giving factions ships

[JonathanD]

Just curious (because I am an incessant tweaker) is there a way to adjust who can own which ships? I'd like to see a drayman or orion in pirate hands every now and then.... Is there somewhere I can play with this?

On a similar note, is there a way to increase the occaisions on which cap ships appear and perhaps the escorts they fly with?

[MamiyaOtaru]

pirates used to have Orions occasionally, so it's certainly possible to give them back.

Have a look at modules/faction_ships.py, at "fighters =" in particular.

[JonathanD]

Thanks, not sure yet if it worked (haven't seen any pirate orions) but I also adjusted what I think was the capital ship rate and I'm seeing tons of caps on both sides now... lots of fun There was a kamek blasting away at the basra refinery and a paradigm came up behind and smoked him... since the kamek only fired back with turrets and not frontal weapons it was a quick battle. Brilliant to watch though!

[Vandrvekn]

Could this be used to add ships from WCU into PR? If so, what files would have to be copied?

[JonathanD]

Good question :p
I'm dling wcu again to find out. But if you meant add them in as player flyable and buyable, thats alot easier.

[MamiyaOtaru]

Adding WCU ships would be a bit more involved. The file I mentioned (faction_ships.py) only controls what ships a faction uses. To add a completely new ship would require a few more edits.

You would need to copy over the ship's folder from WCU/units to privateer/units (like privateer/units/hellcat). If it has its own cockpit you need to copy that folder over from /WCU/cockpits.

Then it needs to be added to /privateer/units/units.csv to show up in game.

To make it buyable, you need to edit /privateer/master_part_list.csv to give it a price and make it buyable. Depending on the category you give it, it would have to be added to the list of available goods for bases in units.csv. Easier would be to give it a category you can already buy like merchant/light or something.

You could skip the master_part_list.csv editing and just edit your savegame files to give yourself one instead..

It can't be done in five seconds, but it really isn't all that bad.

[JonathanD]

I've done it with vegastrike ships, but not wcu, nor am I likely to today. Seems sourceforge is being slooooooooooooooow with the wcu download.

btw, I gave the pirates the vegastrike corvette with the above edit... coolness

[Draken Stark]

Are there any freeware programs out there to create new ships for this game in the right formats?

[JonathanD]

what exactly do you mean by "create new ships"

Creating the models can be done in a variety of free and not-free 3d modeling programs. The rest you can do in excel, notepad, or a variety of other editors.

[Draken Stark]

I'm looking for a Modeling tool that has a compatible "save file as" format for Privateer Remake. If anyonee knows one or more that is free I'd probably like to take a crack at it to see if I could create some more ships. I've already got stuff that could handle the textures for me.

[MamiyaOtaru]

I use Wings3d. With a plugin available here, it can export to .xmesh format, which is then bundled up using vegastrike's mesher.exe into the .bfxm format the game uses.

There might be an xmesh exported for another prog, but I don't remember which.

Just about any program (including wings3d) will let you export as .obj though (or something that can be converted to .obj) and mesher.exe can turn those into .bfxm as well (though xmesh offers slightly better control of material properties).

You can usually get away with using whatever 3d editor you are comfortable with, but some make you jump through more hoops to get the result converted

[Draken Stark]

Thank you for the info. I'll see what I can do... maybe have a few contradutions even...