Cormorant's installation instruction for new I-War ships:
(It looks difficult, but if you follow these steps, it's very easy.)

1. You'll need the mission development kit for i-war and deslab the scripts.slb, shapes.slb and text.slb files in "\psg\resources" in your i-war-directory. Look for the kit at the official I-War Site: http://www.independencewar.com/home.htm
You'll find further instruction on deslabbing in the documentation on the kit. Of course, you only have to do this once, no matter how many new ships you install.

2. After deslabbing, place the new shp-file "corvettemk2.shp" into the directory "psg\resource\scripts\ships" in your I-War directory.

3. If you want to fly the new ship or fight against it, you'll have to include it into a mission script. To do this, open the missions directory "\psg\resource\scripts\missions" in your I-War directory. You can open the scr-files there (they are the mission scripts) with a text editor and modify them. You should backup a mission script before you edit it.

4. When you've found and opened the mission you want to include your new ship in, find the passage rather at the beginning of the script where several lines begin with REGLOAD. Include the following line to the other "REGLOAD" lines:

REGLOAD	CorvetteMk2Md,"\psg\resource\shapes\CorvAsm_rto.lwo",LWO2BRM

Make sure no ";" is in front of the line, and don't delete anything of the other lines!

5. If you want to fly the new ship yourself, find the line rather at the beginning of the script where the player ship is declared. Usually, the passage will look somehow like this:

CREATE_SHIP	Dreadnt,DreadMd,"Dreadnaught CNV-301",CORVETTE,NAVY,0,0,0,0,0,0
#INCLUDE 	pcorvette.shp
PLAYER		Dreadnt

Some stats may be different, but usually, it looks like the passage above. Replace "DreadMd" (sometimes this may be called differently) with "CorvetteMk2Md", and replace "#INCLUDE pcorvette.shp" with "#INCLUDE corvettemk2.shp". If you want, you can also rename your ship, from "Dreadnaught CNV-301" to "Corvette Mk2" or something. Be creative ;-)

6. That's it, you've just installed your new ship into a mission. You can play the mission script you modified the way it is described in the documentation of the Mission Development Kit; Usually, the following should do: Create a shortcut to I-War and enter the following line as the target line:

"C:\{{Your I-War directory}}\IWar.exe -nologos -noslab C:\{{Your I-War directory}}\psg\resource\scripts\missions\{{The mission script file you just modified}}"

7. Some specifications of new custom ships might not be absolutely compatible with the mission (docking ports may be different, etc.), so it may happen that you encounter strange bugs or unusual in-game situations and get stuck in the mission.
If the game crashes back to the desktop, go through these steps again and make sure you did everything as described here. If you still have any problems with the new ship, feel free to contact me:
FreakyMarco@hotmail.com

8. If you want to fight against the new ship, you should have some scripting skills, just check out the documentation of the Mission Development Kit, there's a nice scripting tutorial at the end that might help you. I am planning to make a mission template for simple combats so users can create a combat with their custom ships even without any scripting skills.

Have fun.
cormorant

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