A Concept in Progress

posted on February 18th, 2014, 3:29 am

Right now I am getting the progress in order. And so far its slow but steady. I will though need help because I am an idiot when it comes to Modding the latest version. Here is a little spoiler on what I am planning.

Race: Cardassians
Avatars: 3
Top Priorities:
- A new Mixed Tech Concept
- Unique Tech Tree Layout
- Nearly as many ships as the Feds got

Medium Priority:
- Balanced Stats
- UI
- Weapon Icons

Low Priority:
- Weapon Sprites
- Unique Weaponry

posted on February 18th, 2014, 9:32 pm

posted on February 18th, 2014, 11:31 pm

Well, as someone who has spent almost as much time analyzing how much work it would take to create a mod of Fleet Ops as he has actually modding Fleet Ops, I can tell you what is relatively easy and what is not.

adding specials, things like weapon rate of fire, etc, is pretty easy. You only change a few numbers in the odf files. It's also pretty easy to take a weapon from one ship and put it on another ship, and if the ship classes are similar enough then things like damage passives will be represented as well.

The problem lies in creating new ships. Every weapon on every ship in the game has a line for every ship, like so:

damagebase = 75.844
"bor_adaptor_TE.odf" 69.018
"bor_adaptor_TO.odf" 69.018
"bor_adaptor_TR.odf" 69.018
"bor_assimilatorZ_BTN.odf" 69.018
"bor_assimilatorZ_BTR.odf" 69.018
"bor_assimilatorZ_BTT.odf" 62.192

so you can add new ships fairly easily, but they will all receive the unmodified base damage from weapons. If you want them to use all the passives like +50% to long range, you will need a script that can store the ship data, calculate damage, and add the new lines to several thousand text documents. I've asked the devs to let us use theirs in the past, but it represents a great deal of effort on their part and would be difficult to make available without releasing a bunch of their other tools as well.