The evolution of playership changing

[Prophet]

I've been playing with the new function for a bit now and I have a few requests.

My idea was to use an event handler to turn a standard NPC ship into a playable ship class, effectively making all modded ships compatible with the ship change. I have run into a number of roadblocks however.

An event handler only allows it's base ship access to the events but allowing access to the <communications> element would be much appreciated. If the ship in question inherits directly from the virtual shipClass this problem is avoided but that solution requires modifying the xml and I would prefer to do it strictly with tScript.

As a bonus, if the event handler would share dockingPorts, dockscreen, and playerSettings, we could use them to turn any ship into a playerShip.

[george moromisato]

I think what you're suggestion is that there would be a base class that contains a <PlayerSettings> element. Then you would set any ship to that base class.

I don't think that will work. <PlayerSettings> is pretty tied to the ship class. [For example, the number of armor segments has to match.]

I think you will be better off just overriding the classes that you want to turn into player ships.

[Dyrewulfe]

Well, an odd place for a first post, but... Oh well.

First off, I just started playing, and as a result playing around with, Transcendence. What's the "new" function related to playership changing? I've not been able to find the info on it yet.

(Re-Edit: Nevermind. Found the info on the above.)

Other than that, I can see how using a converting system would be an issue, from what I've been able to gather from browsing the xml so far. It seems to me, though, that... Well, I guess I can't call it easier, since there's quite a lot of grunt work involved in it. Anyways, if it's planned or intended to add playership changing(I believe I read some bits on the official site that said this is the case.), wouldn't it be best to make these components more generic? For instance, things such as the armor and reactor HUD, etc... Could be made generic and procedural... And if all ships had the other necessary fields, such as device slots and maximum cargo space, wouldn't it be rather easy to support any ship being player-compatible?


(Edit - P.S. What's the issue with communication, exactly?)

[PKodon]

Well, as I can't find a thread with reference to a problem someone brought up (probably on IRC), I will post here.

The problem that was brought up was that, when changing player ships, the old ship becomes like a wingman, but won't fire any of it's weapons.

Now, my brain sits there in the background, thinking about things, till it has an "Ahah!" moment. Yesterday, that moment came with regard to this problem.

Could it be that the reason the old player ship did not fire weapons when attacked is that "player" ships have no AI code?

If so, then the next question is, what happens if you put AI code in a player ship, does it fight with your control, does it just auto target and fire weapons?

Any other ideas?

PK