The Backroads — an alternate route

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 The 1.7b5 release broke something in the Menkalinan code. It’s going to take me a bit to sort out just what George did and what I need to do to fix things.
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AssumedPseudonym wrote: The 1.7b5 release broke something in the Menkalinan code. It’s going to take me a bit to sort out just what George did and what I need to do to fix things.
 …Or not…? I ran through with a new game to try and get some debug information, but everything seemed to be working normally. As near as I can make out, it’s only affecting games already in progress. I really hate problems that solve themselves. If they want to do that, they shouldn’t make problems of themselves in the first place. >.<;

EDIT #1: Nope, something is definitely amiss. I’d forgotten to update to 1.7b5 in the folder I do my testing from. ¬.¬;

EDIT #2: I’m not sure if it was the virtual station’s sovereign or the measly 1x1 blank sprite, but removing the sovereign and upping the blank sprite size to 32x32 for a bigger target to gate into appears to have rectified the problem.
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 The Backroads has been updated to 0.5.7-c in order to fix a couple of issues that cropped up when George released 1.7b5, mainly the Menkalinan stuff from the preceding post. There’s a handful of other updates as well; feel free to decompile it and poke at the changelog for the details.
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 The Backroads has been updated to 0.5.7-c-1 to fix an issue on the Nemesis playership that cropped up due to incorrectly updating its code to not rely on deprecated functions. My bad. This is only TheBackroadsLibrary.TDB needing updated, not the resource library. It’ll probably take all of five seconds.
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Just out of curiosity, where do you want bugs posted - here, or over on Ministry?

In case you want them here, I've observed that the location of the stargate in the starting system of Zyr makes the mission to assist Fiona's ship to reach the Sister's station far too easy, in that the various defenders of the stations nearby kill the penitent ships almost immediately, without any interaction by the player. This negates the chance of failure completely, which may not be the intended behavior.
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 Either works, but Ministry is preferred.

 Yeah, I’ve noticed that one. I’m not sure I have an easy answer to it, either, given the lore for the system. It doesn’t help that I put the system together back when Fiona only showed up in Eridani. I’m pretty sure that Haetenaro is doing most of the damage, and the odds of them and the Penitents tolerating one another are… poor. Do me a favor, post this one over there so I’ll remember that I need to get it sorted out at some point.
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AssumedPseudonym wrote:
Mon Mar 06, 2017 5:36 am
 Either works, but Ministry is preferred.

 Yeah, I’ve noticed that one. I’m not sure I have an easy answer to it, either, given the lore for the system. It doesn’t help that I put the system together back when Fiona only showed up in Eridani. I’m pretty sure that Haetenaro is doing most of the damage, and the odds of them and the Penitents tolerating one another are… poor. Do me a favor, post this one over there so I’ll remember that I need to get it sorted out at some point.
Done. I'll pay closer attention to see if it is the Haetenaro ships, or if it's a collective action by all npcs in the area.
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Well, I've confirmed that while the Haetenaro ships do start things off, the other ships in the area will all pile on and finish the job. Between that and the casino, getting started in the Zyr system is probably too easy. I can easily rack up 20-30k in credits just playing the slots for about ten minutes or so. You might want to tinker with the payouts a bit to counter that.
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 I thought I had made the Casino un-get-to-able, especially since it’ll take all of five seconds. I’ll fix that right now before I forget about it.
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Out of curiosity, I decided to see how much I could really make in five minutes. Starting with a balance of 52 credits, I amassed a bit over 45k in five minutes of playing the slots. I also added a new bug for you in Ministry. ;-)
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In trying to track down a bug where the game crashes when trying to advance past sanctuary in the Nemesis frigate (it's eluding me - what it looks like so far is that if I save the game and then reload it, it works, but if I play straight through, it crashes... but I'm having some trouble pinning it down)... anyway, I noticed that the frigate's automatic decontamination routine stops functioning after St. Kat's. I thought it might be because I've upgraded the ship's armor to better rated pieces, but given that I've still got a majority of the armor as regenerating health, I don't think that's it. I've raised a bug in Ministry on it, in any case.
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I did get an error message
TheBackroads.TDB: Line (46): Unable to find library: a010fff
in the Mod Collection game screen (where it lists the files in your Collection) when it was downloading. It vanished at the end of the download.
It downloaded OK though. And yikes, it is big.
========================

Couldn't dock at the Borasisi Port. Possibly it needs a dockscreen (other than an abandoned one) EDIT: Saw the other tickets.

In Sann Luwee system two enemy stations Varda Port and Pons-Brooks Cove had the station name to the left of the station and significantly distant. Seeing a bit of this. The station names are a long way away from the station map Icon. It seems to always be when the name is on the left of the map Icon.

Excellent thrust effects.

I really like the multi-cylinder construction of the stations. Looks really good.

Dinanopulse blaster probably needs a different sound. More of a whirring noise, not the discrete bangs it currently has. I was looking around for whatever was firing at me, but it was me! Great projectile effect on it too. EDIT: There is a whirring sound but drowned out by the bangs. Doesn't sound right to me. Shrugs. EDIT or maybe its the same bug as below.

Love the Bootlegger HUD. That is great. Nice work.

The shield hit effect, the expanding circular thing, on the Peerless-class corvette and its escorts looks great. So does the exhaust.

The starport looks excellent. Top 3D effect.

Heavy Maul cannon needs it sound doubled to match the projectile firing. This could be something to do with an engine bug that you want George to fix. EDIT: OK, it worked fine later, not sure what happened there. In the first instance I only got one firing sound per two firings.

Getting attacked by a swarm of Defiants looks and sounds great.

I was just thinking how good the types Lifetaker and Warmonger were when I found out about Deathbringers! Ouch.

And those Rectifiers look magnificent. The thrusting at the front and firing from the back is awesome. And watching them turn is excellent. The images have true depth. Well done.

Is there a non-jumpdrive way out of the Trinity sysStopTime trap? I just got stuck there and that was it.

The UnBound Repositories show as red enemy but can only be targeted by pressing 'F'. Not sure what's happening there.

Extra spaces between words in the scrDesc of dsAEIrongroundNavalOffice, but it's consistent so I assume you are doing it on purpose.

I accidentally destroyed an Ironground Garrison and got a heap of Justicars coming after me but I could dock with other Garrisons after this. Needs disposition change code I assume.

===========================
Couldn't get the last game to load again. Get a "Unable to load game Crash loading game." error message. Doesn't crash to desktop, just back to the "Load Game, New Game, Quit" screen. Debug log attached. .sav available. Other games load OK.

Also in the debug log you will see repeated image loadings, in particular for the Constable and the Scorpion (playership). These seem to be correlated to entering or leaving a system as I was jumping about a bit. The Galactic map is also reloading a bit but this has been ticketed.
Attachments
TBR debug log.txt
(24.54 KiB) Downloaded 255 times
Stupid code. Do what I want, not what I typed in!
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 …Well then. *Cracks knuckles and gets started typing.*
relanat wrote:
Tue Mar 21, 2017 3:54 am
I did get an error message
TheBackroads.TDB: Line (46): Unable to find library: a010fff
in the Mod Collection game screen (where it lists the files in your Collection) when it was downloading. It vanished at the end of the download.
It downloaded OK though. And yikes, it is big.
========================

Couldn't dock at the Borasisi Port. Possibly it needs a dockscreen (other than an abandoned one) EDIT: Saw the other tickets.
 Yep, that’s one I needed to bug George about.
relanat wrote: In Sann Luwee system two enemy stations Varda Port and Pons-Brooks Cove had the station name to the left of the station and significantly distant. Seeing a bit of this. The station names are a long way away from the station map Icon. It seems to always be when the name is on the left of the map Icon.
 That’s an engine bug. I ticketed it a ways back.
relanat wrote: Excellent thrust effects.
Amusing thing on some of those thrust effects: Two of them are straight-up copypasta clones of vanilla projectile effects — &efThermoShellDefault; and &efAkanCannonShell; to be specific — and one is a recolored version.
relanat wrote: I really like the multi-cylinder construction of the stations. Looks really good.

Dinanopulse blaster probably needs a different sound. More of a whirring noise, not the discrete bangs it currently has. I was looking around for whatever was firing at me, but it was me! Great projectile effect on it too. EDIT: There is a whirring sound but drowned out by the bangs. Doesn't sound right to me. Shrugs. EDIT or maybe its the same bug as below.
 I’ve been running with SNAPSS for so long that I forgot what the dinanopulse sounded like on vanilla sounds. ¬.¬;
relanat wrote: Love the Bootlegger HUD. That is great. Nice work.
 …And getting it to work right was bloody tedious, so you’d better like it… ^.~
relanat wrote: The shield hit effect, the expanding circular thing, on the Peerless-class corvette and its escorts looks great. So does the exhaust.
 Custom shield hit effects are sort of fun to do. I may need to redo Lambda’s, though, heh. It was an early experiment and I’m not sure I still like it.
relanat wrote: The starport looks excellent. Top 3D effect.

Heavy Maul cannon needs it sound doubled to match the projectile firing. This could be something to do with an engine bug that you want George to fix. EDIT: OK, it worked fine later, not sure what happened there. In the first instance I only got one firing sound per two firings.

Getting attacked by a swarm of Defiants looks and sounds great.
 Getting attacked by a swarm of Defiants is terrifying if you’re in a Nemesis. Trust me. @.@;
relanat wrote: I was just thinking how good the types Lifetaker and Warmonger were when I found out about Deathbringers! Ouch.

And those Rectifiers look magnificent. The thrusting at the front and firing from the back is awesome. And watching them turn is excellent. The images have true depth. Well done.
 The entirety of Trinity is actually ships I’d created in Kingdom Hearts II, of all things. I wrote them up to render a looong ways back when I wanted to show them to a friend and screenshots weren’t an option. I figured since I still had them, though, why not put them to use?
 Also, I plan on nerfing the Rectifiers.
relanat wrote: Is there a non-jumpdrive way out of the Trinity sysStopTime trap? I just got stuck there and that was it.
 It should stop you for one tick every two ticks. In essence, you should be moving at half speed, and it should stop once you get far enough away from the Cathedral or destroy it. Are you getting different results? (I want to update that to use operatingSpeed at some point, incidentally.)
relanat wrote: The UnBound Repositories show as red enemy but can only be targeted by pressing 'F'. Not sure what's happening there.
 I’m almost positive it’s because they don’t have canAttack="true" on the station. I may leave that in, though; it’s just the right kind of interface screw for UnBound that it fits.
relanat wrote: Extra spaces between words in the scrDesc of dsAEIrongroundNavalOffice, but it's consistent so I assume you are doing it on purpose.
 Extra spaces? Wait, between sentences, you mean? Yeah, I’m old school enough that I put two spaces after sentence-ending punctuation. I think the practice has fallen out of favor. If you mean something else, though, let me know.
relanat wrote: I accidentally destroyed an Ironground Garrison and got a heap of Justicars coming after me but I could dock with other Garrisons after this. Needs disposition change code I assume.
 I don’t have legal routines in for any of my sovereigns just yet, just retribution routines. It’s on my to-do list in TBR’s Ministry.
relanat wrote: ===========================
Couldn't get the last game to load again. Get a "Unable to load game Crash loading game." error message. Doesn't crash to desktop, just back to the "Load Game, New Game, Quit" screen. Debug log attached. .sav available. Other games load OK.
 I have no idea what to make of that. If it happens again, you’d have to send a copy of the save and Debug.log to George; there’s nothing I can really do about it.
relanat wrote: Also in the debug log you will see repeated image loadings, in particular for the Constable and the Scorpion (playership). These seem to be correlated to entering or leaving a system as I was jumping about a bit. The Galactic map is also reloading a bit but this has been ticketed.
 That one’s also above my paygrade, heh.

 And thank you for giving feedback! Short of throwing money at them, it’s the best thing you can do for a developer. ^.^
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 The Backroads has been updated to 0.5.8! I have to admit that I’ve been badly unproductive on it of late, so this is mostly assorted tweaks and minor bug fixes. The most major changes are:

 » Stargates in Elysium to select TBR systems
 » Numerous updates to Ryudsew Iler ships
 » Changed the Nemesis-class playership to a Pariah-class
 » Full blown rework of the Pariah’s secondary weapon handling to be less lolwutishly fuglamundous
 » Weapon extensions now take the launcher slot and device extensions now take the cargo hold slot for balance tradeoffs
 » Added interior repair to armor dockscreens at stations for Pariah playership
 » Added the intro screen damage gauges from my utility mod on Xelerus (mostly so I can test TBR on other computers more conveniently)
 » April Fool’s recolors on all factions (though one or two might just stick once I revert about a week or so into April)

 As always, a full changelog is included in the TDB file if anyone wants to decompile it and poke at it. Existing saves should still work unless you had a Nemesis playership. Not much I can do about that, though, unfortunately.
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The Pariah looks great! Sad that the cargo space is halved, but having fewer armor slots makes up for it by a fair bit.

The April Fool's colors are awesome! :)

Plus, three new and exciting bugs for you to fix in the Ministry... :wink:

Also, did you intend for the Pariah to no longer have automatic decontamination systems, like it did before?
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