Shrike's Ultimate Overhaul (DEV)

[Song]

The "Average" playthrough in a Wolfen with a mixture of armor took me 32 minutes of playtime (5 or so was setting it up), and was insane. There's definitely going to be some anti-frustration features to keep the player alive, and the gameplay more fun. Currently, there's too many encounters so you'll get 50 or so ships coming at you at once. It's fun....IF you survive.

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ANDERSON

Adventure	Transcendence Part I: The Stars of the Pilgrim
Domina relationship	Novice
Genome	Human male
Money (credits)	19,958
Score	21,785
Ship class	Wolfen-class gunship
Time played	32 minutes and 30 seconds
Version	1.07a

ACHIEVEMENTS & REGRETS

Cleared the Charon system for Korolov Shipping	

COMBAT

Enemy ships destroyed	280
Enemy stations destroyed	6
Friendly ships destroyed	2

CONDUCTS

Honored permadeath	
Never backtracked	
Never destroyed friendly stations	

ENEMY SHIPS DESTROYED

pirate ship Kronosaurus	1
Charon frigate	7
Drake-class missileship	7
200A defender auton	1
Viking II-class gunship	2
Corsair II-class gunship	24
Oromo-class gunship	1
Viking-class gunship	78
Zulu II-class gunship	1
Hammerhead-class gunship	4
Borer-class gunship	1
Corsair-class gunship	153

ENEMY STATIONS DESTROYED

Charon Pirates stronghold	5
Fortress of the Charon Pirates	1

EXPLORATION

Systems visited	2
Never reached Rigel Aurelius	
Never reached St. Katharine's Star	
Never reached Jiang's Star	
Never reached Point Juno	
Never reached Heretic	
Never reached the Galactic Core	

EXTENSIONS

Dock Screen Framework	
Extension dc4e0001	
Galactic Omni Device	
Osaka-class Transport	

FRIENDLY SHIPS DESTROYED

T31-class armed transport	1
Zulu-class gunship	1

ITEMS INSTALLED

ceralloy armor	
Luminous armature	
AK505 Ballista cannon	
class III deflector	
dual turbolaser cannon	
Nova-50 reactor	
plasteel armor	
light plasteel armor	
NAMI missile launcher	
cargo hold expansion	
dual laser cannon	
hull plate ionizer	

WEAPONS FIRED

XM900 Lucifer missile	8
dual turbolaser cannon	3,985
KM500 Stiletto missile	178
KM110 Starburst missile	348
NAMI missile launcher	554
KM100 Longbow missile	20

Interestingly, I only spawned 150 KM500s and the 8 XM900s (there was a single outpost sitting on a planet, unkillable). The rest of the missiles were all looted. Fuel was mostly spawned by me, and repairs were all cheated in: I haven't added the easier repairs features into charon yet. I also completely forgot that I'd given myself the AK505, so I probably could have done it a lot quicker. All in all.....Progress!

[Song]

Reading through the Mods and Extensions pages, a few ideas come to mind for my current idea of maybe turning SUO into an adventure extension.....but as I'm not a scripter, can anyone say if they've seen examples of, or how I might go about:

-Making armor patches be used by the AI (George mentions this in the modding page, and it gels with my current plan for buffing the Drake and a few other ships.)
-Setting up an event that fires when a station reaches, say, 50% of its health, that triggers a formation of reinforcements to gate in and support the station.
-lastly, do we have an OnDock event, or do I just have to mess around with dockscreens to make the experimental booby-trapped shipwreck?

[alterecco]

All of those are doable.

Here is the how I would go about it

1) Hardcode two events on the ships you want to be able to use patches. An <OnCreate> event and a <CheckConditions> event (the last one could be named anything you want). In the <OnCreate> event you start a recurring timer that fires the <CheckConditions> event. Use sysAddObjRecurringTimerEvent for that. Set it to run quite often, say, every 10 ticks (1/3 of a second). In that event you check the condition of the ship, and if some condition is fulfilled, then you apply the patch, or whatever else you want to do.

2) Like above, except that in your recurring event you check for station health and spawn the reinforcements when you get below 50%

3) You would use the <GetDockScreen> event to control which screen is to be shown. Look under the "CHOOSING AN INITIAL SCREEN" heading in this post for an explanation http://neurohack.com/transcendence/foru ... php?t=3537

Hope that helps.

[Atarlost]

All of those are doable.

Here is the how I would go about it

1) Hardcode two events on the ships you want to be able to use patches. An <OnCreate> event and a <CheckConditions> event (the last one could be named anything you want). In the <OnCreate> event you start a recurring timer that fires the <CheckConditions> event. Use sysAddObjRecurringTimerEvent for that. Set it to run quite often, say, every 10 ticks (1/3 of a second). In that event you check the condition of the ship, and if some condition is fulfilled, then you apply the patch, or whatever else you want to do.

There's an existing event for this. <onAIUpdate> goes on an item and runs periodically if that item is on an AI ship. If you want patches to auto-activate on the playership as well use onUpdate.

[Song]

Just the AI for now. I'll put that on the "To do in mid-semester/later" list. For now, I'm still fixin' charon.

I've done a test of the freighter, and suffice to say, that pin-point accuracy on an omni-turbolaser can really mess up difficulties. I'm going to have to really revamp some things.

Current plans:

-Set up drake with armor patches (Not that it'll use them, yet)
-Make drakes a little harder to blow up.
-Remove missile-swatters from Kronosaurus. Possibly look into making Volkov turn up after killing it if it's killed in Charon.
-Look into a custom dockscreen for the fortress. This would only work if the korolov base has been smashed AND the fortress killed (since you can't dock at the dead station when it's not dead), and would allow the player fuel and armor repairs from an automated system that survived the players destruction of the base. Maybe even some limited device installation (so the player can exploit the stuff they find in the fort).
-Give the fortress a different weapon: Using a virtual weapon replicating the KM110 as fired from a NAMI launcher, rather than actually firing said missiles. This should stop the station from running out if the player tries to tease it...or if there's another station near it (sapiens, in the last case). Extend the range of that missile launcher so it can target the player out to 95-100ls.
-On that note, rebalance the missile load in the stations supplies.
-Possibly nerf the fire-rate on those particle cannons, and/or switch them over to 4 turbolasers, or 4 particle guns with limited fire-arcs.
-Replace the broken Korolov stuff, and try again on that from the beginning.
-Reduce general number of ships, increase difficulty of remaining ships.

[Atarlost]

-Give the fortress a different weapon: Using a virtual weapon replicating the KM110 as fired from a NAMI launcher, rather than actually firing said missiles. This should stop the station from running out if the player tries to tease it...or if there's another station near it (sapiens, in the last case). Extend the range of that missile launcher so it can target the player out to 95-100ls.

Why not use the Sapein station missile spawning code?

[Song]

-Give the fortress a different weapon: Using a virtual weapon replicating the KM110 as fired from a NAMI launcher, rather than actually firing said missiles. This should stop the station from running out if the player tries to tease it...or if there's another station near it (sapiens, in the last case). Extend the range of that missile launcher so it can target the player out to 95-100ls.

Why not use the Sapein station missile spawning code?

Mostly the range...although it's an option, certainly. Getting the damned thing firing at decent range is tricky.

[Atarlost]

The AI won't use non-tracking sublight weapons at long range. Try using KM500s instead of KM100s.

[Song]

There's the problem...I need the KM110, not the 100. And implementing a KM510/20 style missile isn't really on the list for SUO.

[Atarlost]

You're not going to get the functional range you want out of a dumbfire missile.

[Song]

Ah well, I'll do some tweaking, see what I can come up with.

In other news: Drakes now have heavier frontal armor, fast-fire lasers, the chance to fire KM120 missiles at you, high chance to fire KM110's at you, and have increased legroom in the crew lounge. I haven't tested this yet, but I anticipate Fun.

[Song]

SUO is on hold while I work on porting my modding stuff over to 1.08b, do some uni stuff, decide what I'm doing for mid-term break, and work on a design experiment (which I'll put on the forums when I've done)....the experiment *may* result in some rather interesting changes to SUO. It's not coding, it's pure design work designed to work on how to enrich the ingame universe and diversify the havok the player can cause.

As a question though: is there any way to completely remove something from the game (yeah, yeah, there's dummying it out/removing the availability, but can you actually REMOVE something?). I'm considering changing how ores and materials work (Adding more metals, changing Cerallox, Orthosteel and Duranium to be synthetic alloys, that sort of thing) for the purposes of the experiment....although not for SUO, because it's a lot of work thinking up production chains, let alone how to make them work.

[Amariithynar]

Testing is showing a few pricing and balance issues in the early game (although given the item in question is a missile launcher that can fire ANTIMATTER by the end of the game, a high price might be understandable).

Idea on this: Have a mid-game upgrade ROM that allows you to unlock that extra usage for it, otherwise it remains unable to use the higher end payloads?

[Song]

I'm ready to port! SUO is being brought up-to-date over the next few days. I'm stripping out a bunch of old stuff as well, reworking other things as I go. The fortress of the charon pirates is going to be genuinely HARD....which will necessitate changes to the missions of the system in ways I don't even begin to know how to do.

[Song]

It's ported over, and I'm on to testing it with other mods to see how it works alongside them. I'm using the standard package for the current succession game + SUO right now. So far, it's worked quite well.