Hey there everyone.
I am currently working on a dreadnought/capital ship mod and trying to design some ships that will do the sprites Eich made some justice. If ANYONE could tell me how the targets, running lights and smoke entries work I will sacrifice small animals in your honour.
I’ve got in my drive a .txt where I noted everything about coding hulls for gsb, the problem is that it’s badly translated to english.
I’ll see if I explain it correctly 
Running lights:
Basically the running light effect consists in the light sprite starting at a certain size and increasing its size depending on its ‘grow rate’ until it reaches a maximum size where it srinks to the original size. Then starts growing again. At low ‘grow rate’ you’ll see a ‘blinking’ effect.
[runninglights]
0 = x,y,gr,ms,lc
Where:
x -> x coordinate
y -> y coordinate (x,y coordinates are relative to a 256x256 sprite)
gr -> ‘Grow Rate’ (The rate at which this light will ‘grow’, big numbers are equal to slow ‘growing’ speeds)
ms -> Max Size (The maximum size the light will reach)
lc -> Light Color (0=greeen, 1=red, 2=purple, 3=white)
The color is picked from the sprite runninglights.dds under the …\data\bitmaps\fx folder
Example: 0 = 59.00,171.00,200.00,4.00,1
Now the Targets:
Here you determine the place where your ship will be hit and the changes in the sprite when the ship is damaged (the changes are picked from the ship_damaged.dds sprite). Also you can add spark and smoke effects when certain parts are hit.
[targets]
0 = x,y,ee,ed,ds,
1 = x,y,ee,1,ds,(damage_sprite_effect-x-y),
2 = x,y,1,ed,ds,SHIP_EMMITER_EFFECT,
Those are 3 examples of diferent types of targets where:
x -> x coordinate
y -> y coordinate (x,y coordinates are relative to a 256x256 sprite)
ee -> Enables ship Emmiter effect (0 disabled, 1 enabled) CAUTION!!! if its disabled and there’s a SHIP_EMMITER_EFFECT the game will crash
ed -> Enable Damage effect (0 means there won’t be any change in the hull sprite and 1 means that there will be a change in the hull sprite determined by the ds valor you enter)
ds -> Damage Square (aka damage box) (It determines the part of the ship that will be changed with its corresponding damaged img. Its represented as xi,yi,xf,yf [Top-Left x,y coordinates of the box and Bottom-Right x,y coordinates of the box])
SHIP_EMMITER_EFFECT -> Okay I haven’t tested with this enough to know surely what it does
- Can be one of the following:
· SHIP_EMMITER_LARGE
· SHIP_EMMITER_THIN
damage_sprite_effect -> Effect that appears alongside with the damage effect in the determined position. It doesn’t work if Damage effect is disabled - Can be one of the following:
· damage_sprite_sparks
· damage_sprite_smoke
Examples:
0 = 187.50,164.50,0,1,170.00,150.50,194.50,227.00,
1 = 99.00,88.00,0,0,
2 = 133.00,114.00,0,1,125.00,102.00,141.00,126.00,(damage_sprite_sparks-133.00-114.00),(damage_sprite_smoke-133.00-116.00),
3 = 99.50,186.00,1,1,88.00,172.00,111.00,200.00,SHIP_EMMITER_THIN,
All the examples are from the vanilla gsb ships.
I don’t know if this helps, if there’s something you don’t understand post it here. Also if any other gsb modder sees this would be nice if he can check if this is correctly explained.
SirJamon = awesome.
You want me to sacrifice something in your honour? I can go up to mandril at present.
There’s no need to sacrifice anything xD, I just had all that (and more) explained in a file if it happened the remote possibility in which I hit my head and forgot everything about modding xD.
If the documentation about modding I’ve got seems to be more easy to understand than I thought (I’m not English), maybe I’ll upload it, when I end with my mod, to help the new modders that come to GSB.
Good luck modding 