What's the best, error-proof way of changing the units that are seen coming from dropships?

I tried altering it back in B18 but nothing seemed to change... and I would go ahead and try now, but I seem to have a tendency of royally screwing things up, so I'm requesting a quick tutorial.

http://www.datarealms.com/wiki/index.php/Activities.ini

Tutorial on how to make custom Activities.

Blah... something still managed to mess up.

Alrighty... so I changed a couple of weapons on the existing dropship spawns and then added 2 new dropships that'll drop something from a mod.
I go about loading the game, and it tells me 'unable to define line 91' or something like that. So I check 91, and it's the riot shield for the skeleton. Wha? I tried just removing the riot shield from its inventory, but then it goes to line 89, being the pistol... wha wha what?
So I come back and examine this tutorial, and I added the mods I wanted to use to the base index... so I load again, and it says it's trying to access a forbidden .rte, or something like that. So, I tried adding JUST the index itself of the mod to the index of the base, and it says line 1 is missing a value... and line 1 would be 'datamodule'.

Ugh... I'm so confused.

Edit: it looks like I can change weapons and stuff, but if I add ONE extra unit to a dropship, it causes the activities thing to go crazy.

Are you using the Tab key to create the spacing that goes before the code? Sorry if it's a stupid question but I remember that I had problems with creating new drops since I wasn't using the Tab key. Or you can try attaching your Activities.ini to a post and perhaps someone can see what your problem is.

Wait till tonight. I'll give you an example.

So you want Suckmod's stuff to spawn as the enemy, correct?

1. Go into Suckmod.rte, find index.ini
2. Copy everything below DataModule, then put // in front of everything
3. Paste into base.rte/INDEX.ini second to the last line (which should be activities)
4. Open Activities.ini and navigate to suckmod.rte
5. go to the unit/weapon you want to add and open its ini file. Press CTRL F and type instancename and copy what you see after =.
6. switch to your open Activities.ini file and replace the necessary line with the instancename. (Do this at the BOTTOM MOST section of the file, those are the parameters for skirmish).
7. Clones, robots, are AHuman. Dropships (2 engines) are ACDropShip. Rockets (1 engine) are ACRocket. Shields are HeldDevice. Weapons are HDFirearm.

Just follow the format the file is in already, you'll figure out how many tab spaces mean what item refers to what entity and whatnot.

Hmmm... I guess using tab solved one of the problems. I can now add, for instance, a second person to a one-person dropship. And I can REPLACE something with a mod, but I can't add an entirely new dropship. I'm gonna take a guess and say that's normal?

No, that's not normal.

You're still doing something wrong.

I think I know what happened with the riot shield. You left it with AddInventory = HDFirearm, I bet. That's a big no-no. You gotta change it to AddInventory = HeldDevice.

No, that's the thing, I didn't change it. It was the ORIGINAL line,hddevice and all. But I guess it was because I was using Enter to make the spacing between ships... it somehow made it randomly go to the next line, or something.

I'm still so confused. I managed to add a completely new ship. I added it to the TOP of the list instead of the BOTTOM like I was doing, and it worked.

I tried adding a different mod unit, but it would make the game crash right before a skirmish; JUST when I select a difficulty level.

The only real problem I have now that I wish to fix, is the dropships coming down too low and killing the units it drops.

Just so this thread can die, let me know what units you want in the activities and I'll give you the modified versions of index and activities. Hopefully you can pick it up easier that way.

As for the dropships coming too low, they do that when they're too heavy or on a low gravity map like crossfire.