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Messages - Hammish

#16
Game discussion / Re: Delay with this update
June 19, 2015, 11:41:23 PM
As someone who ended up in the hospital for illness about a month ago, I feel your pain Lurler. :(

Hope the recovery goes smoothly and quickly!  Can't wait to have a chance to check out the new stuff and update my own accordingly once I'm back in the swing of things. :)
#17
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod Discussion
May 13, 2015, 09:12:11 AM
Sorry for the long bit between delays, been pretty sick as of late on my end.  Hopefully by this weekend the next patch for BTC will be out.  It should include:

Finished reworking of remaining icons;
Fixing the remaining vanilla VE quest items to work with BTC;
Last of the NPC modifications with armor/hull changes for pirate cruisers and battlecruisers, traders, and aliens.  (Alien balancing in particular will require some testing from the world)
Two new weapon types in the Experimental tree to make the SP cost worth it:
- Plasma Missiles: a smaller, more agile version of the plasma torpedo.  Can empty the capacitor rapidly for burst damage, exceptional tracking, great versus corvettes but only marginally effective against frigates and useless against cruisers and structures.
- Cluster Cannon: an upscaled version of the flak cannon, the cluster cannon fires large slow-reloading canister rounds to saturate an area as opposed to the constant stream of explosives provided by the flak.  The submunitions are actually powerful enough to damage both corvettes and frigates with ease, and the larger versions of this gun can even harry cruisers.
#18
Sadly it's one of the things I don't think modders can help out with as well, since it's part of the GUI. :(
#19
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod Discussion
May 06, 2015, 07:02:37 AM
Yeah, that's because aliens haven't gotten the NPC treatment yet.  S'in the patch notes, I was rolling out the NPC adjustments bit by bit.  Corvettes were first, then frigates, the next drop will have the cruiser pirates, aliens and trader ships upgraded with the new formula.  Sorry for the slow roll-out but I wanted to get the entry-level mobs tuned to the new system first before tackling the endgame stuff (BTC is no longer using the vanilla system of determining structure/armor/shield based on danger level, but on individual mob data).

Granted, tachs -are- insane damage, but they're overall very low DPS (great burst damage and snipe, but the 3.0 seconds between shots is murder.)

For a better approximation of the power until then, if you're high level, hang out in high-danger space and square off with some of the NPCs there.  Some of them mount weapons like the tachs or fusion beams.  Be especially careful of the Dio XEs with tachs or ptorps if you're in a Hades, given the lack of hull/defenses. :)
#20
Ideas and suggestions / Re: Not all hulls alike
April 30, 2015, 03:31:58 AM
Doing factional stuff would actually be a lot easier, since you already have faction tags in the game that you can rely on. ;)

Basically shops just go through every item in the game when attempting to stock a slot, and if it doesn't meet X, Y and Z parameters, it moves on to the next item until all slots are filled.  For the hull section, X might be 'hull' tag to stock hull slots; now you just need to make Y or Z into 'freedom' and voila, the only thing that will will ever even possibly go into those slots is a 'hull' item that is tagged 'freedom'. :)

Also, we do, kinda!  Look at some of the cross-itemization that Walmart is doing, and they're even global.  Some of their stores now have car lots on them, gas stations either on-premises or nearby, auto repair stations in many of them, pharmacies, lawn & garden centers... yeah.  Stations in VE, totally the Walmarts of the future.
#21
Ideas and suggestions / Re: Not all hulls alike
April 29, 2015, 04:12:37 AM
Yeah, there's nothing like an item rarity, just tech level (used in the calc to determine what is a valid object for placement) and how many items in each class are used in a station type.  That does mean that it's possible to make a 'hull shop', though, that you could seed either randomly or in places like the capital sectors, which I always thought would be a neat idea and makes sense to me based on assumed proximity to shipyards.  Severely lessen hull spawns in other shops to make up for it, voila!  Edit: It is worth noting that you could probably create shop slots that were 'reserved' for a certain rarity of item like this:

1) Create a new attrib name.  Let's call it RARE here.
2) Create a new variation on the tech-level search function.  This function will not only require that an item matches a minimum tech level but also possesses the RARE tag.
3) Install the new function in some shops so that it procures items.  You could even get fancy here and put it into regular stations; if X is the number of items in a category a station normally spawns (defined in the station XMLs), instead have the tech-level search function call X-1 items and 1 of your new-function items.
4) Add the RARE tag into whatever items you want potentially filling that slot.

Now, if you REALLY wanted to get fancy, you could randomize the RARE slot number in a shop.  Have the scripting RNG a number between 0 and 100.  If 0-89, Y=0.  If 90-99, Y=1.  If 100, Y=2.  Now have the station generate X-Y basic items and Y RARE-tag items.  You now have items that you still can't set with individual rarities, but you have a rarity you can adjust (via the 0-100 formula) for a specific subset of items, and you've done it without bloating the number of items in shops.

True randomization is out, though, unless people get REALLY creative with the scripts and come up with a way I haven't found yet.  In order to be listed as a valid shop purchase a ship needs to have an associated ID tag with it, and the XML for that ship is loaded when the mod loads (and compares the ID tag to the file name, no less.)  Thus, in order to actually do true randomization, the script itself would need to be creating actual-new XML files on your local machine... but even that wouldn't help, because they won't load into the mod immediately.  To say nothing of the fact that I'd have a thing or two to say about a mod demanding those kind of write privs on my local drive. ;)

Also, be careful with exactly how many variants you generate, if you go that route.  I'm starting to run into the issue with BTC where you can make the mod file... well, awfully clunky, with the amount of custom stuff trying to load at once.  Too many variants and you're going to start running into performance issues, especially with people that have machines with less RAM.  Just a pointer. :)
#22
You guys have done an excellent job at communication through all of testing and now release, if you ask me.  Don't worry if you can't reply to everything. :D
#23
Ideas and suggestions / Re: Not all hulls alike
April 27, 2015, 04:38:42 AM
You could actually do this within reason using mods; just create a few variations on the hull you want to do up this way, then use the same description and icon for the ship.  Voila, now the game will spawn different copies of that ship with different stats.  Not wholly randomized, but... pretty close. :)
#24
Mods / Re: Pinkeh's Workshop
April 26, 2015, 09:05:33 PM
Truth! :)
#25
Mods / Re: Pinkeh's Workshop
April 26, 2015, 02:30:37 AM
Quote from: MenschMaschine on April 26, 2015, 12:11:47 AM
Thank you very much for not becoming a slave of greed and immaturity :D

It's a bit more complex than that. :P

The only thing that really made me hate the situation, personally, was the comment from 'Valve legal department' that said if another mod was being offered free to the public, people should feel free to poach it for paid mods.  That should have never, ever been said and also doesn't hold up legally. :|

Hope it all works out, though.  I'd much rather see them put into place a system where mod developers are just encouraged to work more closely with game publishers, and in some cases are merely allowed to release paid mods as 'non-official DLC' that the development studio signs off on.  I do firmly believe that some mods are so involved, and have high enough production values, that they should have the right to collect a bit of income, but not in the current system they are trying to push.  As it was said... a clusterfuck, and anyone who watched what happened with Bukkit for Minecraft knew what was coming.
#26
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod Main
April 25, 2015, 04:22:17 AM
Bump for the update to 2.0.9!  Massive changes in BTC as of 2.0, even moreso with this version.

Please enjoy my work and let me know what you think.  Steam comments especially welcome. :)
#27
Kinda depends, if I understand the javascript correctly.  Basically you can create a new function to summon any type of ship, the important part is is the NPCGenerator call with the correctly-passed arguments.  So you might want to create a new function based on that one if you want an entirely new /class/ of NPC, apart from aliens, pirates, traders, ect.

If you just want to spawn in new entities of an existing type, you can just use the existing functions and make sure that the tags are set correctly in the XMLs for the NPCs, as those are what the randomizer uses (along with the current danger level) to pick valid choices.
#28
Modding info / Re: Modding the VoidExpanse
April 24, 2015, 06:00:55 AM
Yar, I knew from analyzing the javascript that flat values were added in first, calculated, and then percentiles added in.  Also clarified this (and I forgot I had) when I added in my new defensive tech tree; it has both flat bonuses (good for lighter ships) and percentile bonuses (great for larger ships), and you can tell from the final number how it handles those.

I just wasn't sure how it'd parse it if you had two percentile values from different sources (it seems like the game treats effects from gear, skills and buffs all differently in the calc.) :)
#29
Modding info / Re: Modding the VoidExpanse
April 23, 2015, 10:45:09 PM
One last quick question for now.  If I'm reading CalculateShip.js correctly, all modifiers from all ships are added together into the cache before being applied, right?

Example:

I have a ship that is mounting a 1000-strength shield.
I have skills that give me +100% strength.
I place a mod on the hull that also gives the effect of +100% strength.

Would the total strength be 3000 or 4000?  I know for boosts in the same category it adds them together (so if I had a skill for 50% and a skill for 50%, it'd give 100% off the base), but I'm not entirely sure how it works if the modifiers are coming from different areas (skillcache vs. invcache vs. buffscache).

Thanks in advance for any answers, guys.  Still doing what I can to try and get word out about the game, hope your sales are going steadily and you're getting some reward for your time spent both on the code and on people like me who like math and systems. :)
#30
Game discussion / Re: Possible to be a pirate?
April 22, 2015, 08:04:13 AM
Quote from: Silberspeer on April 20, 2015, 03:14:59 AM
You'll have to resist the screams of robo-parrot 24/7. That's all.

+1

Applicable, this should be the autopilot for Pirate ships:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJnklyxbcL8