Todo for next version of Playership Drones.

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PSD7 Progress Report
Working on shipyards. Due to limited playership options, they will probably sell one of each type of ship. Player may buy, trade, or sell. Buying and trading remains mostly the same as before. Selling means you sell your current playership then switch to a nearby drone; you do not need to command your drones to dock at a station. (Actually, the Dock command for drones is gone, so that is impossible now.) Currently, when trading or selling, shipyard only offers 25% of your ship's worth. This should help mitigate early profits such as trading your starting Constellation or Raijin for a Sapphire.

New game settings planned:
Bottomless or Dynamic shipyards: Dynamic shipyards means a shipyard's inventory of ships is finite. Ships bought are removed from the inventory, and ships you sell get added. Bottomless or non-dynamic shipyards means the inventory never changes. You can buy infinite ships from shipyards, but they never gain the ships you sell to them. Dynamic will likely be the default.

One ship challenge: If enabled, buying and selling ships are disabled. You are only allowed to trade and change ships. Field repairs would be disabled too, but that feature has not been implemented yet. The idea of this is to let the player change ships, but not get too overpowered by amassing lots of ships. Given that one of Playership Drone's goals is for player to command disposable ships, this setting would be OFF by default.
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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PSD7 Progress Report
Bad news, implementing shipyards is taking longer than planned. Good news, features are working as planned, despite being a bit unfinished. Once I finish shipyards, the only major feature left to implement is to add support for Corporate Command playerships and probably add a few more ships (probably Hornet, Ronin, and classic old-fashioned Molotok). Then, it is the big clean sweep throughout the PSD code, which could take days. I hope to have the alpha ready sometime before the end of the month.
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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PSD7 Progress Report
Mostly searching for code that needs cleanup, but there are a few minor problems I need to try to solve.

For Eternity Port games, the CDM shard gets transferred from one playership to your next playership. Yes, the shard data persists; or rather, the data gets backed up, the shard transferred, then data restored after the wipe from a shard install.
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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Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

PSD7 Progress Report
Added support for Corporate Command playerships. Shipyards and communications are finished, barring minor changes caused by cleanup in progress. I am getting weary of trying to write the mod right, and I do not plan to re-implement more features or most of the ships before alpha release. Features I will try to implement are support for few more select gunships (Hornet, Ronin, and maybe others) and adding a expansion that adds Near Stars onto the standard topology (obviously requires you to have Eternity Port or it will not work) so that player can use EP ships as pilgrims or drones and fly through the Near Stars instead of Ungoverned Territories. I hope I will finish by the weekend.

Wages will not be implemented in the alpha release, since it is not important enough. Consider your crew as an integrated part of the ship. Drones will not shoot quite as fast as the player, usually.
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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Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

PSD7 Progress Report
Added support for the Osaka. Doing so exposed a few problems I did not anticipate, and will need to fix. Will add a few more ships to help test things. Weekend release may not be as certain as I thought.
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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Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

PSD7 Progress Report
Added Hornet, Ronin, Centurion, Britannia, and pre-1.2 classic Molotok. May try to add a few third-party ships from other mods, but that is low priority. The last thing left I must do before alpha release is finish the code cleanup, namely by renaming lots of things to something more sane and consistent. I will aim for end-of-month release, but I cannot guarantee that.

One feature that could be nice and something I like to try, but probably will not (due to time constraints), is formation macro. Something similar to those used by ships given in fleet missions. The idea is player emulates a formation command (within the new Connect dockscreen), either preset or player-defined, and the nearest ships will form up. It would be a tool to reduce steps needed to assemble a formation of ships. The new way to set ship position is an improvement over before, but it can be tedious to do with multiple ships, and the above idea is a way to speed it up. Something to think about for later.
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.
Jacob Bronsky
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Hey there !

As a longtime Transcendence fan, I am overjoyed to see my favourite mod back on track. (Hell, it's probably my favourite mod all games accounted for).
Anyway, I had a small question. EP adds quite a few gunships used by the earth powers. Namely, the Kaiten for the APD, the Demir for the ED and the Otomo for the UAS. Do you have any plans for them ? Globally, what ships do you plan to support for the first release ?
gunship256
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Jacob Bronsky wrote:EP adds quite a few gunships used by the earth powers. Namely, the Kaiten for the APD, the Demir for the ED and the Otomo for the UAS. Do you have any plans for them ? Globally, what ships do you plan to support for the first release ?
Related question for PM: Do you plan to release instructions to make playerships compatible with PSD 7? Hopefully, that can take some of the load off of you in the beginning.

Also, are the XML files for Corporate Command and Eternity Port available/creatable somehow?
PM
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What I will release soon is only an alpha. Some previous features of Playership Drones have not yet been re-implemented, such as linked-fire weapons. Capitals with multiple weapons, like Charon frigate, are not supported like they used to. Consider the alpha release like PSD1.

I just finished my code cleanup, and Playership Drones 7 Alpha is almost ready. Just need to test it and update the docs, and it should be ready for upload later today or tomorrow.

I guess I can test some more third-party ship add-ons, but that will delay release for a day or three (especially if I find out I need to update the Star Castle mod if I try to make those ships compatible). This time, I only plan to support ships with 120 facings. I do not plan to support older ships with only 20 or 40 facings.

Now for some bad news. After I release the Alpha, further development on Playership Drones will be put on hold for a while because I have other projects I really need to work on. This is the point of the alpha - I do not have time to do everything to bring Playership Drones fully up to date as soon as possible.

@ gunship256: You need the libraries to use Corporate Command and/or Eternity Port ships. If you do not have them, you cannot use PSD-compatible ships exclusive to those expansions. You do not need anything else. The Alpha will include what you need to play those ships (if you have the libraries, of course). Special: Adding EP ships to Stars of the Pilgrim will also add Near Stars to the topology (except the final systems involving Luminous), although EP ships are pilgrims, start in Eridani, and Eternity Port quest is not available. PSD for Eternity Port automatically includes EI500, Sapphire, and Wolfen. You can add Corporate Command playerships to PSD/Eternity Port, although no new topology will be added.

Making ships compatible with PSD7 will be easier than before. Changes required are less, and the extra data should be less arcane.

@ Jacob Bronsky: No extra ships for now. Without HUD and other images, it would be tedious to create the resources needed. There was one Eurasian Diarchy ship (Evern, I think) I considered to make compatible, but changed my mind when I saw its stats were worse than a playership (e.g., gunship that turns as slow as a freighter).
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.
gunship256
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Location: repairing armor

PM wrote:You need the libraries to use Corporate Command and/or Eternity Port ships. If you do not have them, you cannot use PSD-compatible ships exclusive to those expansions. You do not need anything else. The Alpha will include what you need to play those ships (if you have the libraries, of course). Special: Adding EP ships to Stars of the Pilgrim will also add Near Stars to the topology (except the final systems involving Luminous), although EP ships are pilgrims, start in Eridani, and Eternity Port quest is not available. PSD for Eternity Port automatically includes EI500, Sapphire, and Wolfen. You can add Corporate Command playerships to PSD/Eternity Port, although no new topology will be added.
Thanks for the info, PM. I'm mostly curious about how you did it so I can learn more about modding. I have Eternity Port and Corporate Command, but I haven't figured out how to look the XML and resource data. Is there a way to open the XML? If not, does the game keep a list of entity declarations somewhere so that if I include the libraries, I can find ways to use the information inside?
PM
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I rename the tdb files to Transcendence.tdb (after copying them to elsewhere), then decompile them one at a time with Transdata. There is another way to decompile tdb files, but I have not tried it yet. There should a topic on how to use TransData somewhere.

For official ships with only one type, there are multiple copies of the same mod except for a few lines of code, and each copy only works for a single adventure. Notice how Corporate Command only extends Stars of the Pilgrim? It does not extend Eternity Port (or Star Castle Arcade). Some extensions like the Osaka dedicate one type per adventure for each ship, and allow the extension to be included anywhere instead of only one adventure.
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 update: Added support for Bobby's Agauptera (only because I converted it to 120 frames as an experiment) and (^o^)'s Tetrapteryx and Vesta ships. Will probably attempt support for Star Castle ships next, then I will be done adding ships and will probably upload PSD7 alpha to Xelerus 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.
PM
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Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

Playerships Drones v7 Alpha is now at Xelerus!
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.
gunship256
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Yay! Downloading now.
Jacob Bronsky
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Wunderbar ! Tanks a lot, PM.
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