Modding FO

posted on April 22nd, 2009, 5:15 am

Now, most of you may be perfectly happy with stock FO, but some of us like to experiment. There are several points i would like to cover about modding fleetops:
* For the tooltips, you use a lot of special characters for things like colored text and mini-pictures of supply canisters and such. Perhaps we coudl get a complete guide as to what these are? I made a small guide, but im sure that it isnt complete and it would be nice to have an official one.
* Some of the odf commands are undocumented; what can we use them for? what odf types will they work in?
* What formulas do you use to calculate offensive/defensive/system value? i would prefer not to guess or use some makeshift calculation.
* what happened to the global_damage_xxx.listfile files? it was nice to not have to guess which is the best weapon to take damage values from.
If anybody has any other FO modding questions, i guess this is the thread to ask them

posted on April 22nd, 2009, 6:38 pm

The balancing formulas are a bit too complex to be documented here and they are hard to be managed by hand, we use a tool for that. It might be released with a documentation in the future. So long its best to use an official Fleet Operations vessel as reference.

Documenting our every-days changes would take too much time and delay development to much, however all features that will be included in a patchproject are documented upon its release. Check the latest patch-project readme for more information.

The damage listfiles have been removed, as they are to slow and to inflexible.

Happy Moding

posted on April 22nd, 2009, 6:43 pm

you need a c++ program or something like that to read the tooltips acuratly, word pad doesn't have all the right characters.

posted on April 22nd, 2009, 6:46 pm

you can also use notepad++ or change the encoding in the normal windows notepad, it should have an option to do that, too

posted on April 23rd, 2009, 12:22 am

Yah! What do all the system values mean? In fact, what do the weoponranges mean. I have found no guide for this and end up having  to guess or ignore all this. 

posted on April 23rd, 2009, 1:00 am

yes I alwayse wondered how you guys detemnined the values, sence they are only mentened in the tooltips.  Do you guys have a secret, maybe that ships are weaker, or stronger than it says.  And what exactally does system value mean?

posted on April 23rd, 2009, 4:09 am

As already described in another topic, the attributes are the base of most other values. You can find a description of the Values on the forums, in posts like Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - A couple questions

System Value will also add resistences to subsystem failure in the 3.0.6 patch

posted on April 23rd, 2009, 7:12 am

Well i suppose i should post my (incomplete) guide for the DLS info for those out there that cant read those symbols. Also, what formulas do you use to derive the actual underlying values out of the values you see in tooltips?
Numbers:
1=£
2=¤
3=¥
4=¦
5=§
6=¨
7=©
8=ª
9=«
0=¢
Other Symbols:
Special Energy Lighting Bolt (yellowish-gold)= ()Its in there it just wont display
Bullet:Å (needs to be preceded by 4 spaces i think) (regular bullet, not red or green or anything i think)
Indent:Æ (needs to be preceded by 4 spaces i think)
grey "(passive)" text: Ÿ

posted on April 23rd, 2009, 2:06 pm

I always wondered how to change those values thanks RCIX

posted on May 29th, 2009, 2:26 pm

Found another definite meaning for a symbol:

¬ = +

posted on May 31st, 2009, 10:30 pm

Despite the difficulty i hope modding FO takes off... I'm sure everyone has ships they'd like to see in the game. Anyone wanna list off a few of the ships they'd like most in the game? For me its:

Fed:
Typhon Class (and its fighters) - From Star Trek: Invasion
Achilles Class - From Dominion Wars
Kelvin Class - From Fandom

Rom:
Raptor Class - From SFC3
Veles Class - From A2
Shadow Class - From A2

Kling:
K'Vort'Cha Class - From Dominion Wars
Q'ang (Chancellor) Class - From the Novels
Voodieh Class - From 'All Good Things...'

Dom:
Super Carrier - From Dominion Wars
Strike Cruiser - From Dominion Wars

Borg:
Tactical Sphere
Uber-Cube

The models, textures and wireframes all exist for these things so i'm sure making them wouldnt be too hard, heh. But the scripting in FO is so epic, it'd still be alot of work.

posted on June 1st, 2009, 2:58 am

...
Kelvin Class - From Fandom
...

DO you mean the Kelvin from ST:XI? if so, check my Kelvin thread; its already added! otherwise i dont really know what ship your talking about.

posted on June 1st, 2009, 1:03 pm

Kelvin from fandom, not from the new movie. Its basically like this:
Miranda is to Constitution as
Nebula is to Galaxy as
Kelvin is to Sovereign

Kelvin Class Refit - Bravo Fleet InfoBase
Kelvin Class, Star Trek: Armada 2 Downloads, Star Trek: Armada 2 TNG, DS9, VOY and Future
Kelvin Class, Star Trek: Legacy Downloads, Star Trek: Legacy Federation

That type of ship heh

posted on June 3rd, 2009, 10:54 pm

Ok my list of ships I will eventually add once I feel like doing a massive amount of odf cloning and modifying are.

Cardasian ships added to dominion to replace some of the curent dominion ships:

Galor class
Keldon class
Cardasian freighter
Cardasian weapons platform
Nor type station.

Federation:
Antares class fighter AKA Maquis raider
DS9 (federation upgraded)
Miranda class with selectable modules
Fighter Outpost(manufactures peragrine assault fighters)

Klingons:
Nehgvar Variant from the mirror universe

Ok now this isnt trek but I would add these for my own amusement.

Battlestars
Cylon Baseships
Omega class destroyer(B5)
Centauri destroyer(B5)
Narn heavy cruiser(B5)
Starfurys(B5)
Shadow battle crabs(B5)
Prometheous class(SG1)
Daudeliass class(SG1)
X302 fighters(SG1)
Hammerheads(SAAB)
Chig fighters(SAAB)

posted on June 3rd, 2009, 11:05 pm

dumb question but why do the borg ships have the odf code
planet = 1
is that important the there game play