[Mod] Playership Drones v4

Cirevam · Sat Apr 28, 2012 5:29 pm

That would be great, especially for larger ships. I say go for it.

Wed May 02, 2012 9:40 pm

* Comments about the update in progress:
Ship rebuilding no longer requires an exact list of parts. All you need is enough undamaged armor segments usable by the ship. If a reactor, shield, and weapons are found in the wreckage, they may get installed too. The difference between the mechanic and shipwright will be tech level of the items they can use. I may also check for ship level too (so that the mechanic cannot repair stuff like Iocrym ships, even if the wreck has enough low level parts).

This next one has been done, but I may reverse it:
Shipyard limits have changed. Instead of checking to see if the player has too many ships, it checks to see how many ships it sold. If the shipyard sold a ship to the player, it will not sell another ship to the player. This makes shipyards work a bit like trading post orders. The shipyard offers a list of ships the player can buy, and the player can buy one, and that's it. Trading ships does not affect this limit. The player may still change ships anytime.

Due to these changes, I will probably reduce the number of shipbuilder items (and Hornets) available to be found. They will probably become rewards for accomplishing certain events (like killing Arco personally) or one-time dealer specials. In addition, I will probably remove shipyards from mining colonies (to prevent the player from buying a Borer, then trade it elsewhere for a warship). If enough shipyards and shipbuilders spawned, the player could probably amass a huge fleet too easily.

You may have read about an idea about a Jacker auton that hijacks a ship and turns it into a drone. I will punt the idea for now.

I experimented with a Hornet given a 10 degree fire arc (5 to each side) with any non-omni weapon. This seems to work well - it makes aiming a little easier. This will interfere with weapons with firearcs of their own, but the only weapons with firearcs I can think of are the Xiphon cannon and a few other mod weapons. Even so, the automatic 10 degree fire arc may be more helpful than harmful overall.

I am still debugging code changes. Once I finish that, I may update the ship select images. I hope to finish the Playership Drones update before the end of the month.

Fri May 04, 2012 3:12 am

Playership Drones v4's days are numbered. The next release will be Playership Drones v5.

Sat May 05, 2012 1:54 am

One question to the players: Does anyone enable and use the files for enemy ships with 40 facings? If not, I may omit them for the next release.

Cirevam · Sat May 05, 2012 3:38 am

I don't. I've never considered it to be that important. If anything it makes the game a bit more difficult because enemies are more likely to shoot at an angle that will hit you.

RPC · Sat May 05, 2012 5:57 am

If I download them, will they be enabled already? I don't recall enabling 40 facing enemies. (I would now that I know about it though

)

Sat May 05, 2012 1:16 pm

(To Cirevam) That is the idea. It levels the playing field a bit.

(To RPC) Each of the Ship* folders has a disabled _F40Ship*.xml. Enable those files, and most NPC ships use 40 facings.

The forty facing NPC ship files were disabled for compatibility - they overwrite ships.

Amariithynar · Sat May 05, 2012 3:14 pm

Is there an easy way to activate them? I never even knew about this.

Sat May 05, 2012 4:59 pm

Remove the underscore from _F40Ship*.xml (so they become F40Ship*.xml). If you do this, any games in progress may not work. Restart the game.

Patupi · Sat May 05, 2012 5:35 pm

I tried it but it conflicted with some other mod I was running (forget which now) so I re-disabled them. It'd be nice to have, but tricky with so many other mods out there that modify other ships

Sat May 05, 2012 7:08 pm

Could be the Juan Carlos or CSC Overwrite in the Ships folder itself. (i.e., Playership Drones could be conflicting with itself.) Disable that file then try again. If that does not work, it may be another mod.

Patupi · Sun May 06, 2012 3:39 am

Don't think I've encountered the Juan Carlos mission, but I did do the supply missions a few times. Actually once with a big ship (I think EI7000) that was FULL of minerals, when I got the minerals back after the mission EVERYTHING I got back was doubled. Not sure why. Took a while to sell enough to get some cargo space!

I'll test this out... but I'm assuming restart is required as a new xml is being added (the 40 facing file that is.) Back to the drawing board!

Patupi · Sun May 06, 2012 4:22 pm

It isn't working. I'm getting an error on startup: "t31-class armed transport (3009) unknown image d912516c.

This is the UNID on the 40 facing file, but it's a different UNID on the Ships file in the same folder. I'm assuming you don't disable the ships folder as it seems to have a good deal of XML that isn't in the 40facing folder (ships lists for buying vessels from stations etc) but would there be a conflict between the two sets of differing IDs?

I've disabled ( ie _ed it) the cscoverwrite file and checked that the t3140face image files seem to be there (both ship and mask). Not sure why this isn't working. Could it be a conflict with some other mod I'm using? I've got quite a lot installed.

Sun May 06, 2012 5:42 pm

Do not worry about it. v4 will be replaced by v5 soon. I will remove the forty facings NPC ship files. If ticket #770 gets fixed, I may add them back.