Is it possible to have aditional ship images in a family?

[Blueinstinct]

Hey, ive downloaded the hiigaran shippack from astradeus (http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3817158)

now this dl contains alot of awesome pictures, more than 1 for each role, so i wonder if there is a way to make aditional images for my race available in the game.

greetings

[feygan]

Yes you can do this, simply name the extra ships how you wish. For me I tend to have pictures I already have in mind that will be a destroyer or cruiser etc, I then just name them cruiser 2, 3, 4 etc. Then when you are designing a ship in the game click the drop down arrow next to the ships picture, this lets you then pick a picture to use for you design. It is not just limited to your own race family, you could for example scroll down and decide you wanted your new mining base to use the picture of a Shakturi cruiser, or the planet destroyer ship. The game doesn't care as it is simply a graphic and it will scale it accordingly. The main reason for putting ship pictures in your race family folder is just for ease of organising things, as it means the extra ship pictures will show up in the same group as your race family ones.

The one limit to this I believe is the AI makes zero use of this, so even if you gave them 20 different frigate pictures they will always design ships using the standard "frigate.png" picture.

[Blueinstinct]

hmmm, you know, i did try exactly what u describe and it doenst work at all. no matter how i call my ships and how many i put in my folder, the game will only show the ones that are named like its original classes... And iam not a computer noob, i know my folders, its just that the pictures wont show up in game.

now that u tell me it works for you makes this even more upsetting for me =)

edit: can u think of anythig that could cause this? I run my game without a theme, overwriting many original files

[feygan]

I do not know if things have changed since Universe but that was always the method I used before. Have you tired looking all the way down the picture list in the design screen? It could be that for some reason your new picture files are being dumped in another part away from the main race group. If that doesn't work then I can only guess that Universe did something to how they are read and you can no longer have multiple versions of the same ship picture.

[GripHAHA]

what's the point as running without a theme if you're going to mod your game? there is no point, the game even starts up as the theme you last chose, and to be honest that might be your problem right there to why the game don't catch the extra modded ships.

[Blueinstinct]

U might be right, though it seems kinda strange that it wouldnt work as is if it works in a theme...

[GripHAHA]

Yeah, I'm not sure, I haven't tested that. The programmer might of coded it differently while reading from a themes folder... not sure, test it.