Old news but if anyone doesn't know how to do this, here you go. NYGM has an aspect I like of various AI visual nodes for various objects in the game. I.e., aircraft, escorts, merchants each have their own visual capablities vs. the "one size fits all" of stock and some other mods.
The one size fits all approach means, i.e., that merchant "crews" have the same spotting capability as an escort crew. I agree with NYGM in that a merchant crew shouldn't have the same capabities as an escort crew and modded my installs as such per the NYGM example.
If you'd like to add it to your install(s) it is very easy and very tedious to do.
Very Easy part:
- Simply open the "AI_Sensors.dat" file and add a visual node for the merchants.
Copying NYGM's work, that means add a node called "X"_Visual" in the same format as the standard "AI_Visual" node already present in your AI_Sensors.dat file. You can call this new node anything you want, but it's name has to also be entered in each ship's .sns file per below, so the simpler the name the easier and less time consuming that is to do.
Make it's sensors MaxRange at least half of your environment size. I.e., 16k env. would have an 8k meter range, 20k would be 10k, etc. You can make it whatever range desired if felt that even half range is to much, etc.
Very Tedious part:
- each merchant ship in your install than has to have it's .sns (sensors) file visual node changed to reflect the above. The visual node is usually the first one listed in the .sns file.
With dozens of merchant ships in most installs you can see how this is tedious. I imagine Teddy Bar made a program to do this quickly for the NYGM work but most of us will have to do it by hand, one at a time.
Long ago in the dos days there were commands to do this all at once too but I can't remember what happened last week let alone that far back.
I've attached a
link to show an example of what needs to be done., using a ship from IABL's MFM mod and the stock AI_Sensors.dat file
Now you can have merchant crews have their own visual ability (or lack thereof).
You can even reduce the range even more to try to simulate the "inside the convoy" night attacks various Commanders actually did, which can be hard to do in most installs due to the shared visual abilities.
But be careful doing this; you don't want them completely blind.
Last but not least, apply via JSGME.