[George] How about Pre-Game Dialogs?

[Periculi]

I have been wanting a way to add some choices that the player can make beyond "ship" before the game starts, or a way to force a dockscreen dialog when the game is entered.

Is there any way to make a work around that would have the player start on some kind of dialog screen before they start flying around to allow them to enter some data and make some additional choices that exists in the current version?

My first desire with this type of functionality is to allow the player to choose a ship and a faction (sov) and also a starting world. Now, I can make a very crappy work-around that simply drops the player in an empty starting node and forcing them to dock with a dialog station, however, it would be more elegant to simply start the player in the dialog screen that my messy work around is trying to coerce them to open on their own by just giving them a single choice of action once the main screen loads and the game allows the player control of their ship.

Obviously, scripting for the ship selection screen would be a great thing. If we could hijack control there and make custom entry screens, that would be a thing of wonder and elegance! However, I know your schedule is full and this is a major code change for what is currently a "pretty much done forever" area of the game engine.

As a compromise, how about a function in the script or as a value of one of the tags (is there a <OnPlayerEnteringGame>? {{is there a list of the xml resources similar to the function list somewhere?}} ) that would open a dockscreen without the player 'docking' with anything.

[alterecco]

As a compromise, how about a function in the script or as a value of one of the tags (is there a <OnPlayerEnteringGame>? {{is there a list of the xml resources similar to the function list somewhere?}} ) that would open a dockscreen without the player 'docking' with anything.

Just call scrShowScreen in that event. If it fails to work, then delay it a bit with a timer.

And no, we have no definitive list of xml elements :(

[Periculi]

Ah, so gScreen doesn't crash out anymore if it hasn't been set, that's an improvement.

Ideally, perhaps for this to work and appear smoothly for me, if there was a way to skip the ship picker if there is only one ship might be nice, or a flag in the adventure description, such as shipPicker="true/false" that would indicate to the game engine that we would like to skip the ship selection screen.

[CFG]

What Im missing is some feature to actually select/deselect which mods should be in a game which which should not.

It happens that Ill want more than one game at a time - eg. for trying out a new mod besides my vanilla game, play a game with different mods and continue another one later ...

Currently the only way to do this is copy the whole Transcendence directory for each 'game setup' and merge highscores by hand.

If I could select which mods should be used in a game and keep my most frequently used ones in the extensions folder, that would help a lot.

After deciding which mods to use (or none), select an adventure, ship, faction, starting location ... I would like it that way too.