Converting Major A Payne's Borg Incursion mods for fleet ops

posted on September 27th, 2016, 7:44 pm

Hello everyone. I'm just starting to get into things after discovering this place, and from the very start I knew I wanted to make "Borg Incursion 2" and "Borg Incursion Vital Responses" playable, the moment I saw the partial guide on how to get mods meant for the vanilla game working. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to adapt what is written in the guides into something workable, especially sense both mods use an installer that modify the base game in the original version. I do have installs of both to work with, with all of the patches that were made for them, but I cannot figure out how to convert them into something usable with fleetops. From my perspective the guide seems incomplete. Any help would be appreciated, even more so if the work has already been done by someone else and a link is available.

posted on September 28th, 2016, 12:16 am

After several hours of fiddling with it, I finally figured it out. The part that is missing from the guide is that it does NOT say to make a copy of armada classic and treat it as if it is the original install. If that were clarified within the guide, it would've made the process a bit quicker. For all I knew, the modded files were somehow being aliased as apposed to needing to be with a copy of the classic mod files.

Edit: Now that I have everything working, is there a place where I should put the fleet ops optimized version of the mods?

posted on September 28th, 2016, 12:17 pm

After several hours of fiddling with it, I finally figured it out. The part that is missing from the guide is that it does NOT say to make a copy of armada classic and treat it as if it is the original install. If that were clarified within the guide, it would've made the process a bit quicker. For all I knew, the modded files were somehow being aliased as apposed to needing to be with a copy of the classic mod files.

Edit: Now that I have everything working, is there a place where I should put the fleet ops optimized version of the mods?

Mods folder yes?

posted on September 28th, 2016, 4:33 pm

What mods folder?
In the game? already done.
On a site? where?

posted on September 28th, 2016, 4:49 pm

To get a Mod working in Fleet Ops, you need to create the Mods folder and put your mod inside it with an .ini file to define its name and description. Then Fleet Ops will use your Mod files in place of its own. So the classic mod is just an install of Armada II copied into that folder and with a few minor tweaks.

Depending on the scope of the mods you're looking at, it could be easier to get the Classic Mod and make the changes to those files, or it might be better to copy your version straight into Fleet Ops' Mods folder and hunt down any bugs that appear.

Edit: oh, you mean to share your working mod. Forum posts are the way we do that around here, once it's uploaded to any file sharing site. There's also a file box on the TeamSpeak server where I leave my mods.

posted on September 28th, 2016, 11:55 pm

Thanks trypic for the last part of your post. Borg Incusion 2 is ready to be put up, but I need some help tweaking vital responses. I haven't gone through every race yet, but the borg ship special abilities do not properly unlock when the correct research is completed. If I can be directed where to look, I might be able to match the ability with the correct prerequisite tech.

posted on September 29th, 2016, 8:59 pm

It's all in a single text file, called tech1.tt I believe. The guide is good at describing the basics, but you can squeeze some extra functionality out of it if you know how.

posted on September 29th, 2016, 9:04 pm

I already tried fiddling with that file, and none of the things I did had any effect in-game. I attempted to change referenced files, but for all I know, I was changing the wrong thing. The problem is that the buttons for abilities found on the UI for the ships are still referencing the vanilla research pods, instead of the pods that are actually used in this version of the mod. The research stations have been completely redone for VR.

posted on October 2nd, 2016, 1:46 pm

If you have a copy of the code I could take a look at it.

The button images are stored under the Textures folder, while the gui_global text file in the Sprites folder defines which ones are used.