Color of the shields??

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 5:18 am

hi, i didnt know now, if im right in this forum, and please excuse my writing..

i got a question, how can i change the color of the shilds in star trek armada 2 ??.. i heard already, that somehow you can chance the color..
example.. enstad of green orange red, change the colors to white yellow blue

i would be gratefull for help..

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 6:52 am

you can't...well not really anyways...there is a mod soon to be coming out i hope that can give us not only blue shields for the Federation but also skin tight shields like in ST: Nemesis.

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 7:23 am

The skin tight shields are a bit more complicated because you have to have a new mesh for each ship. I assume that the sprites can be added to any shape of shield, but I'm not entirely sure, since I haven't tried it yet. The best (possibly the only) way I know of is to turn the shield mesh into a pod which can be built by a ship or station.

The original plan when the shields were being researched was to use a pod. Elrond found another way to get the plain blue shields and it pretty much stopped there. I haven't communicated with Elrond for awhile, so I'm not sure whether he went ahead and tried the skin shields with a pod or not.

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 4:32 pm

thanks for the information, does somebody know, when the new mod is available??

and ps: the translation, from english to german s****^^

because the most words and meanings are wrong converted^^..

pps: do some of you play online the game, and if where??

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:25 am

Nikky wrote:

thanks for the information, does somebody know, when the new mod is available??

and ps: the translation, from english to german s****^^

because the most words and meanings are wrong converted^^..

pps: do some of you play online the game, and if where??

...shieldscolor is hardcoded, so no way is found so far... Wink

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:41 am

CaptainFuture wrote:

Nikky wrote:

thanks for the information, does somebody know, when the new mod is available??

and ps: the translation, from english to german s****^^

because the most words and meanings are wrong converted^^..

pps: do some of you play online the game, and if where??

...shieldscolor is hardcoded, so no way is found so far... Wink

Actually, there is a way, as I mentioned above. Elrond started it, so I think it's up to him if he wants to release it.

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 7:06 am

draconis_sharp wrote:

CaptainFuture wrote:

Nikky wrote:

thanks for the information, does somebody know, when the new mod is available??

and ps: the translation, from english to german s****^^

because the most words and meanings are wrong converted^^..

pps: do some of you play online the game, and if where??

...shieldscolor is hardcoded, so no way is found so far... Wink

Actually, there is a way, as I mentioned above. Elrond started it, so I think it's up to him if he wants to release it.

...are you sure it works Question

I dont know Elrond, can he do meshes Question

So I said: no way is found so far! Many people have tried to find a solution,
including me. All faild so far. But we all could hope the best... Idea

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 7:50 am

Actually, Fleet Ops did figure out how to do it first. Elrond found that same way of making blue shields. I'm not entirely sure that Fleet Ops was the first though, they probably did some research and figured it out eventually. It's just about getting a spherical mesh and adding in the blue shield sprites with a sprite node. After that, all you have to do is replace the old one and add the sprite entries into one of the sprite files.

Oh, and it does work. There should be screen shots of it around AFC somewhere. I have also seen it work in my own mod.

Lieutenant-Commander Joined: Feb 17, 2004 Posts: 1102

it is about time that a tut is made about this subject , then it helps me stop asking for this mod Very Happy

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:14 pm

Don't know Elrond, I'm one of the Site Administrators here. Wink

But seriously, yes, before Fleets Ops releases their shields (if they do), I'm going to release my OWN tutorial for this. I know I have made it a point to keep my shields somewhat classified. However, perhaps I will not any longer do that. Releasing a tutorial for the shields, practically anyone with ms3d (for making the shield), PSP or Photoshop (for making the shield textures, should you wish to make new ones), and a text editor (for editting the explosion.spr and tex_anim.spr files - I recommend TextPad 4).

In fact, the above statement of what programs you need to do this stuff will be presented in the forward of my tutorial. It is really so simple, you'll all slap yourselves for not having known this in the first place! Laughing

Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 5:14 am

Elrond wrote:

Don't know Elrond, I'm one of the Site Administrators here. Wink

In fact, the above statement of what programs you need to do this stuff will be presented in the forward of my tutorial. It is really so simple, you'll all slap yourselves for not having known this in the first place! Laughing

...sorry Elrond, but I havnt got that much time like in the good old armada 1
days for modding! So I wasnt here in your board, but in my board for a long time!
I have made many new sprites for my special weaponry, so I had allways
a theory to do shields the same way like this notes. But there is one thing:
All your ships and stations in game need that new spritenote in its meshes!
Its a lot of work and its the reason I never tried it! If you guys did it, good job... Wink

Cadet 3rd Year Joined: Apr 29, 2004 Posts: 88

CaptainFuture wrote:

Its a lot of work and its the reason I never tried it! If you guys did it, good job... Wink

THAT sounds familiar. Seriously if I change something something else always goes wrong (generally not related to ship I edited, also changing it back never solves the problem). However this mostly happens to the A2 demo moddin, not the A1 full version modding. And I once decided to put the B5, SW vs ST (with added ships from SW:FC and SWvsST A1, as well as lots of single ship downloads) and BattleStar Galactica together. After spending 6 months of putting the races in it crashed when I first tested it. probably something with the sprites as I don't know anything about them and I suspect there are double sprites in the file.

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 4:17 am

...the big problem is, shields colors dont have a sprite definition! So you cant
change it, because they are hardcoded! If you put a new shieldsspritenote
on your mesh, you could give this note a new definition. Thats the idea... Wink

And

When will we see it Question

...

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 7:41 am

Yes, that's it exactly; adding your own sprite node to a new shield mesh. You can even put multiple sprite nodes on the shield mesh, so yo can have an explosion effect and a shield flash if you like.

Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:03 pm

think is tho how do u get it to look like the shields that are on now.. so when it hits the shields it will make that part of the shield visable? what would u put in the sprite file?