stock a2 weapon question

posted on February 16th, 2013, 4:12 pm

In stock A2 each race has an artillery ship. In the weapon cbltphot.odf it references an explosion sprite, the ugly expanding explosion wave which I want to change to use the texture from the dominion emblast from Fleet Ops. Simply changing the explosion sprite does nothing, it's still the stock one. Is this due to it being hard coded?

Now, the weapon.odf also has this:
// Set the object odf name
objectName = "xartil"

The xartil.odf file has more explosion info like number of rays, color, damage specifics, and another explosion sprite reference which is the actual one seen in game. Is the game saying the explosion is an actual object and not simply a sprite/texture? I've been looking and seeing how the emblast was done in Fleet Ops I have to use a utrium and u_ball_obj reference in my odf's? It seems pretty confusing as to why one can't simply replace the texture and not need to refernce even more odf's?

Can I just copy the klingon ion storm weapon, but make it for a torpedo and change the sprite/texture reference to the emblast and get the effect I'm after?

posted on February 16th, 2013, 4:20 pm

I believe that explosionSprite and explosionSpriteRadius are non-functional. A number of the ordnance graphical features in Stock A2 are non-functional sadly.

Yes, the ordnance spawns the xartil object which is the explosion .

We use utribeam and utritiumball links in FO if we want the object to only fire at enemy targets. Artillery fire at all targets - neutral, friendly, enemy. More info on that in the guide http://guide.fleetops.net/guide/modding ... s/ordnance

Since I don't know what type of weapon/effect you want, I cannot recommend a procedure, however

posted on February 16th, 2013, 4:40 pm

Thanks D_N. I've been pouring over the guides and see the section you mention. What weird is if I comment out the objectname referece in the weapon.odf, it still plays. I also went into the xartil.odf and commented everything out and added explosionsprite = XXXXX it still played the stock explosion. Your statement about the non-functioning explosionsprite reference is clear now.

What I'm after is the ship to fire it's torpedo (artillery) and upon exploding on an enemy ship/station or even in open space if it misses is instead of the ugly expanding wave texture, I want to see the emblast lighting-space fissure texture from FO. It grows, does it's damage and then fades out just like in FO.

Do I need the PP to use the utribeam and utritiumball references or will that work in stock A2?

posted on February 16th, 2013, 6:12 pm

Yes, that's because xartil is the default http://guide.fleetops.net/guide/guide/m ... /artillery . Many commands have defaults that are reverted to if an entry is missing.

In order to do that, indeed you'll need to use a utritiumball, though it doesn't have to be spawned by a utribeam . An ionstorm torpedo will work fine too for instance.

Yup, should work fine in stock A2. If you come across an unknown command, look it up in the guide - it will always say if the command is native to FO or to A2 .

posted on February 19th, 2013, 4:48 pm

I must be dense as I couldn't get it to work using the klingon ion storm special or the utritiumball. Luckily I found a mod on AFC for a tribobalt torpedo that works perfectly using the FO emblast texture explosion.

The main weapon file has a launcher classlabel, the ordinace file it referencese is an artillery classlabel. The objectname it references is a fireballexplosion classlabel so i just referenced the explosion sod I wanted. The explosion file references the last file, which is a shockwaveexplosion class label and just uses a blank texture so there is no visible shockwave.

Just wanted to wrap up my solution if someone else looks for similar idea. Thanks for all the help D_N