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Part
Nine: Overview
In this section
you will
add the CPU controlled walls
of Mines and Autoguns in a defensive posture around a Research
Station.

9.0
The
Addition of CPU Controlled Ships in Multiplayer missions
We
are now going to add a Research Station near the
bottom of our map
and surround it with 4 walls of Autoguns sitting 2000m away
along each of the axis. Scattered around the station and
guns we will have mines. We will make the players regret
the day they used the slipgates, it's why we set them up
around this station, in the previous chapter....

9.1
- Add
a Research Station near the bottom of the map.
In
the your DSpiral2 folder, open up the ‘Mothership_1.missphere’
file and the ‘Resource.missphere’ file. Copy the
first ship line, the sMothership line from the Mothership
file into the ResourceSphere file, this line;
Ships
,0.0,50000.0,0.0,-90.0,RACE_SECT,sMothership,1,NULL_FORMATION|?|?,?,?
9.1.1
- This is going to be our Research Station. Change
the co-ordinates to ‘0,0,-65000’ so it sits at the dead
centre of our map and change its facing to ‘0’.
9.1.2
- Looking at the BD Object Derelict list we see
their race is ‘RACE_TRADERS’ and its written as
‘trResearchStation’ so change the 'RACE_SECT'
and 'sMothership' value accordingly.
9.1.3
- We only want one of them so the number is fine
and the formation we want is NULL_FORMATION which I find
always sits well with the bigger ships (those you usually
add in singly), so we are happy there then..
9.1.4
- The last thing to do is to check that we did
include the research station in the level file.. It seems
we didn't.. Oh well, lets do it now. You know how
to include stuff in the Level file so I shouldn't need
to tell you to add the line:
IncludeShips
RACE_TRADERS,trResearchStation
And
that’s our Station done, its that simple.

9.2
- Add four walls of
Autoguns in a defensive posture around the station.
Lets
add the Auto Guns.
9.2.1
- We want four groups of 6 guns, so copy the
Research Station line four times.
9.2.2
- On the first of these lines we will have them sitting
2000m to the ‘North’ or '+y' axis, simply change the co-ordinates
to ‘0,2000,0’ and we want them facing this direction so
change their facing (rot) to ‘90’ (Always remember x=0°
and the angle is measured anticlockwise),
the second group to the ‘East’ so they have co-ordinates
‘2000,0,0’ and rot of ’0’, the third co-ordinates are ‘0,-2000,0’,
rot is ‘-90’, the fourth group I will leave you to puzzle
over yourself. Did you get it? Wadda' you mean a five
year old could have got that!?
9.2.3
- Ok then smartypants lets continue along the line,
the race of the Auto Guns is ‘RACE_TRADERS’, so that’s
fine. The ship names we get from the Relic Object Derelicts
listings again and they are ‘trJunk_Lgun’ and ‘trJunk_Sgun’,
make the North and South emplacements the Large guns and
those to the East and west the Small guns. We want to have
‘6’ in each group and we want them in ‘WALL_FORMATION’.
Nothing special about them although we can do funky thing
like making them invisible to sensors if we wanted but we
wont bother. Your completed lines should look like this;
Ships
,0.0,0.0,-65000.0,0.0,RACE_TRADERS,trResearchStation,1,NULL_FORMATION|?|?,0,?
Ships
,0.0,2000.0,-65000.0,90.0,RACE_TRADERS,trJunk_Lgun,6,WALL_FORMATION|?|?,0,?
Ships
,-2000.0,0.0,-65000.0,180.0,RACE_TRADERS,trJunk_Sgun,6,WALL_FORMATION|?|?,0,?
Ships
,0.0,-2000.0,-65000.0,-90.0,RACE_TRADERS,trJunk_Lgun,6,WALL_FORMATION|?|?,0,?
Ships
,2000.0,0.0,-65000.0,0.0,RACE_TRADERS,trJunk_Sgun,6,WALL_FORMATION|?|?,0,?
9.2.3
- OK, the last thing needed here is to include
the ‘tJunk_Lgun’ and ‘tJunk_Sgun’ in our Level
file. And I refuse to tell you how, you know how!
Away and do it now, and smugly we will finish our map
of with a smattering of Mines.

9.3
- Add a smattering
of mines around the station.
Adding
mines is simple they have simple lines of text as we saw
in chapter Five of the Primer. Lets add a good dozen in in
a rough spherical nature around the Research station.
A
typical line for mines looks like this:
Mine
,-8678.0,15349.0,-6198.0,0.0
Where:
mine
posx,posy,posz,properties,propertiesparam
I'll
let you decide where they will go, just place 12 of them
around and near the Research Station. You know the location
of the station, the autoguns and the nearby slipgates, so
use your imagination and ALT-TABing skills which you should,
by now, be becoming quite adept at.
There
is another way we can do this. Well, thanks to Aged, we
have an Excel sheet called the Sphere Tool. What
this sheet will do is create a set of 54 cylinders that
all together will make the shape of a huge sphere, pretty
damned cool eh? What you could happily do is to set up a
sphere with a radius about the location of the station equal
to the distance away each slipgate is, 5000, and using only
every third set of co-ordinates generated, will give you
18 mines in a perfect sphere..

9.4
- Summary
And
that’s it. That is a completed 1v1 player map. Finished.
Done with. Complete. Go and have a look at the map
and perhaps enjoy a game and see how well it plays. You
have completed the 1v1 version of your map. The toughest
part is over and all that remains is putting in players
3, 4, 5 and 6.
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