Todo for next version of Playership Drones.

A place to discuss mods in development and concepts for new mods.
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There is the Alpha, but it does not have capships or the other features that made Playership Drones popular. Playership Drones began much like the current PSD7 Alpha. It was in PSD2 that some capships became playable, and finished by PSD3.

No, I still plan to add every SOTP ship in. If I have time left, Corporate Command and/or Eternity Port ships.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
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Some more ship conversion progress today. If I can maintain my current rate, I might finish support for all basic ships by this weekend.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
shanejfilomena
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Playerships Drones became popular because it is a work or ART and a great Boon to the Universe of Players.

since changing ships became a real thing and sometimes seriously appropriate for some missions where the player just doesn't have what it takes on their ships ... well, the Drones have always been Awesome.
Flying Irresponsibly In Eridani......

I don't like to kill pirates in cold blood ..I do it.. but I don't like it..
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My conversion rate for ships have slowed, so I have not been able to finish converting all standard ships by now. Many are converted, just not all, and none of the expansion-only ships.

I decided to stop ship conversion for now and try to implement field repairs and see what breaks and needs fixing. If field repairs gets implemented as planned, all that is left (that I am willing to work on now) is ship conversion, and shipyard tweaks at the end.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Restored PSD6-style ship rebuilding. However, that is not good enough for PSD7, so I am busy updating the process. Next to experiment with is an overlay similar to that used by neuroplague pods (from Eternity Port). The idea is the player needs to wait about a minute (equivalent to an in-game hour), more or less, before the restoration process is complete, with a progress bar underneath the shipwreck. It can be interrupted if something swipes the items required for fields repairs from the wreck.

Unlike field repairs for PSD6, player will only be allowed to install armor and a reactor. No shields, weapons, or other devices.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Worked on a preliminary update of the field repair process, and it worked out very well, and did not take as much time as I thought. That does not mean it is done. Now, I need to clean up and optimize the code, and if the last such refinement done to linked-fire weapons is any indication, it will probably take all day.

How field repairs work in PSD7:
* When you dock a shipwreck, you see an option Field Repairs. It will likely be grayed-out, and it will give you a reason why, or rather which item it needs. Due to space concerns, it does not list all the items it needs. At first, it tells you deposit patcher arm or patch spider. You do that, return to dockscreen, it will probably tell you drop a reactor next. You comply, then it tells you to drop armor. After that, Field Repairs will likely be enabled and tell you that Field Repairs 'restores ship to basic functionality after a delay'.

* After you activate Field Repairs, you automatically undock, and a progress bar (currently green, may change later) appears underneath the shipwreck. After about a minute, repairs are done and the ship is restored.

The Field Repairs progress needs more work. I plan to vary repair times based on armor segments. A minute for a ship with four armor segments felt good, so I will probably have repair time be 15 seconds per armor segment. This means a Hornet or Wind Slaver takes 15 seconds to restore, playerships with four armor segments take a minute to restore, and an Aquila (with 16 segments) takes four minutes to restore.

As posted earlier, only armor and reactor gets installed. The rationale is proper dock services are required to install anything more than what is required to get the ship to basic functionality. With that in mind, the player really wants to go to town as soon as possible to arm up his new ship.

Integrated items like Constellation's auton bay are part of the ship, and should be present. I write should because I have neither accounted nor tested that yet, but it will be soon.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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As anticipated, much of the time spent on PSD7 today was cleaning up field repairs. The basics are mostly done, only thing really left to do for field repairs is to deal with integrated items... But that should be relatively trivial to resolve when the time comes to deal with it.

Really, the only major feature left to implement is to make all official ships PSD7 compatible. Many ships in Stars of the Pilgrim already are, but I still have a few dozen ships left to add. I cannot say when that will be finished, but there is the April 21 deadline. I think PSD7 will be ready by then.

Another thing. Playerships Drones 7 Beta will span multiple files just like prior versions of Playership Drones. So far, I have rerendered ships (that are not present in George's HD library) to have 8-bit masks, but I may consider 1-bit masks if that will significantly cut down filesize. Doing so for dozens of ships will likely be tedious, so if time becomes of essence, I might not do that.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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After more playtesting with field repairs, I noticed that if the patcher arm/patch spider is not consumed, then it either is in the new ship's cargo hold or it gets dumped in a crate. This is sloppy. Since I do not plan to have the repair item consumed (yet), I changed the field repairs process slightly.

Instead of depositing the patcher arm or patch spider in the wreck, it must be installed on your ship. Now, field repairs checks if you have one installed first, before it demands the player to deposit items into the wreck.

When the player starts field repairs, he must remain within a short distance (same as used for the Connect command for drones) within the wreck until repairs end. This distance will be highlighted with a circle overlay (similar to those used by mining pods). The delay does not amount to much if the player can simply start repairs and leave to do something else. When the player needs to wait near the wreck at all times, the delay will be more meaningful and a price of sorts.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Field Repairs are finally done. It now checks for integrated items. Rebuilding a wrecked Constellation will restore its auton bay at no cost. No need to hunt for a replacement auton bay. Also, no reactor will be required (or installed) for the relatively few ships that do not start with a reactor item (namely autons and Iocrym ships).

Finishing up field repairs revealed some things I need to tidy up in other files. Otherwise, the only major feature/obstacle left is adding more ships for full PSD-compatibility with all official ships.

If I finish early, I might take a stab at personalities (varying messages and responses). Do not count on that, though.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Just took a look at how many ships are left for me to add support to. There are about forty ships left for the core game (which has about a hundred) for me to convert. A quick look at Eternity Port shows about thirty ships (but I have not created HUD graphics to support them yet). Corporate Command has about twenty ships, if I remember.

Thinking about Corporate Command, PSD6 did not support chimeric versions of ships. Repairing purified them and gave the player a normal version of the ship. Since many of them have 120 facings, I could try to support chimeric ships, but if I do not have time to do so, I will continue the purification from field repairs.

I am about to add PSD compatibility to the CSC, and I am so tempted to give it a dock services special ability. In other words, you can have your own CSC do dock services on itself, or your other ships, free of charge. I have a vague idea how to implement it. However, as I posted before, I should not be distracted by feature creep. I really need to support the ships first. As an aside, I am thinking of slapping a -50% malus for all energy shields for the CSC.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Forced to take a break from adding ships to adding replacement Domina effects.

The biggest ships got bigger in recent versions of Transcendence, and after trying Defend with a CSC, I needed bigger Domina bubbles. At first, I added more scaled-up Domina bubble images, which barely covered the super-sized CSC, but then noticed that all Domina bubbles added by PSD alone were over 2.5 MB zipped. Due to size limits at Xelerus, this is unacceptable. Domina powers will use procedural effects instead of sprites in PSD. They probably will not be as pretty, but the alternative is worse.

I am source diving through various xmls to see what I can use. Currently, the new effect is a circle overlay (as used by mining pods) that varies by ship size plus a lightning field (as used by CDM shard powers). I only got started and still experimenting with various effects.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Turns out that simple <Orb> effects, with the cloud style, can recreate the Domina bubble sprites, and the size can vary by length or width of the overlay owner's sprite.

It is so simple that I no longer need to override the power types, just the overlay types.

I may post the results later in another topic.

Back to adding ships!
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Quick progress report: All standard ships are PSD-compatible, at least for Stars of the Pilgrim. I should extend compatibility to Eternity Port too, which will happen soon enough. I have yet to make expansion ships PSD-compatible, and I do not know yet if I will have enough time to do so. What I need to do is determine what else needs to be done to shipyards, implement any necessary changes or features, then update ship data, which is a lot of work when there are about a hundred ships.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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Currently, I am updating some of the docs, and I will probably commence extending PSD-compatibility support to Eternity Port very soon. This will probably take a few days. Afterwards, PSD7 Beta will be done enough for a release. However, depending on time left, there are other features I would like to try to implement before said release.

* Add PSD-compatibility to Corporate Command and Eternity Port ships: This will be tedious, and it will probably take about a week to do. April 21 is the deadline, and release should happen before then.

* Add Dock Services option for CSC (and possibly other ships): This is gravy, due to difficulty of acquiring such a ship, but it seems fun, and it could be useful to others who want to use PSD to partially implement a mothership.

* Personalities: Alternative drone messages. Much of the code has been in since Alpha, but I have yet to test it. Perhaps, I can add a few test cases.

Some of the wish-list features I posted much earlier, such as carrier capability and automatic subordinate AI, will not make it in the release of PSD7 Beta.

One more important note: Due to the way Playership Drones manages ship types, most ships available in Eternity Port will change your class from CDM Mercenary to Pilgrim after you change ships. I have not yet found a suitable fix that does not break something else or is not overly complicated. I do not think there is anything critical that relies on the player being a merc. So far, the only class-related stuff I found so far is text messages, which can be ignored.

EDIT: I was wrong, changing class changes powers too. This is a critical bug I need to fix before I attempt to add more features. Actually, I should try to fix this now!
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
PM
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PM wrote:One more important note: Due to the way Playership Drones manages ship types, most ships available in Eternity Port will change your class from CDM Mercenary to Pilgrim after you change ships. I have not yet found a suitable fix that does not break something else or is not overly complicated.

EDIT: I was wrong, changing class changes powers too. This is a critical bug I need to fix before I attempt to add more features. Actually, I should try to fix this now!
Just a quick note this has been resolved for now. This was an annoying problem that took some hours of solution finding. Some ideas simply did not work. Even the solution is less than ideal since it uses magic numbers, assumes only two possible adventures, Eternity Port and other pilgrim adventure, and I may need to fix it later should more expansions become available. For now, this is not a big enough problem, since mercs will not switch to pilgrims and vice-versa, and I can proceed to finishing up PSD7 beta.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
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