Modders: In Here - All Hands on Deck!

[jeeplaw]

For those who are currently modding, i think some of you have come to the realization that we can pretty much do almost anything by modding the game. At least thats hiw i feel.That being said, as a community, i dont think it would do us any good developing out a mod or mods that overlap each other.

So, if youre working on something post it up! It can be small, like my License to Kill mod which introduces kill pirate licenses to something as big as the BTC mod. Either way, we can also learn from each other. Took me forever to learn ehich files to edit to put a new faction in [CyberDyne ftw!] But it works..finally!

So what i have is

1] License to Kill mod : completed, waiting for release. Earn extra creds and exp for killing pirates.


2] CyberDyne factoon Mod : WiP. Faction is in, sectors are in, not sure if ships have spawned yet.
-- no quests yet, no unique npcs yet, no unique ships yet

3] Dynamic quest bulletin board : WiP. Shooting for something like Mechwarrior 2 quest assignments

[Hammish]

Reporting for duty... sir?

[jeeplaw]

Na, I was just following the theme of the game 

Besides BTC, what other features or functions are you going forward with?

[Hammish]

BTC is pretty much everything I'm working with, I just incorporate any ideas I try into that.  My main tinkering at the moment is in the math systems, though, and reworking some of the balance.  Given than BTC uses three class sizes for ships instead of two, I'm really trying to give a purpose to each.  To that end I'm tinkering with armor and damage values (instead of just DPS values) to further differentiate between armor-piercing weapons and rapid-fire, low-damage anti-shield or anti-hull weapons.

As an example, I'm toying with defaulting all corvettes to 0 armor, frigates to 25 armor, and cruisers to 50 armor (and then making it MUCH more difficult to acquire other armor, since it's an summed value and not a multiplicative one).  This would make the rotary weapons exceptional against corvettes, tickling against frigates, and unable to touch a cruiser at all without massive investiture in the weapon damage trees.

Other than that, I'm still just getting all the BTC modules up to snuff.  General weapons and hull options are looking good but I want a vast array of upgrade modules for various attributes and a reason for people to swap them.  I also need to tweak adjustments to the physics models I have made and update NPCs, and then get my crafting system into place (making use of dialogue options and some drop items).  I also have a slate of 3D models that I'd love to have done up, though Flessen has been very helpful in that regard in the past (some of the turret models he did for BTC are amazing, like the artillery cannon, twin barrel and MLRS rack.) Lots to do, lots to do.  Which is why I've been trying to attract people to help with the project.

[jeeplaw]

Wow, from an asset perspective, it looks like you're all in! I think you're right on the rebalance btw. My focus right now isn't so much the math or the items in game as such, but instead what's NOT in the game

[Hammish]

Yeah, I tend to be that way.  As to the balance, I just like things a bit more technical and rock-paper-scissors I suppose; I still feel that the AT guys have the balance for the vanilla game pretty down-pat by this point.

[jeeplaw]

lol, i think i missed something you said..you're working on a crafting system? Go you! lol. I was going to look into it, but the guys at AT said that it's roadmapped and I didn't want to duplicate efforts there. Once they release their crafting engine, I'd like to see what it does before i tear it apart

In terms of "Ship of the Line" type ships, I think dropped blueprints to be redeemed for hulls is an awesome idea. And this is one off stuff that would prove to give great reward AND longer life to the game.

Right now I'm sort of focused on adding meaningful background noise to the game world to give more flavor to the game. Traders being attacked sending out distress signals, that sort of thing. I've added in a new faction called CyberDyne and I need to flesh out some missions for them as well.

[Hammish]

Yeah, I have in the works what I call the poor man's crafting system; it's just done via NPC dialogues.  The basic gist is that various NPCs across the universe would tell you what they needed to craft specific items and then accept those items and give you the completed project back.  Not really tough to do, looking at the starter quest teaches a person everything they need for it.

I always figured I'd eventually make that the way the super-high-end tech was made in my game, the experimental -X variants on everything.  Right now they're available in shops randomly for massive amounts of money, but it'd be nice to have a 'crafted' way to produce them.  Once I get the base project in hand again with the current releases I'll look into putting it in for at least the hulls in BTC.

[jeeplaw]

Does anyone have the function for spawning new kinds of NPC's in the starting system? This will spawn a trader..

function SpawnMerchant(system_id, faction, jag_ids)
{
    //pick random jumpgate
    var jag_id = jag_ids[MathExt.RandRange(0, jag_ids.length)];
   var from_system_id = game.GetJumpgateDestinationSystem(jag_id);
   var from_system_faction = generator.GetSystemFaction(from_system_id);
   if (from_system_faction == "aliens"
      || from_system_faction == "pirates")
   {
      return;
   }
   
   var tradersCount = ship.CountSystemNPCShipsWithBehavior(system_id, "Trader");
   if (tradersCount >= 3)
   {
      // limit traders count in system to 3 max
      return;
   }
   
    var coords = game.GetObjectCoordinates(system_id, jag_id);

    // spawn trader
    var id = generator.AddNPCShipToSystem($i0005, "Trader", 5, "special_human_tradership", system_id, coords.x, coords.y, { class: "merchant", meta: "human" }); // Merchant

    relations.SetShipFaction(id, faction);
    ship.SetShipAsArrivedFromJumpgate(id, jag_id);


is that the same function to reference a new npc type as well for a spawn?

[Hammish]

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.