[Race/Campaign Release] Star Wars Invades GSB!

[size=200]Star Wars Mod[/size]

One of the great things about Gratuitous Space Battles is that all the data is in plain text format, just begging to be tweaked. I decided to try importing a Star Destroyer into the game. One thing led to another, and before long I’d made an entire mini-campaign, complete with a cheesy story, fighter swarm scenario, frigate swarm scenario, and gratuitously explosive scenario. Normal difficulty is about what you’d expect, but Hard and Expert are significantly harder than the built-in scenarios.

My goal balance-wise was for Hard to be doable using the built-in hulls, races, and weapons. Expert basically kicks it up a notch without adding ships - I only changed starting layout and orders. I’m not sure Expert difficulty is even possible without using my modded hulls and weapons. At least, I couldn’t do it!

[size=120]The readme has hints, brief installation instructions, uninstallation instructions, and a complete list of acknowledgments.[/size]

It’s not Han Solo’s lucky day! Star Destroyers are kind of like unstoppable killing machines.
The Rebel fleet dukes it out. That thing’s operational, and someone’s on the wrong end of a superlaser…

1 new playable race
12 new ships with custom graphics - X-Wings, Star Destroyers, Millennium Falcon, the Death Star(!), etc etc
New weapons with their own strengths and drawbacks
3 gratuitous scenarios:

  • Imperial Pursuit: What if Han Solo decided escaping Darth Vader through the asteroid field was too risky, and to fly straight through a huge alien fleet instead?? Build the alien fleet and find out for yourself.
  • Imperial Freelancing: Seeing your potential after the previous mission, Darth Vader has hired you to destroy as much of the Rebel fleet as possible. Let none escape Imperial justice!
  • Imperial Downfall: So, you’ve crushed the Rebellion. Jerk. Now who’s going to stop the Death Star?!

[size=200]Installation[/size]

I tested this on a clean install of GSB with my user directory (My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles) cleaned out, and everything worked fine. Hopefully that wasn’t a fluke.

  1. Download the file here: MediaFire OR from 2shared OR from RapidShare (yuck)
  2. Unzip the archive.
  3. Move the folders contained to your “Gratuitous Space Battles Beta\data” directory.
  4. You’re good to go! The new hulls, race, and scenarios should all show up under the appropriate menus.

[size=120]UPDATE for beta 1.11+[/size] The new tractor beam Cliffski introduced causes a crash if you click on the “Other” or “All” tabs in the ship design. Download the attached starwars.txt race file, unzip and put it in “Gratuitous Space Battles Beta\data” to fix the problem. 1.11fix.zip (1.04 KB)

[size=120]IMPORTANT[/size] As of beta 1.10, after you first load a new scenario, whatever races you unlocked previously will be unavailable again. The fastest fix for this is as follows.

  1. Go to “My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles”
  2. Make a backup of “sc.dat” (just in case!)
  3. Open “sc.dat” in Notepad (NOT WordPad, MS Word, etc - we need a plain text editor)
  4. Scroll down until you see [starwars1], [starwars2], or [starwars3]
  5. Under these headings, change “tutorial = 0” to “tutorial = 1” and you’re good to go!

It looks like this process has to be repeated each time you open one of my scenarios for the first time. Sorry everyone.

[size=200]Acknowledgments[/size]

Cliffski for the amazing and mod-friendly game :smiley:
George Lucas for creating a universe of endless possibilities.
Scifi-3D artists Sean Kennedy, Maciek Skawinski, Don Showalter for the models I rendered for this project.
Other artists: Fractalsponge, Gino Dykstra, Cory Harvey, Brandx, Aak193, MetroidPrime, Katase.

Hell yes, pretty nice, played a few battles. Maybe in the future you can make full empire and rebel races.

Looks interesting but can’t get the file to download…

Throumbas, glad you’re having fun.

NacNud, looks like the server is having issues. Typical…if something can go wrong it will :smiley:

I’m uploading it to a couple more sites and will update the first post when it’s done.

Wow! Big fun. Thanks for all the hard work that went into this mod.

Thanks!

I hope the relatively high number of thread views to posts means most people AREN’T having problems with the mod :smiley:

played with it a little. Star destroyers looked neat but the weapons and the weapons fire at the rear were noticably away from the ship.

i have probs with the tractor beam turret
it cause a chrash when i wanna switch to "other " at the ship designer
it tells me that the turretdraw isnt found or something

Beserko - The lasers the rear turrets shoot are significantly longer than normal, so depending on the direction the turret shoots in they can spawn behind the turret at funny-looking places. Unfortunately, there’s a bug that prevents making really big ships or I would just scale up the ship and turret to cover up the problem.

Hotdog - Hmm, 1.11 introduced a new weapon that caused this. I’ll upload a fix and make a bug report, thanks.

Fix is up, check the installation part under the first post.

how the hell do i mod?! There are only three files for me, and those are GSb beta, uninstall GSb beta, and manual. I’m using a mac os x with crossover games 8.

You’re looking at the shortcuts. Since Crossover is based on Wine code, I’m going to assume it does the same thing, which is to put game installs inside a hidden folder in your home folder. There should be a link provided by the program somewhere to get to its drive_c folder, or you could try searching for that folder, making sure you include hidden files.
This is all guesstimated, as I run Wine on Linux, but it should be pretty similar.

I’m getting crashes whenever I try to play as the Star Wars fleet. I spent ages constructing a glorious fleet to crush the rebel scum, only to have the game crash seconds after to getting into the fight. The game works fine when I’m playing against the Star Wars fleet, however.

Unfortunately I’m not getting any meaningful error message to report, just your typical useless “GSB.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” error.

EDIT: On further inspection (ie, in the debugdata errors.txt), there is an error to report:

“Assertion failure:filename:…\src\SIM_Race.cpp,linenum:58,build:Beta 1.15”

That means that crew names are needed for the new races…

It seems an update made several of the hulls unusable. I only made some empire ships but of those I can only use the Star Destroyer and the Tie Fighter.

EDIT: And oh yeah, the whole crashing thing.

I put crew names in the star wars fleet file and tada, it works. Awesome.

Could you explain that more fully?

is there any program that can be used to extract files into the game folder other than Winzip? Crossover doesn’t seem to be able to download it…

If you look in Gratuitous Space Battles\data\races at starwars.txt and compare it to the other race files, you’ll notice it’s lacking the crew section at the bottom. To get the Star Wars race working, I just copied the crew section from another of the race files and pasted it in.

Winrar.

i tried something else for some other bug, and now all the files are right where i want them (Literally!) I put the star wars fleet into the races folder, the star wars race is there, but they have no hulls, no mini- campaigns, no nothing. just another taken up spot on the race chooser.