By "found a few guides" did you mean the pdfs that come with the mod pack? Because I know there is a tutorial written by IC on how to prepare ships in XSI for ConvertXSI to work properly. And it goes over adding firing points and such.

ConvertXSI is a command line program, so you need to run it from the DOS command prompt (Start > Run > cmd) with the proper syntax. How to do it is described in the SINS_modset pdf in the mod pack's documentation folder

This should give you a mesh that you're ready to plug into Sins.



The basic mod structure (where to put it, folders, etc) is covered in the SINS_modset pdf as well, so I won't go over it here.

The easiest way to plug in your mesh would be something like this:

Depending on whether or not it's a capital ship or frigate, go into the GameInfo folder from the mod pack, copy an existing capital or frigate and rename it to whatever you like. Taking an example from the Kol (CAPITALSHIP_TECHBATTLESHIP.entity):

MeshName "CapitalShip_TechBattleship"

You will find this line towards the bottom of the file. You can replace this with the name of your mesh file (and your mesh will need to be in the mod's Mesh folder, of course).

In this entity file you can also modify everything about the ship. Weapon damages, costs, speed, shield/hull hp, so on so forth. Another important thing of note:

NameStringID "IDS_CAPITALSHIP_TECHBATTLESHIP_NAME"
DescriptionStringID "IDS_CAPITALSHIP_TECHBATTLESHIP_DESCRIPTION"

These refer to the English.str file located in the Strings directory, and if you do a search for those names in that file, you will see that IDS_CAPITALSHIP_TECHBATTLESHIP_NAME has the value "Kol", and the description has the description you see on the infocard. For your ship, you'll probably want to add your own string definitions in the same format, and make sure to increase the string count at the top of the file.

Also, the entity file defines all the icons the ship uses, so unless you make your own (whole other can of worms on how to put that in), you'll have to make do with using an existing one.

Now, to put it in the build list, open the playerrace.entity (playerTech, playerPhase, playerPsi) of the race you want to be able to build the ship. If it's a capital, until 1.1 comes out, you'll have to replace one of the existing ones because the game only allows 5. 1.1 will raise this to 9. But in any case, as an example from playerTech:

capitalShipInfo
Page:0
count 5
entityDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHBATTLESHIP"
entityDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHCARRIER"
entityDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHCOLONY"
entityDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHSUPPORT"
entityDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHSIEGE"

This is the TEC's capital ship build list. Put in the file name of your .entity there (replace one if yours is a capital ship) and you're good to go. If it's not a capital ship, add it to the frigate info and increase the counter. In frigateinfo, page 0 is frigates, page 1 is cruisers.

Again, the SINS_modset pdf will go over the basics of stats editing and such, so what I wrote should hopefully make sense once you've read over it and/or tried it out.

My DOS is a little rusty, but try this. On your C:\ drive make some folder (MyMesh, whatever) and drop ConvertXSI.exe and your .xsi file there.

Go to Start > run > cmd, this should open a DOS prompt window.

Type in this, hitting enter after each line:

cd C:\
cd MyMesh (or whatever you named your folder)
convertxsi mymesh.xsi mymesh.mesh (or whatever your .xsi file is called and whatever you want your mesh name to be)

You should now have your Sins-ready .mesh file.

Welcome Good luck with the rest of your modding!