[Script] Factory Complex Constructor [22.9.2007] [V3.21 FINAL]

Brinnie · Post by **Brinnie** » Wed, 16. Apr 08, 13:40

spoidz wrote:Brinnie,

Yes, I've never had any issues with any of my XTM starts.

Thanks again.

I'm gonna get started then, I just skimmed through the manual and it looked a bit complicated.

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Wed, 16. Apr 08, 14:04

brinnie,

It's really easy if you just take your time. Also there is a fail-safe that when you are moving a factory, it won't allow you to move it on top of another station so you can avoid crashing them together.

A few tips:

Always use F3 to look at the station you are moving and then zoom out to see where it is in relation to the next one.

Whenever you drop a station, after you un-fix it with the FCC, hit Shift-P twice and it will set the station at zero rotation and facing the default way. Move all your stations at default rot/facing and they will be easier to line up.

Once you get close to the other stations set your movement/rotation steps [shift-(-)] (shift-ins) to the smallest amount and then you can fine tune their location to the next station.

When you connect the first two stations, you can place the HUB pretty far from the top of the stations. That way your ships will never need to drive under all the connector tubing. This also allows you to make the stations under that as messy as you want, I don't worry about aligning connection points anymore.

IMPORTANT: After the first two stations are connected. From then on every new station gets connected to the original HUB (complex).

1 - Drop new station, move to location.

2 - Drop new HUB and then select NEW station first.

3 - Select original HUB (complex) second.

I usually place my solar power plants at the top of any complex and then FCC-move all the rest of the stations up close under that. Just spread them out up under the SPP and then connect them without worrying about pretty tubing.

Brinnie · Post by **Brinnie** » Wed, 16. Apr 08, 14:19

What can I say? It is going to sound repetitive but:

Thanks, Again.

The first thing I am going to do is install FCC and try your tips.

I'll need some money though, I spent most of my credits last night on 10 factories which I have already added (the old way) to my complex.

*********************
EDIT
*********************

--- Saving a Reference Point:

I accidentally put 1 down, how do I remove it?

Rhadamant · Post by **Rhadamant** » Thu, 1. May 08, 04:41

Use your unfix hotkey and it will remove.

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Thu, 1. May 08, 06:13

EDIT: Maybe you found your answer while I was typing.

The only way I would think would be the Advanced Tractor Beam where you towed it into final exact 0,0,0, but might also cause going crazy trying.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=149343

The only other chance might be Complex Cleaner (I haven't used) but it has a function to move stations to a new position while keeping the complex functioning. Maybe the "move" portion is that exact.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... ight=tubes

The only other way I guess would be to try to drop the station exactly in the first place. You can try manually but I realize that it may be hard to lock the cursor to find 0,0,0 as well.

Brinnie · Post by **Brinnie** » Thu, 1. May 08, 12:58

Rhadamant wrote:Use your unfix hotkey and it will remove.

Thanks

The Shadow Wolf · Post by **The Shadow Wolf** » Thu, 31. Jul 08, 09:23

I've had a solid read of this thread but can find no references to anyone repositioning stations in a complex to make the untidy complex become neat and tidy. I'm running a game with a dozen scripts and about twenty or so ships in XSP format.

My problem is that I'm struggling to get one station I've moved to become fixed in space so that I can then move the others into position to make the said Space fuel complex neat. I have set up the same keys as are listed in the manual and have maaged to unlock the station and move ALL stations together but now I want to lock ONE in place. Can someone please help me. I'm struggling here.

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Thu, 31. Jul 08, 15:41

have maaged to unlock the station and move ALL stations together but now I want to lock ONE in place.

If all the stations moved together that means you unlocked the whole complex and then moved it. That will happen unless you individually target a station first.

In order to unlock a single station you'll have to target only that station and move it individually. You'll probably have to get real close facing it and then target it with your "T" key. The defixed station of the complex will remain green, FYI.

Then to re-connect the tubes you can attach a new hub to the old one and the tubes will reattach.

NOTE: Once you fix that single station, it is still FIXED to the whole complex, so once you move the rest of the complex, that station is going to move WITH the complex. If you want to separate that one station from the complex, you'll have to delete the hub and start over. You can move that one station to the complex, but you can't move the complex to that one station.

The Shadow Wolf · Post by **The Shadow Wolf** » Thu, 31. Jul 08, 17:13

I'll try that. I thought I had to unlock the entire complex first not just target one station in that complex without unlocking the rest.

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Thu, 31. Jul 08, 17:29

Not according to the latest readme. You might want to print it out as there are some other tips and hints in there for you as well.

The Shadow Wolf · Post by **The Shadow Wolf** » Fri, 1. Aug 08, 12:07

Well it worked so .. Thank you.

I've now got a neat and compact complex that was once taking up half a sector. Took a while even though it was a dozen stations.

Thank you again spoidz

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Fri, 1. Aug 08, 15:30

Glad it worked out,

and the real thanks to triple81, Lt. Ford, Dusty, that have saved us all countless hours of work with their scripting

Poobah · Post by **Poobah** » Thu, 7. Aug 08, 17:34

This mod sounds really good; is it compatable with Ashley's Fabs? I really wouldn't want to miss out on that, but on the other hand from what I've read this would really make complex construction massively easier.

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Thu, 7. Aug 08, 18:29

mufassa,

I haven't had any problems so far, and I've restarted several times importing my Ashley's fabs as well as rearranging them after the import with FCC.

I know that there have been a few posts about them having to get kickstarted after moving or importing but there is also a fix for that on the Ashley thread.

One tip with FCC and Ashley, excessive steering on big ships (tweaked

) may cause them to still hit the hub or tube when departing no matter the spacing.

Masterdon Pivot

Mr Tibbs · Post by **Mr Tibbs** » Thu, 7. Aug 08, 19:49

I'm having some problems trying to use this plugin.
I've got a complex of around 130 stations that I've been putting together in a grid format with each station 2.5 km appart from each other.
A couple of days ago I noticed that if I spent any amount of time in the sector my complex would disolve and in my log I'd find that one of my stations had been destroyed by another. Now I'm trying to fix this with FCC but am finding that once I press the unlock station key, it's taking 20-30 minutes in real time for it to actually unlock. Once unlocked I can move the station around with no problems but it's the initial wait to get it unlocked that's killing me.

Are there any optimizations or settings I could change to speed up the process?

My computer is fairly old but still functional

AMD XP3200+ Barton
Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mbyte AGP 8 GFX card
2 gig PC2600 RAM Dual channel (2 x 1 gig chips of same type)

I have no problems at all with the graphics and can fly through the complex at a fairly good frame rate (ok without the anti aliaising turned on).

I know it's down to CPU as I can play X3 on my latitude laptop which has a dual core processor and here I have the opposite problem.
Takes a couple of seconds for the station unlock to work but gfx are pants. about 1 frame per minute. lol

spoidz · Post by **spoidz** » Thu, 7. Aug 08, 20:19

Mr Tibbs,

From what I've read a lot of the GFX load on complexes is the Tubes. With 130 plus I bet that's a lot of spaghetti.

You could try using this script to reduce that load. Ive used it in the past with my FCC and complex but I've no where near your fab numbers.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=167224

It's in german but it will work.

Mr Tibbs · Post by **Mr Tibbs** » Fri, 8. Aug 08, 20:56

I used to have a lot of spaghetti before I used this script. That was when my complex only had about 30 stations connected to it.

Now I place all my stations of the same type into a cube of 3 along and 4 high then I just add to the next layer at the back of the complex so most of the tubes are quite tidy.

So I end up with a structure like this end on

SP SP
SP SP
C C C Cb Cb Cb Cr Cr Cr
C C C Cb Cb Cb Cr Cr Cr
C C C Cb Cb Cb Cr Cr Cr
C C C Cb Cb Cb Cr Cr Cr

C = Crystal Fab
Cb = Cahoona Backery
Cr = Cattle Ranch
SP = Solar Powerplant

I've got my rastar producers to the east of the crystals and the rest of my production complex (shields, weapons, missiles and misc) to the west of the cattle ranch.

The problem I encountered was dropping the station from my TL and with only a 2D view (and also pure laziness on my part) some of my stations ended up on top of each other. I can see in the pattern which the stations are that I've goofed. Just a shame my CPU doesn't seem to handle the load. I guess there's not a lot I can do until I can afford to upgrade to a nice quad core system.

Anyway I just tried that mod but it crashes X3 when I load any of my save games. I'm on the laptop atm but will try on the PC in a while and hopefully have better luck

Mr Tibbs · Post by **Mr Tibbs** » Fri, 8. Aug 08, 23:11

Thanks for pointing me at that mod. It worked a treat. Managed to track down the offending stations with it off then when I used it, it cut the lag down considerably.

That crashing I experienced was because I've been using the ITS_ARG_CP_MOD_V1c to get cockpits. Had to turn it off, save then loaded it with the no tubes mod and fixed it.

jan.nico · Post by **jan.nico** » Sun, 9. Nov 08, 07:49

I am having issues with installation, I have read through the the whole of this topic and can still not get rid of the readtext errors

, i have tried the bugfix dl's and i have tried reinstalling the game from scratch and just this mod. Is the download in this topic the one for X3 reunion or x3 Terran conflict? any help would be greatly apreciated

-Dusty- · Post by **-Dusty-** » Sun, 9. Nov 08, 16:01

jan.nico wrote:I am having issues with installation, I have read through the the whole of this topic and can still not get rid of the readtext errors

Do you have X3: Reunion or X3: Terran Conflict? This version is for Reunion, the TC version is here.

Anyway, if you're having problems with the Reunion version: Did you install the script via the .spk file (Cycrow's Script Installer)? If yes, try to install the script manually (copy the folders "scripts" and "t" into your X3: Reunion directory). Maybe this solves the problem.

... if not: What's the exact number in the readtext error? It should look like "ReadText 8845-000".