Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

A place to discuss mods in development and concepts for new mods.
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Song
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After getting one-shot by a Drake during my testing runs, I have removed the chance for M2s on the Lord's Drake. It now only spawns with M1s. This is a distinct improvement, although it now seems to be irradiating its escorts.

I've also made encounters more frequent. All in all, these guys are mostly doing what I want....their general tendency to overkill is more indicative of problems with armor than anything else. Killing them quickly is generally the best move.


Tomorrow is my final day to get new things in and fixed up before I freeze everything, polish the last few things, and upload a version for public testing...and the Great Georgeventure.


..I must say, it may be the RNG, but playing with this mod has had some extremely exciting moments.
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Operation 'Save the Deimos' has been a huge success, and they're now rather lethal (but not that much tougher...it's more down to not losing their guns as much). Wolfy got the AXTIR barricades working as intended, and my changes to the LOTOR are going....reasonably. Need to up Drake availability, but apart from that they're going rather well and showing up where I want them to.


As the final balance pass before a release begins, I'm adding some fun little misc items into the game. They don't do anything, but some of them are fairly valuable and should make for good trade goods. You can find them in the same illogically weird places as misc items turn up in the base game. :)


Now I've just got two more launchers to code in, some minor tweaks here and there...and then I'm done. For now.
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Just waiting on someone to be able to launch the game with the mod to make sure it works, and I'll be able to release the alpha. The last addition: the IMP9 rocket launcher. Fires a spread of rockets based off the Dragonfly system's projectiles. It's omnidirectional, but slow firing and unguided. In the future I'll expand the munitions line...but for now, I've settled for a couple more Frontier references. Choose between a short-range heavy hitter or a longer ranged spread that does less damage.

I've also given the IMP9 to the Knight's Frigate. Be careful getting close to one if it's not firing NAMI heavy munitions at you. No custom graphics yet for the LOTOR, but what they have will do for now.

Edit: And already I see a hotpatch I need to do before release. Ah well. Not a hard one at least...the IMP9 is overperforming, so I need to bump the level up.
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 Couple of minor item name bugs I’ve stumbled across. First, a cans of Fauxconut milk. Second, an dual x-ray laser. You may want to do a sweep to make sure you didn’t miss any others. …Or maybe recruit Xephyr. He’s good at finding that sort of thing.
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Song
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AssumedPseudonym wrote: Couple of minor item name bugs I’ve stumbled across. First, a cans of Fauxconut milk. Second, an dual x-ray laser. You may want to do a sweep to make sure you didn’t miss any others. …Or maybe recruit Xephyr. He’s good at finding that sort of thing.
I'd seen the first one, but not the second. Thanks. :)
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With features on hold while the devstreams are including SM&M++ (so I can patch things without breaking things), I'm looking for other people to do some general testing on the mod. I'm also starting to plan ahead to the next phase of things to add into the mod.


I'm thinking about having an uncommon offshoot of Korolov as my next "try something new" project. They'd be lower risk than escorting (or possibly about the same but with altered payments?), but you wouldn't be able to win promotions. They'd also not care as much about booting you out if you got to be a Legend. I'm thinking possibly a maintenance depot? It'd also be a good opportunity to bring in some of the specialised 'Q-ship' freighters (like the vanilla EI100M) I've been wanting to use. They'd be super-rare, but being able to 'escort' one into battle might be a fun mission.


..I'm also thinking about doing some modding to Korolov anyway to expand the range of ships they can ask you to escort. Korolov is annoying because it has mountains of (quite old) code baked into a single station...but this isn't that bad when it comes to trying to modify a whole bunch of things. It just discourages minor tweaks. It's been some years since I last tried this though, so I'll need to relearn a few things (and learn some mission coding finally).

Another goal, and one which is significantly easier, is to add additional patrol encounters (technically "wander"), possibly as a feature of Commonwealth metropoli.
The frigates of the 'Lords of the Outer Realm' are the only NPC ships that currently (can) mount the IMP9 rocket launcher. At short range it's a boring but powerful scatter weapon, but still not really a match for the armor on a Protector 3 IAV.
The frigates of the 'Lords of the Outer Realm' are the only NPC ships that currently (can) mount the IMP9 rocket launcher. At short range it's a boring but powerful scatter weapon, but still not really a match for the armor on a Protector 3 IAV.
KnightProtector.png (227.29 KiB) Viewed 7590 times
And finally, while testing has revealed that the IMP9 is if anything overperforming, I'm going to start work on some thermonuclear cartridges for endgame use with it. Continuing the "reuse names from Frontier 0.5" trend, they'll be the 'Hammer' and 'Anvil' cartridges (and as in frontier, this really messes with the naming theme for the IMP9 missiles)
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Made some tweaks to the Parker Plasmatronics lineup to fix some issues. Patch will be up "Soon".
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Still working on hotpatch:

-Fixed LOTOR encounters not containing gunships sometimes
-LOTOR Settlements and strongholds can now spawn patrols comprised entirely of gunships (before they always had a heavier ship). This means patrolling gunship squadrons with stealth armor is a thing now, as was intended (but not coded) before.
-Fixed bad code on LOTOR Drake reinforcements
-Increased frequency of encounters

-Slight change to Panther IAV settings for AI.

-P40 plasma sweeper now 2-slot, heavier. Still NotRandom, so you have to see a Protector 4 die in order to get one.
-P51 and 58 slightly altered, more expensive.
-P67 has faster ROF, is now 2-slot. Heavier and more expensive.

Patch will be up in the next day or so, will not break saved games.
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relanat
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A very enjoyable hour blowing stuff up! Wish I had more time.
I don't know if it's one of your effects but the little red/orange blast explosions look really good. Not to mention a lot of the other stuff. And I love that quad-Akan!

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I did get a crash/no-load trying to restart a game. GodMod, SM+M 1.9b and SNAPPS installed. 1.7a2c.
.sav available if you want it.

When trying to load the game I got:
"Unable to load game.
Crash loading game"

Code: Select all

Debug log
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Start logging session
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Direct3D
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Screen: 1280 x 768
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Scale: 1.00
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Background blt: Enabled
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Use Direct X: Enabled
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Use GPU compositing: Enabled
10/14/2016 10:39:56	LogPixelsY: 96
10/14/2016 10:39:56	DeviceType: 0x1
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Caps: 0x00020000
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Caps2: 0x20020000
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Caps3: 0x00000320
10/14/2016 10:39:56	DevCaps: 0x0008ae50
10/14/2016 10:39:56	DevCaps2: 0x00000051
10/14/2016 10:39:56	[DX] Buffer Format: 22
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Transcendence 1.7 Alpha 2c
10/14/2016 10:39:56	Graphics quality maximum: 47 ms; 2 cores.
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Loaded library: Extensions\DockScreenFramework-master\Library.xml
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Loaded extension: Extensions\GalacticOmniDevice-master\Core.xml
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Loaded extension: Extensions\SM&M+++.xml
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Loaded extension: Extensions\SNAPSS_Alpha1.xml
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Loading news.
10/14/2016 10:40:03	gethostbyname failed: 11004.
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Unable to resolve address for multiverse.kronosaur.com.
10/14/2016 10:40:03	gethostbyname failed: 11001.
10/14/2016 10:40:03	Unable to verify connection to the Internet.
10/14/2016 10:40:04	Error from Multiverse: You are not connected to the Internet.
10/14/2016 10:40:04	All resources downloaded.
10/14/2016 10:40:08	Initializing adventure: Transcendence.tdb
10/14/2016 10:40:14	Created new game
10/14/2016 10:40:14	Starting new game.
10/14/2016 10:40:31	Loaded game file version: 1076604
10/14/2016 10:40:41	Crash in CGameFile::LoadSystem
10/14/2016 10:40:41	Crash loading game.
10/14/2016 10:40:46	End logging session
Happens every time I try to load that game. Others with the same extensions are fine.
==============================================
Only other thing was the side-mounted Dobson doesn't have an external moniker in the Ship Configuration Weapons screen.

Nice work. :D
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Song
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I haven't seen that one before. It's likely to be from the godmod breaking something (unless you upgraded the mod during the save, in which case something funky may have happened), but if you run into it again on another savefile please let me know what you did leading up to it. I'll check the Dobson...auxiliary mount weapons aren't really external as such....they get damaged by the auxiliary weapons base that they inherit (which is basically an overlay), but there may be something I can do to label things....
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I'm now working to get the LOTOR graphics tht Xephyr has made for me into the game (and an obviously massive thanks to him for taking the time to make some fantastic ships). Unfortunately, there's an annoying bug where one (completely normal) image resource results in an invisisble ship. I've rewritten everything three times with no impact at all...so I'm gonna give up until I can put it past someone else with more experience.


As a teaser for the release that will come when I work out WTF the engine is doing this time (and why)....
I'm working on some renames for the LOTOR ships, as well as tweaking setups to match the new graphics.....but for now, here's a couple of them trying hard to kill each other (the missileships won)
I'm working on some renames for the LOTOR ships, as well as tweaking setups to match the new graphics.....but for now, here's a couple of them trying hard to kill each other (the missileships won)
LOTORTeaser.png (262.37 KiB) Viewed 7509 times
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 There are usually three causes for invisible ships: Deliberate design decision, out-of-memory, and BMP version on masks. I’m pretty sure we can rule out the first two in this case. Poke me on IRC later and I’ll try to get things sorted for you.
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Song
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Invisible ships fixed with AP's help tweaking the relevant BMP.



-Revised LOTOR setups across the board
-Renamed several ships (ongoing effort)
-Tweaked a few weapons
-Reworked the Tsar launcher. It's now a magic "make things explode" rocket, but it's awful to actually use.
-Buffed the deimos by increasing HP and reducing interaction on the Hecates cannon. It can now shoot through incoming fire.
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Those sprites are utterly amazing. I so wish I had more time to practice in Blender.

I can confirm that GodMod is dying. A simpler, sleeker alternative would be a great idea - the code is byzantine and I doubt anyone but the original creator could restore it.
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Song
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JohnBWatson wrote:Those sprites are utterly amazing. I so wish I had more time to practice in Blender.
So do I! Xephyr did great work...especially based off the vague descriptions I gave him. He's just sent me the station graphics, and apart from a small nitpick with one of them they're just as good...so I'll be implementing those soon enough as well. And moving him up the credits. :P
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