Militia missions --> new format

Freeform discussion about anything related to modding Transcendence.
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JohnBWatson
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Creating a thread on what I mentioned in the stream today. Thus far, I've got the destroy station and destroy freighter missions set up, and have a placeholder for the bar screen on the station override. I was planning on taking care of the two original missions I haven't gotten around to yet, but I figured I'd make a thread here to seek comments on what I have so far and get advice for additional missions.

Attached is the WIP code for the conversion.

An idea I've had is to use the station's guards as wingmen for various missions. This could serve as an alternate means of acquiring Rama and Jenna that is less predictable and more immersive, by having surviving Ronin Cs and Centurion Xs have a chance of initiating their conversations.

Edit: Cleaned up the code a bit.
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MilitiaFixes.xml
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Last edited by JohnBWatson on Sat Mar 18, 2017 6:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.
shanejfilomena
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you can lock onto the station guards and have them escort the player -
fall back is sometimes an escort fights...other times they don't
( as we can see from the CSC escorts that simply are "there" sometimes ( not all the time ) and let their leader take the hits unless something is right in front of them. )

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					(setq escorts (sysFindObject gSource "sHZ O:guard;"))
But it's far better then anything I got enough hot cocoa to tinker with :)
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giantcabbage
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Hi,

I think this is a great idea - and I’m also working on converting things to use MissionType. I’ve been putting the changes on github and you can view them in this pull request: https://github.com/kronosaur/Transcendence/pull/32

If you go to the files tab you can see the edits I’ve made, or click the View button to see the final state of the file. I don’t have it in mod form at the moment, but it should be straight forward to download the files and include them in one for testing.
I have conversions of the four Militia missions, but I was focussing on just converting them and have not made many other “enhancements” (other than those that come naturally from using MissionTypes, and Korolov which I extracted from my old mod).

Anyway it looks like the main difference is I based my code on Eternity Port, while yours is closer to Corporate Command
  • You have a lot of simple dockscreens (NoAccess, MilitiaMessage etc.) which could just use dsRPGMessage instead.
  • I don't think you need to count the number of success / failures with militia_missionCompleted. You can call plyGetKeyEventStat instead to get the number of success/failures which the game counts for you
  • I used rpgMissionAssignment rather than writing my own function (though I did modify it to add the interval between missions).
JohnBWatson
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Very nice - I didn't know someone else was working on this too. Seeing as your version is more complete than mine, is there anything I could focus on that would help?
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Song
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While it's a bit outside the scope of what you've all been planning, might I suggest swapping the marauder ship spawning for the various missions over to tables? Whether it's custom or the stock encounter tables, it would be good to vary things up a little. The old missions hard-coded Viking II's and this causes some issues for modding (as well as not scaling by system level).
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JohnBWatson
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Was planning to do that - even had it in the notes - but wasn't sure if it wouldn't be better to code in the different scenarios manually, so that there'd be more room for custom events, like what was done for George's Scarab escort mission.
giantcabbage
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While it's a bit outside the scope of what you've all been planning, might I suggest swapping the marauder ship spawning for the various missions over to tables?
Yes, my main aim is to update all the legacy missions to use the latest features (MissionType, Language, ShipTable etc.) so that they are easier to mod. My main reason for avoiding making in-game “enhancements” to the missions today is that then I’d have to deal with new balance issues and behaviour bugs. Enhancing the missions is definitely more fun, but it takes much longer - so my plan is to convert everything, (hopefully!) get it merged, and then start enhancing / upgrading things.

In many cases ShipTables can be easier to read and code than having a fixed set of enemies. For Fleet mission 2a I’ve replaced this with this OK - the polar2 doesn’t need to be in there yet, but in the future you could have all the level-scaling for escorts etc.

For the Commonwealth Agricultural mission I’ve designed it to allow multiple types of attack. Currently it only has a pirate attack like the legacy mission. But you should be able to add an extra one just by adding another data block like this (there’d be extra work balancing and adding appropriate mission text):

Hmm.. actually half the Militia mission already uses encounter tables (etMarauderAmbushX), but the tables were mostly Viking-IIs with no level variation! As far as I can tell the two tables are ONLY used by the Militia missions so I’m tempted to add more ships and level scaling.
Seeing as your version is more complete than mine, is there anything I could focus on that would help?
Testing / checking for where I’ve been lazy with the conversion is always helpful (e.g. places I should have put in a ShipTable!)

Or if you want to focus on new / enhanced missions that would be great too. Simple things (e.g. a balanced, level-scaled ship table) can probably go in sooner. With new missions, even if George doesn’t want to merge them straight away, you can leave them as an “extra missions” mod (I suspect this is what I’ll do with all the experimental bits of my old Korolov missions)
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Xephyr
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I'd be willing to help with adding new missions. I've been pushing for having more stations use rpgMissionAssignment for that reason; Ideally I think there should be more missions than the player should reasonably expect to encounter in a typical game.

Missions are probably the hardest type to create and I'm always happy to see more of them.
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RPC
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Location: Hmm... I'm confused. Anybody have a starmap to the Core?

I'm making a huge modpack and got this error:
Image

just change line:

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"\""We're recieving a distress call from a Scarab - class superfreighter in deep space. We don't know what the hell it's doing there, but we need somebody to go find out. Are you interested, " (typTranslate &unidCommonwealthMilitia; 'PlayerRank) "?\""
to

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"\" We're recieving a distress call from a Scarab - class superfreighter in deep space. We don't know what the hell it's doing there, but we need somebody to go find out. Are you interested, " (typTranslate &unidCommonwealthMilitia; 'PlayerRank) "?\""
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JohnBWatson
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This mod is largely obsolete due to the recent update to the game that did what this was going to do. Ditto for Syndikat fixes. I can make the change if you'd like, but there's nothing unique that needs to be archived.
RPC
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Location: Hmm... I'm confused. Anybody have a starmap to the Core?

Nah if it's obsolete don't worry about it.
I haven't been keeping up with the changes so learning as I go/pretending I still know stuff and hope people correct me.
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Der Tod ist der zeitlose Frieden und das leben ist der Krieg
Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen!
I don't want any sort of copyright on my Transcendence mods. Feel free to take/modify whatever you want.
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