Space maps

Space, the final frontier….because it’s BORING!

That seems to be the general consensus on both the PS2 and PC SWBFII servers. On the top ranked server “=SP= Dark Force Rising” they run several space maps in their rotation and the comments over the chat are always the same “I hate space” etc... Some players leave but most will either not join or just sit at a turret control and watch the action. The games on =SP= are all timed so they just wait it out the timer.

What can be done to make space maps more appealing? I know with the Super Hoth mission file in use you are able to land a ship anywhere in space on the Yavin space assault map (spa1g_ass) and run around the top of a capital ship, but what then? Usually you get stuck there, out of ammo, or you get blasted by an autoturret. Not much of a place to have a battle. Oh and don’t try to sneak up on an autoturret with the intent of taking it out. It’s amazing how fast they spin around and waste you.

I’ve been experimenting with space maps to see what can be done to liven them up a little.

First I thought it would be cool to do be able to land anywhere on a space CTF map. There were possibilities such as camping out at the goal and ambushing the opposing team. I also envisioned landing on one of the frigates circling around, concealed from view on the top-side, then swooping down on the flag or enemy. I ran into 2 problems with that. First I found that I couldn’t land on some frigates, I would just slowly drop through them. Most important I found that no one could grab the flag. My ship would just pass through it. That ended that idea. The game would never end unless I put it on a timer and played it as a watered-down assault level.

My second idea was to spice up the assault maps. I would love to see an all-out firefight in the large CIS hangar bay. The land anywhere works well in assault but also has a few interesting side effects.

The first thing I noticed is that you do not have any slow flight capabilities when you enter a hangar. Apparently this is reserved for dedicated landing areas. It’s pretty much impossible to turn around in the smaller Republic, Alliance and Imperial hangars. In the CIS hangar you can turn around (if you are real careful) or you can pass through to the other side.

Another thing reserved for designated landing areas is the suppression of weapons fire of ships. With land anywhere you can fire inside the hangars, but you are traveling too fast to be effective (if you can even survive).

To address these I modded the fighters so they can slow down all the way to a stop. Basically I set the minimum speed to 0 allowing a ship to hover, aim and fire in it’s current location. As simple as this sounds it opens up a lot of possibilities.

I found that the weapons fire in the hangar was not 100% effective. I could blow up ships, some easier than others. But I couldn’t kill CIS infantry or destroy health and ammo droids. This may be a setting in the weapons definition as to what they are and are not effective against. I have to dig into that a little deeper.

It is also possible to replace the pilots and marines with other classes. I have read examples of putting Jedi in space. There are many limitations. First there are only 2 classes per side. The second is the limits in the HEX file for string substitution. For example I cannot replace a class that has a 10 character name with one that has a 15 character name (but I can do it the other way around). Jedi’s may get boring too. Can you picture a battle between 12 Anikins and 12 Dukus?

I was looking for a way to replace the marines with Dark Troopers and jet Troopers. I want to see if they can fly freely through space (with infinate jetpack of course).

Does anybody have any ideas on how to spice up space, or is space just too damn boring no matter what?

pryo!! u insane mad GENIUS!!! lol i bet ull figure it out eventually!! i think space is the best! i wanna b the best spacer there is! but to do that i need compitetion which means spiceing it up lol hmmmmmmmm oooooo! um this may b crazy but what it u gave fighters shield generators like the capitol ship has (not as strong of course) so that any1 can survive a volley of missles! what bout that? if noobs aint being blown to bits so fast they might like it more lol

yeah,but they probably wont even know about because when a space map would come up,they would probably leave

VASH wrote:

what it u gave fighters shield generators like the capitol ship has (not as strong of course) so that any1 can survive a volley of missles! what bout that? if noobs aint being blown to bits so fast they might like it more lol

Yeah I can relate to the missile thing, that and the autoturrets. It get's old getting your ass handed to you everytime you try to leave the hangar.

No can do on adding shield generators. What I can try is increasing the max health and increasing the rate at which a pilot (not a marine) can repair the shp (it varies from ship to ship).

What are your favorite space maps and/or type of game?

ctf is fun however it doesnt go so well n space its much more interestin on assualt lol also if points r to low then it over n like 5 min when all the major systems is destroyed i prefer maps with frigates lol and asteroids i like weaveing in and out of obsttacles to dodge ppl lol hmmm bombers r hard enough to kill they got the most hp so i generally leave em alone especially if sum1 good n em lol my 1st targets r the light fighters there the biggest threat to me with fast lock on and good speed but downside is lowest of hp they might b to deadly with bomber hp but star fighter might b good (personally id leave em alone because i think they well balanced and im used to what it takes to kill each class lol) after i make sure space is clear of light fighters i focus on star fighters it takes awhile for there loading times and even longer for lock on it easy to manuever between obstacles to break their lock on and 1 volley from my personal fav will finish em off too lol after that if all is clear i focus on least threat, bombers lol its so rare for em to hit me and because of speed 2 volleys will generally hit and take em out lol keep n mind that the pilot is biggest threat always focus on good players first (unless n bomber) then work ur way down lol and that is Vash's Guide to space combat lol wait what was the question? o yeah more fun lol hmm maybe make light more durable and bombers faster and fighters faster lock on time it may spice things up a bit lol what ya think?

yeah the bombers need to be faster,because they might have more health but they are really slow,and their weapons isnt that good for taking out fighters.by the time you get to a frigate,the turrets on them will just shoot you down

I put the space maps for the Clone Wars era in rotation on a test server. These are the only ones I’ve modded so far. All ships can now slow to a stop and stay on station. The only additional ship modification I’ve done so far is I upped the speed on Anikin’s starfighter. I wanted to see how high I could set it before the game would freeze. All other ships are at their defaults.

In all the assault maps the ships have the ability to land anywhere and fire inside the hangar. For some reason you have to aim some of the ships, mostly Republic, high when shooting in the hangar.

I did not add this ability to the CTF levels. There is a “glitch” that can occur where you can no longer grab the flag. This glitch can arise in assault as well but since there’s no flag it doesn’t really matter and will make for some interesting gameplay (I’m not telling what it does).

In CTF I also unlocked some of the doors leading to engineering, life support and the shield generator rooms. I didn’t do this on all the maps because in some maps these rooms are missing and you walk through the door into the vast empty interior of the ship, fall and die. That could be funny, I might unlock them later.

Give the mod’s a try, I’d appreciate some feedback. The test server is also called “SWBFII OFFICIAL GLITCHING” but it is the one that is locked. The password is “ARENA”.

wait... how do you do the infinit jetpack

That's so cool that someone else has noticed some of those weird glitches in the space battles.

Sometimes I could shoot with the ships inside the hanger, but like you said it wouldn't kill the guys on foot. Only the ships. And it is really hard to control the ships inside. I didn't realize that it was the minimum speed was higher than 0.

I'm finding all kinds of funky stuff going on with that mission file that's from the Super Hoth mod. I think it affected Geonosis CTF too. I have it set to 10 scores and it seems like it would just end after a certain amount. Sometimes 6, but sometimes it goes to 8 or even all the way till 10.



For making space battles a little less boring I was thinking about making ships have more health but also make the blasters do more damage.

Cuzz the lock-on rockets do kill most ships with one volley. And it's kinda like rocket whorin' against grunts in regular battles. hehe
I'll admit I'm one of 'em. I'll use a ship that has unlimited rockets and just fly around the enemy's hanger. When one would come out, I'd just lock-on, swoop behind them, and fire rockets till they were gone from my radar!


That's cool that you UnLocked the doors in the space CTFs but I still can't play those. hehe

Do you think there's anyway to make the Space Marines do the auto-repair thing that the pilots do?
If that's possible, then maybe replace the pilot with the specials.... Jetties and Darkies in space would be badass!

To get the infinate jetpack for the jet trooper, you need to edit the rep.lvl file using a HEX editor. Search for the string ""rep_inf_default_jettrooper". You need to find the specific occurances preceeded by the strings "BASE", "rep_inf_default" and "TYPE". There are 5 of these located at the following hex addresses:
0BCC8F4
0C471E4
0CC1AEC
0D6E7F0
11E6278

Once you find one of these, they will be followed by a series of properties each preceeded by "PROP". There are always 8 characters between the word PROP and the value of the property. For example PROP########VALUE.

Below is a partial list of the properties, their default values and what I changed them to.

BASE = "rep_inf_default"

TYPE = "rep_inf_default_jettrooper"

[properties]

MaxHealth PROP = "300.0"

PointsToUnlock PROP = 12

UnitType PROP = "trooper"

AISizeType PROP = "HOVER"

ControlSpeed PROP = "jet 1.50 1.25 1.25"

JetJump PROP = "5.0"
JetPush PROP = "8.0"
JetAcceleration PROP = "30.0"
JetEffect PROP = "rep_sfx_jetpack"
JetType PROP = "hover"
JetFuelRechargeRate PROP = "0.12" change to "1.00"
JetFuelCost PROP = "0.16" change to "0.00"
JetFuelInitialCost PROP = "0.25" change to "0.00"
JetFuelMinBorder PROP = "0.24" change ot "0.00"

If you don't understand HEX editing you should review the tutorials first. The game is not forgiving of error and there is a LOT of trial and error involved.

sweet! glad ppl finally gettin interested bout space lol that would b cool sho nuff lol and pyro the empty space of ships is really funny too lol

i cant edit anymore maps because my computer keeps crashing,but i did try to edit the jettrooper but i didnt have any luck

{DSB}Mewtwo wrote:

i cant edit anymore maps because my computer keeps crashing,but i did try to edit the jettrooper but i didnt have any luck

Did you change the values in all 5 locations within the rep.lvl file?

yes!!! i got infinit jetpak
now i can go to the mirror world

wait a minute...yay i got it right this time it turns out i typed in the wrong word

ACE wrote:

yes!!! i got infinit jetpak
now i can go to the mirror world

Don't forget to visit the pyramids

oh yeah,thanks for reminding me pyro because i got to see what the pyramids look like from up close

I finished my first set of mod’s for all the space maps, Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War eras. On all the assault maps there is the ability to land anywhere and fire weapons in the hangars. All the ships now have the ability to hover. While I was at it I added the hover ability to the snow speeders on Hoth, just to see what they could do. They can now hover directly over an ATAT and fire straight down on the neck, that is if they can keep up with them. I had previously quadrupled the speed of the ATATs.

In my testing I did find what may be an issue. I do not have any turbo boost on any flying vehicle. At this point I’m not sure if it’s due to the mod’s or just glitch in the game itself. I have run into the same thing on other non-modded servers playing the PC version. Anyone here experience anything similar?

It was after 1:00 am and had to call it a night.

btw is it possible to give single jump(ex super battledroid) a jump like a jedis?

ace- yeah! ive seen the arena (assault one) increase grievous's jump increase and ive seen lonewolf do it to me lol i jump so high i died when i fell bak down lol

pyro- ive been tryin to check out ur space server but im lagging really bad recently so it hard to stay long (i get frustrated from dying so much lol) it not just ur server its others like arena so dont worry bout that lol 4 the short time i there i noticed the cool hover thing! i like that lol and the awesum rapid fire rockets lol but thats all so far x.x like i said i cant stay long to accomplish much lol lol o yeah and the land anywhere feature nice lol

lol how??? i wanna do that ta my server

greivous can jump pretty far if you sprint and jump and you can make people fly when you kill them even higher than maul

and how do y thak off the dieing for leaving the battlefield

ACE wrote:

and how do y thak off the dieing for leaving the battlefield

Usually you need to HEX edit the map file (i.e. hot1.lvl for Hoth) and find all occurances of the text string "boundary" and overwite it with zeros or otherwise alter it (i.e. "-oundary"). I originally did mine with zeros but now I prefer the latter example. It makes it easier to find it again if I want to change it back. If you overwrite everything with zeros you can't tell what was what.

This will turn off the "death clock" but will not disable the display of "LEAVING BATLEFIELD" or the nagging to get back to the battle. I'm looking into the mission file for that setting.

I say this usually works. I could not get it to work on Polis Massa. I haven't tried it in space yet.

ok 1 mor question (maybe lol) how do u get infinate stamina and do the slants thing