Reworking wiki

[Lurler]

Hello everyone.

Now that the game is almost ready we have little more time for other things and one of the things I personally would like to do is make our wiki a bit better since currently it lask a lot of important information.

So, my question - what articles/pages in particular would you like to see there?

[Hammish]

My personal thought would be maybe having a section for the equipment/hulls and the stats on it, like a reference sheet of the stuff available, and maybe some additional work on the modding section (which I'd still love to help with in some way).

[Lurler]

To be honest adding pages that simply state things already present in the game isn't really that important at this point. Plus it can be done by other people at any time. While I thought I might be more useful by writing stuff that other people simply can't know.

So, you advice about modding articles is definitely spot on. I just did some major overhaul of some articles and wrote more detailed information on certain points, as well as adding the modding footer to easily find other related articles. Hope it clears some modding things up.

I only wish I could get help from you guys to fill the wiki with more relevant info

[Hammish]

We'll snap to it soonish!  For me personally work has just been kicking my ass, in addition to getting BTC finally up to snuff.

Really, it's AT's fault on that last bit, though.  You guys made such a great sandbox to play in and then keep adding awesome stuff in terms of code to tinker with.

[Hammish]

Addition: For 'stuff we couldn't possibly know except through trial and error', I do know it'd be handy to have an explanation of some of the more odd values present in the XMLs; 90% of them are self explanatory, but the rest really aren't.   Like the stuff that's been discussed in the modding forums but people might have to search a ton to find, like how armor works, or how the flight system is modeled (the latter still confounds me from time to time, when trying to balance maneuver vs. acceleration vs. mass vs. everything else, hee)

Example from a generator:
<effect_type>energy_production_generator_value</effect_type>
<effect_base>45</effect_base>

<effect_type>energy_capacity_value</effect_type>
<effect_base>1500</effect_base>

<effect_type>fuel_consumption_generator_value</effect_type>
<effect_base>90</effect_base>

Now, production value and capacity are simple: how much it produces per second and how much max it can store.  But how does consumption track?  Is it how much fuel the generator uses per second, how much it uses per point of energy produced, ect?  (I'm pretty sure it's how much is used per second active but I could be wrong.)

TL;DR a bit of notation on how values and systems work and what metric they use might go a long way.

[Lurler]

If I'm not mistaken (and I may very well be) it is per X energy generated. With the basic idea that if the generator outputs X energy, then it will consume Y fuel to do so. It could do so in smaller batches if you don't need the maximum power output at once, in which case it will consume less fuel.

[Hammish]

I had considered that as well, but if that's the way it is computed then there must be a decimal tossed in somewhere since otherwise it'd take like a full tank of gas to regen 10% of a capacitor.   1/1000 would probably make sense, though.  So a 90-cost generator would consume around 0.09 fuel per energy regenerated.

But yeah, it's that kind of little stuff that I think would be most useful to modders, though that's just my opinion.  Otherwise it's asking here or trial and error for things like the generators or stuff like the various handling bits and varying decimals there (acceleration and maneuver being XXX.XX% percentage based but cruise/strafe being 0.XXX% based.)  Just a small thing, though, and the only thing I could think of for adding to the wiki.

[Psychophobe]

Ok I'm playing as a ship that uses Missiles, and I have found I would really like some missile information:

I am using "Homing missiles" but they do not appear to "home". They sometimes fly in a straight line, and other times they appear to follow my mouse, which is more "guided" than homing, and as well as this I actually have no idea the best distance from craft to fire missiles. Also, The SRR DF1 missile is very, very slow, so I fire it very close, and often get splash damage from it, but then the homing missiles don't home so perhaps a guide for which distances work best for which missile types?

I took to assume that Homing missiles homed in themselves on targets and did not need to be "guided", as these would be Guided missiles! *groan*

Edit: I know the SRR DF1 is NOT a homing missile. 

[Hammish]

Are you locking your target with 'R'?  Generally weapons that have homing require a target lock, beyond that it's simply a matter of some projectiles homing better than others.

Also, if you lose lock homing projectiles will go 'dumb' and resume a straight trajectory.