Override Vanilla Station Frequency

[cybersoul]

Hi, I am new to the forums, having just recently stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Transcendence. After playing a few games, I am interested in slightly tweaking vanilla here and there for my own enjoyment. I've been playing 1.1 and want to do my tweaks to that version for direct testing and comparison. However, it would be great if those changes could be easily ported over to 1.2 at a later time.

Which brings me to my direct question. From the modding tutorials, I know I could copy an entire station, say stCommonwealthDryDock, and then change only the levelFrequency line to modify how much the station appears. However, that seems "heavy" for the one line change and seems prone to break when I later switch from 1.1 to 1.2, if the vanilla dry dock changes between them.

So is there a lighter, better way to override just the levelFrequency of a vanilla station, without changing anything else or unintentionally locking myself into a particular version of the stCommonwealthDryDock code?

Thanks,
CyberSoul

[pixelfck]

Hi, and welcome to the community.

Unfortunately, if you want to change some aspect of an entity (station, ship, item), the only option is to overwrite the entire entity.
So, your observation that this feel "heavy" is unfortunately correct, as is the observation that this is a likely cause of non-compatibility when the vanilla version changes.

Cheers,
Pixelfck

[george moromisato]

Hi, and welcome to the community.

Unfortunately, if you want to change some aspect of an entity (station, ship, item), the only option is to overwrite the entire entity.
So, your observation that this feel "heavy" is unfortunately correct, as is the observation that this is a likely cause of non-compatibility when the vanilla version changes.

Cheers,
Pixelfck

This is, unfortunately, correct.

But we've often talked about adding a system for adjusting just the encounter frequency of a type. For example, imagine that you include a library into your adventure. It would be great if the adventure could control the encounter frequencies for any (and all) types in the library.

My plan is to do exactly that in a future release, almost certainly in 2014.

[Song]

Hi, and welcome to the community.

Unfortunately, if you want to change some aspect of an entity (station, ship, item), the only option is to overwrite the entire entity.
So, your observation that this feel "heavy" is unfortunately correct, as is the observation that this is a likely cause of non-compatibility when the vanilla version changes.

Cheers,
Pixelfck

This is, unfortunately, correct.

But we've often talked about adding a system for adjusting just the encounter frequency of a type. For example, imagine that you include a library into your adventure. It would be great if the adventure could control the encounter frequencies for any (and all) types in the library.

My plan is to do exactly that in a future release, almost certainly in 2014.

It'd be a nice option to control the station availability from one place, declaring the station(s) UNID(s) and then the levelfrequency.....then just tell the campaign to look at that bit of XML during system generation to determine how common the randomly-generated stations should be. That way it'd be possible to swap out station spawning frequencies for an entire campaign, or easily tweak relative values for a custom campaign without having to jump around in the code. I've always found it odd that the rarity of a station in a campaign is handled in the station code, not the campaign code.

[cybersoul]

Hi, and welcome to the community.

Unfortunately, if you want to change some aspect of an entity (station, ship, item), the only option is to overwrite the entire entity.
So, your observation that this feel "heavy" is unfortunately correct, as is the observation that this is a likely cause of non-compatibility when the vanilla version changes.

Cheers,
Pixelfck

This is, unfortunately, correct.

But we've often talked about adding a system for adjusting just the encounter frequency of a type. For example, imagine that you include a library into your adventure. It would be great if the adventure could control the encounter frequencies for any (and all) types in the library.

My plan is to do exactly that in a future release, almost certainly in 2014.

Thanks for the welcome and all the quick replies, as I could not find a way to do this by searching and was wondering if I had missed some magic onEvent type trick to change it. I remember seeing a (staSetLevelFrequency UNID levelFrequency) function mentioned, which would of course provide the most dynamic control over this exact issue. On the other hand, the most flexible static solution would be some sort of ObjectExtension XML mechanism for the major XML configured object classes (stations, items, etc), where you could statically override just certain parameters/fields, without changing the base object. I think that is where alterecco was going in this post http://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.p ... 620#p40620.

For now I will just copy/paste and keep a manual patch diff.

Cheers,
CyberSoul