Creating New Maps and Editiing Existing Maps In Star Trek Ar

posted on August 25th, 2010, 5:19 am

I have been at times editing and creating my own maps for Star Trek Armada II and have noticed a few things that I don't know how to do or to possibly fix.

1) When creating new maps and adding new units to them, the (like ships, stations of the other races) they don't stay on the maps when I'm trying to play them. Instead all the planets, moons, nebulas and other map objects are there but nothing belonging to the races that I've set on the maps.

2) When editing the campaign mission maps I have been wanting to add units to the opposint team like the Borg or the Romulans or the secondary race that appears in some of the missions. My question is, how do you switch to "Team 2" to add units to them?

3) I have a few other units for the non-playable Ferengi in the e_other.odf (I think that's the files name) well when I select them to add to the maps, the game crashes. Is there a special way to add units to the Ferengi even though they are non-playable?

4) When I try to create my own new files for adding things to the map because the existing ones are full for some of the races or planets, they don't appear in the menu in the game for the map editor or even the race that has the added file. How do I get these new files to show up? What files do I need to edit?

posted on August 25th, 2010, 10:21 am

1) you cant change this, any unit assigned to a team that a player will take will be removed at the start. assign units to teams that wont be used by a player and they will stay there.

2) hold shift and push direction arrows up and down to change the team indicator. whichever team u select will be the team a new unit is placed with. that's how it works in general editing, im not sure for campaign missions.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 4:48 am

1) you cant change this, any unit assigned to a team that a player will take will be removed at the start. assign units to teams that wont be used by a player and they will stay there.

2) hold shift and push direction arrows up and down to change the team indicator. whichever team u select will be the team a new unit is placed with. that's how it works in general editing, im not sure for campaign missions.

I will give that a try and I think I may have come up with an idea to make the stations and one ship appear for the Ferengi and not crash the game. I could set their race to "race = norace". If this could work, then I could make special copies of the other races ships and stations that I want to appear on the map as map units and then in theory (at least I'm hoping) they should then stay on the map and also possibly not cause a crash.

Is my thinking and theory correct or is it going to be a waste of time?

posted on August 26th, 2010, 10:27 am

Is my thinking and theory correct or is it going to be a waste of time?

no idea, i'm not a modder 

posted on August 27th, 2010, 2:01 am

no idea, i'm not a modder 

I guess I got to find a modder that might know and actually will help me out. (I wish some modders would take alook at this thread too to offer their exsperiences.)

PS: Thanks for you help with the main part though.

posted on August 29th, 2010, 5:14 am

I've tried the Map Editor out more fully and have also been able to asign units to the opposing teams in the campagin missions. My Campaign mad for the second Federation Mission is working out great with the additions but the same can't be said for the Fourt Federation Campaign Mission Map. It was working fine with the few Federation additions I put in prior to creating this topic but now that I've added alot of ships to the Romulans (Team 3) including many Reman Scimitar-class starships and a few other Romulan ships, a Borg Base in the Romulan Neutral Zone and a small Federation Base in the areas where the Enterprise enters the map damaged. After saving the map and going to test it, the game crashed and I know that all the ships I added work.

I did though add more additions to the Klingon ships that Vanilla Ulimate gives the Federation, and near a planet is the Klingon Fortress (my new kbase) and a few Klingon hero ships. Is it possible that I've overloaded the map?

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posted on August 30th, 2010, 3:08 pm

Jet - i'm guessing from all your posts that you are prone to changing too many things at once.  When developing things its a good idea to change one thing then test it.

It is possible if the map is quite large to run into issues, or it could just be you had added or changed something the map doesn't like.

So, only recommendation is go back to an earlier version (you are using some sort of versioning system???  with backups???) and see what happens.

Regardless, i understand you have a lot more pressing problems that filling up maps with tons of extra objects.

posted on August 30th, 2010, 11:16 pm

Jet - i'm guessing from all your posts that you are prone to changing too many things at once.  When developing things its a good idea to change one thing then test it.

It is possible if the map is quite large to run into issues, or it could just be you had added or changed something the map doesn't like.

So, only recommendation is go back to an earlier version (you are using some sort of versioning system???  with backups???) and see what happens.

Regardless, i understand you have a lot more pressing problems that filling up maps with tons of extra objects.

I actually do test one thing at a time and put one thing at a time into the game and then test it. The problems that I've reported are always occuring even after finding out and figuring out how to fix them. Thus I look further inot them and then if they are stumping me after checking all files involved I make a note of them and don't build them again, the only thing Ihaven't done is take them out of the AI, instead, I've been trying to avoid the races that have the problems and not have the AI use them, so namely the AI race I test agains is the Tholians since its only a ship for them that is a starting unit that just doesn't play its sounds.

You are right that I have many backups created, all in my external hard drive since it can hold close to 650GB. For maps, I'm just testing the campaigns as I go and since some units I feel should be added, I do that part of the editing when I don't feel like adding any ships or stations.

The other errors are more pressing so I just at times do other parts for my mod to get away from the errors and at the same time run tests.

I haven't really deleted things from any map that they originally had, I did chancge the pathing for the Fourth Federation Campagin becasue Vanilla Ultimate was putting the starting ships right through a dangerous nebula (Metaphasic I believe) and before the mission even begins right in the cinmantic veiw, you watch the ships explode except for the construction ships and 1 scout. Then the Vanilla Ultimate modding team give you 3 Kligon ships to start the game. I only changed the pathing so that the ships would survive. This was weeks prior to the addition of the Remans. All was fine then, there might be a problem with a Reman ship though that I added because the Remans crash at times in Instant ActionI know they usually didn't in my prior installs so I'm going to do further research into this problem.