Mod help

Shield regeneration rates are specific to each entity file, such as "ShieldPointRestoreRate 1.000000", meaning 1 shield hit point per second.

To make capital ship abilities work on frigates, you need to change the levelSourceType. Capital ship abilities are "Intrinsic" and are set to 3 maxNumLevels - this means the level of the ability depends on the level of the ship.

Since frigates can't have levels, their abilities are the "FixedLevel0" source type, and have only 1 max level.

i know about the shield point restore rate but im looking to change the length of time between each restore.
as for the special ability id have to change it to a fixed level? from there how do i give it to the frigate?

You can't change the tick frequency, it's always going to be some amount per second. You can make it .2 per second and it'll take 5 to see an hp regen, kind of a roundabout way of doing it.

After you change the ability file, just add the ability to the frigate entity - at the bottom they have blank slots for abilities.

Ok, you can do this very easily using these things in combination:

"AffectsOnlyShields" (use in DoDamage periodic action type)
"OnBuffFinish" (buff apply condition)
"ShieldFailure" (end condition)

I hope you see where I'm going with this... ...I'll let you fill in the details...

good luck...

One more thing, the final buff should use this end condition:

"TimeElapsed"

Fill in the amount of time you want to take, and you're done...

(just take care as to which abilities you graft these parts onto, as that choice is very important, in keeping away the Minidump Gremlins...)

I think he was just asking about how to modify generic shield stats, not creating an ability to do it

so anatar let me get this straight. i can change the time interval between restores but not the amount or the other way around. if it helps i want the shields to go down and take X seconds to see a regen to. im looking to make it like a covenant ship where the shields go down and gome online after a few minutes giving time to attack the hull without shields. raise the time interval between restores and raise the restored amount. i thank everyone for their patience.

You can alter the amount but not the interval

Probably the only way you can do what you want is to make an ability to do it. I haven't tried it of course, but the basic concept is:

- A passive ability affecting the ship in question
- When the ship has no shields, it sets the recharge rate to 0
- It expires after however long you want, thus resetting the shield recharge to the default value.

Possible issue is I don't know if you throw an expiration condition on a passive that the passive will re-apply afterwards. Basically, I don't know if it's a one shot deal and will only work the first time the ship loses shields or if it will keep working every time.

Someone who's messed with abilities more (I'm a bit rusty :P) can probably pitch in here.

ok do you think if i asked ironclad they would help or tell me if there is a file for that. my issue is based off the post for halo mod and i want to try to do it better.

There are plenty of talented modders (Helioforge is one of them) around these forums who can help you if you run into trouble. However, you should try it first for yourself to get a feel for making abilities and to try and figure it out.

More people will be willing to help you solve a specific problem rather than walking you step by step through making the entire ability

I don't think the tutorial PDF goes too much in depth about ability scripting, so the best advice I can give you is to look at existing similar ones. For example, you can look at the Progenitor Mothership's shield recharge ability, so you can see how shield recharge modifiers are done.

Bailknight put together an awesome list of all the various modifiers ability scripting uses here. It seems daunting at first, and will be until you look through and figure out the flow of logic in the ability files and play around a little And I can help pitch in with the basics, but as I've said I haven't created this type of an ability so beyond the basics of "how everything works" I won't be able to tell you much that you can't try yourself

ok thanks. yeah i have been looking for just a file on time intervals to no avail so at this point i really want to find it. thank you for all your help and i have another guestion? would you be willing to help me make plasma torpedos to give to the advent ships? and give a gause gun to all the tecs?

It doesn't exist

Shield recharge rates in the x amount per second are in each ship's entity file, and you can't change the interval.

Other shield stats like max mitigation, rate of mitigation increase/decrease are in each race's entity file (PlayerTech, PlayerPsi, PlayerPhase).

That's pretty much it. Everything else with shields you have to do through abilities.



It all depends on how you want to do it. Making their weapons look like it is very easy. You can just find the name of the Kol's gauss blast projectile effect in its ability file, and use that in every other ship, so all the shots look like the gauss projectiles. Same with the plasma, which have several versions on various Advent ships.

ok

this really messes up my mod idea but i guess ill have to do the ability version. my main need for that are restoring the shields after the duration period if im not making sense please tell me. and i could remove any restoration rate so that this is the only way for shields to restore. i know nothing of ability modding or how to give it to ships all my attemps end in a minidump.

heres my current error messages with the frigate gauss ability.
Entity Ref not found: AbilityGaussBlastf
Entity 'FrigateTechLight' references a non-existant ability: AbilityGaussBlastf
any advice on a fix would be nice
i have ony made an extra document for the buff and ability files to make it seperate from the capitol files.