How do I change a ship's weapons? (ie. Ion Interceptor)

Homeworld Remastered Collection Homeworld Mods and Modding
#1

I recently got HWR, and I want to mess around in the HW2R campaign by making some ridiculous OP ships. For this example, let’s say an Ion Interceptor. Note, I followed the directions at Need help with editing ships and platforms but the Interceptors still use their normal guns.

Here’s what I did. Please correct me if I did something wrong:

  1. Decrypt and extract HW2Ships.big from Homeworld Remastered Collection\HomeworldRM\Data
  2. Edit the hgn_interceptor.ship file as follows:
    Change the line StartShipWeaponConfig(NewShipType,“Hgn_KineticAutoGun”,“Weapon_FrontGun”,“Fire”);
    to StartShipWeaponConfig(NewShipType,“hgn_ioncannon”,“Weapon_FrontGun”,“Fire”);
  3. Save the ship file to \Homeworld\HomeworldRM\Data\ship\hgn_interceptor\hgn_interceptor.ship
  4. Add -overrideBigFile to the launcher shortcut.

This doesn’t change anything. The interceptors still have the kinetic auto gun as their weapon. I would appreciate any help with this. Thanks.

#2

There might be a combination of things going on here.

What you might be seeing is that the .event file is what determines the “muzzle flash” from a weapon going off, so you’ll continue using a kinetic one. On top of that the ioncannon weapon is VERY limited in traversing angles and has a little spool up time that may prevent the cepter from ever firing it.

Try something like a pulsar beam or one of those tiny missile launcher the vaygr corvettes use.

Aside from that your process looks okay.

#3

Thanks for the info. I tried other weapons, and even edited the hgn_keniticautogun weapon, to no effect.

Something strange I noticed: I edited several interceptor stats, including health, speed, cost, and build time. The only one that worked was cost. Every other change gets ignored. At least I know that -overrideBigFile is working, and the folder structure I mentioned earlier is OK, but I don’t know where I’m going wrong with the rest of the edits.

#4

Since this is the campaign we’re talking about here there might be some special stuff going on that makes campaign version act differently…

#5

I found the issue. Using the launcher caused the problem. Using HomeworldRM.exe with -overrideBigFile -dlccampaign HW2Campaign.big -campaign Ascension -moviepath DataHW2Campaign -mod compatibility.big allowed the ship edits to work.