you to all know we're on the case with Rebellion!

We you guys, keep up the good work, love the mod and cannot WAIT to play with it in Rebellion

Hey, I have a quick question about one of the choices in special effects. When the Vazari flagship uses its ult....why is the effect image a black hole?