Goal:
Rework Northstar Prime Titan to sound and behave more like Mihaly and the XO25f from Ace Combat 7
Tasks
1.Change offensive ability from Cluster Rocket to Multi-Target Rocket Core.
2. Create two new skins for NSP. Draw color palett inspo from XO25 Erusian fighters from AC7.
Skin 1 will be sleek and and clean. Mostly black with white and orange accents.
Skin 2 will be more weathered and beat up
3. Fix voiceline Mod
4. Change hud look to resemble AC7 hud. Main changes will include
- changes to missile lock crosshairs
- changes to taget acquisition crosshairs. Square = titan/vehicles. Octagon = pilot/grunt
- change color scheme to green/red depending on situation
- add elevation meter, maybe even double hover height, just for fun. kinda broken but whatever.
Lessons learned so far.
T1.
Changing the offensive ability is actually really easy. all you have to do is go to /scripts/weapons/wpn_name and swap "shoulder" for "dumbfire" between the two files. While simple, bear in mind that the game will crash if player has not deselected both
"Enhanced Payload" - Northstar
"Multi-Target Rocket Core" - Monarch
from their Titan Kit. Having either ability selected will cause a crash on Titan spawn.
T2.
Getting models into blender and editing them is simple enough through either the VPK tool or Legion+, however the real trick right now is getting them back into the game files in an edited/acceptable state.
T3.
I learned that nearly all audio for the voiceline mod (especially the viocelines) needs to be on Channel 2, otherwise called stereo. this mean that when you're looking at your audio file in whatever program you're using, there should be two audio waves right on top of each other that are identical. You must almost make sure that there is no meta data in the file, and that it's exported at 48K hz otherwise the game will not play the sound correctly.
Another note, it does not matter what you name the audio file so long as it goes into the proper folder, although giving it a similar name does help with organization.
T4.
Changing the crosshair is probably the easiest thing to do in the game files. They're always in weapon .txt files and always at the very bottom. Also, there are plenty of lists online that have all the crosshair names so you don't even have to guess which ones are which or go sleuthing through the game files. I was able to change the mutli-lock crosshair to the smart-pistol reticle easy enough but struggled in getting the target- acquisition marker to show up even though it's coded into the multi-lock file. Weird, I know.
NEXT STEPS:
T1.
Figure out whether or not it will be easier to add an entirely new titan via copy/pasting asssets and changing the names, or if I should change all existing assets for the game to XO25. In my brain the latter would be the easiest as there's some background stuff I won't have to change in order for the game to still function properly.
However…
T2.
My guess is that the easiest way to go about changing the skins is to edit the base model titan and then replace the existing model with my own. That way the edited version is the default skin in-game.
However…
T3.
I do not know why the mod isn't working anymore. Changing the vpk files shouldn't have affected it at all. I must figure out what's causing the issue. I've boiled it down to three guesses.
1. It's my computer, it just doesnt like or doesn't want to cooperate.
2. There's something actually wrong with the mod, i.e. it's not using the right dependency or something
3. somehow. palpatine returned.
T4.
Changing crosshairs is very easy, thankfully. Getting crosshairs to behave is somehow another task entirely since I don't fully understand the games language/structure yet. For this, I need to get a hold of the Ace Combat game files and to be honest I haven't even begun to look into that yet. Hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle to import the assest into the game since they've both been out forever. I'd also like to take this time to stop myself before I add another task onto my already full plate.
However…
