At a loss while creating missions

[Runescythe]

Okay, I have multiple issues and no amount of googling is really helping me out.

1. First off, through no fault of your own, I have no idea how to identify certain equipment while customizing various ships in the game.  If there is some form of guide saying what piece of equipment does what, please let me know.

2. Some equipment do not work at all mid combat. Energy bombs are not functioning at all, so if there are items that do not work, why have them listed at all? I also find the lack of jump drives a bit off since I need this sort of thing for later battles that I wish to wage in a machinima that I am making.

3. Is there a way to position certain ships exactly in a specific location? It also helps if both sides are not hostile altogether.

[Mularac]

first question: In what are you mission making? Skirmisher? B5? Galactica? A mod of your own?
1) About such guide, are you referring to the items on the tacticstypes.ini? You can find it here: http://www.moddb.com/groups/the-nexii/forum/thread/secrets-of-the-tacticstypesini
or are you talking about what each device does?
2) again, at what equipment are you referring to?
3) of course you can, just open the mission editor, select the mod in question, and reposition your ships as you like. Read the Mission Editor entry on the modding manual for more information. As to make a set of ships not hostile to each ohter, you have to change the relation between them (located at the start of the .misssion file, it's the SetRelation entry). For example:

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SetRelation(#race_player, #**, 1); will make the race ** appear friendly to the player (this is, however, not reciprocal)
And of course you can set more than one race in the mission and many other things. I highly recommend you give this http://www.moddb.com/groups/the-nexii/downloads/nexustji-basics-tutorial3 a read before starting any mission making or general modding.

[Arparso]

1. There's no guide, sorry. Theoretically you could have a look at the mod's "universetextstextsdev_***.ini" files and look for the names presented in the Skirmisher (e.g. "weap_r_eshell") and get the ingame name and description from there, if available. That's a rather cumbersome method, though, but it's pure trial and error otherwise, I fear. In the default "NEXUS Skirmisher" mod there is a vague naming convention, though. For example, you might have "weap_r_eshell", which translates to "weapon, raptor, energy shell" - first comes the device type (weap for weapon, shld for shield, etc.), then a single letter for the alien race that uses that weapon (r for raptor, v for vardrag, g for ghost, etc.) and afterwards the weapon's name (eshell, ebomb, flak, etc.). At least that might give you a clue about the kind of device you're dealing with.

2. What devices specifically and which mod? I just tested the energy bomb (weap_ebomb) and it was working fine. As for the lack of jump drives: they're simply not included in the NEXUS Skirmisher mod, because it uses the default Nexus multiplayer ship classes, which aren't set up to equip jump drives or interplanetary drives. At least for the latter one it's an easy fix, though... open up "universetacticstacticstypes.ini" in your mod's folder (default: "modsNEXUS Skirmisher") and search for the shipclass you want to add an IP drive to. Look for one of the "Slots" lines of that class and append the number 81 to that list of numbers. For example:

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   change
Slots 61 61 61/65/67 61/65/67 61/65/67   66 66 66 66 66 66 ;
    to
Slots 61 61 61/65/67 61/65/67 61/65/67   66 66 66 66 66 66 81 ;
If you're going to record machinima, however, you might want to learn scripting your own missions, though. Nexus has a rather comprehensive modding manual included and for everything else there's this forum

3. Not with the Skirmisher, but you can start the Nexus modding tools (should come with the game) and load the Skirmisher-created mission using that. There you can relocate and rotate every ship the Skirmisher placed there.

[Runescythe]

Well, I understood the whole idea that I might have to use trail and error on the skirmisher, so I am having an easier time discerining one weapon from another. I'm not using any mods in general, just the Skirmisher which was hopefully was all I needed: Apparently that is not the case. I'll take a look around and see what turns up.

[Runescythe]

lol, sometimes I wish this whole cmd line coding was as easy as some mods make them out to be. I can barely understand a word on how to set these things up.

[Arparso]

I'm not using any mods in general, just the Skirmisher which was hopefully was all I needed: Apparently that is not the case.

Depends on what you want to do. If you want to play some fun skirmish battles against the AI using the stock Nexus ships, then you don't need anything else (besides the game, obviously). The goal was to emulate a skirmish mode usually found in all kinds of RTS games, but which doesn't exist in Nexus. As a bonus, it's also mod-compatible, so you can use the Skirmisher to create the battles you always dreamed about happening in the Stargate, Star Trek [2] or even Battlestar Galactica universes, if you install any of those mods.

For anything else, the Skirmisher simply wasn't built to do. If you want to create a kick-ass machinima video exceeding the scope of a simple battle scene, you'll need to learn Nexus' scripting system rather sooner than later, I guess. The Skirmisher can still be of assistance in creating skeleton mission files or giving you a proper battle AI so you don't have to invent your own... but anything else, you'll have to do on your own (or ask someone about it, I guess ).

lol, sometimes I wish this whole cmd line coding was as easy as some mods make them out to be. I can barely understand a word on how to set these things up.

Setup what specifically? Maybe I can help.