[AL Plugin] Revelation, by Litcube - V 0.85b (Beta)

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SLeeZeCoRe
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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 03:03

I spotted the two entries I assume are the attack timer 300 something minimum, 700 something maximum (can you guess I wasn't paying attention lol).

It's 'Tick' timing I have to change is it not ???

How do I make it less frequent.

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Post by Requiemfang » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 03:10

from the sound of the timer it sounds similar to RRF invasion fleet timer. The RRF's fleet invasion timer allows you to set the interval of the attacks. If my guess it's correct Litcube was sort of trying to do the same thing?

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 03:16

Requiemfang wrote:from the sound of the timer it sounds similar to RRF invasion fleet timer. The RRF's fleet invasion timer allows you to set the interval of the attacks. If my guess it's correct Litcube was sort of trying to do the same thing?
Nope.

The timing is directly related to the speed at which the OCV ships transport wares from the home base to the front lines. Once the station recieved enough wares and builds enough ships.

I feel using a timer for random enemy spam is arbitrary and tacky.

RRF, isn't tacky, though. It's a different system for a different purpose. Here, it would have been tacky. Like wearing a silly hat to a no-hat party.

Dude, if you want to alter things, it's more complicated than that. You risk breaking the plugin.

The rate of expansion slows dramatically as the bases get further and further away from the home sector. However, the transport ships are smart enough to run a supply chain, akin to a line of folks at a well, a bucket, and a house fire; they pass er' along in a chain.

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Post by Kadatherion » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 04:57

I had another battle, this time a defensive one. On a new (yeah, yet another one =_=") game, since I had some troubles while trying to completely uninstall RRF. There were definitely less ships around compared to what happens when assaulting one of the infected sectors, since that number got progressively thinned while they were jumping in, anyway it was pretty chaotic, and this time no stopping in mid air.

Seems like it's not an intrinsic issue of this plugin or RRF... it's just that when several heavy plugins begin to interact, such as it happens with RRF when it's called by these invasion events, the engine goes nuts. I hadn't that issue with RRF interacting with, for instance, Race Invasions, which also spawns rather large fleets (but with definitely less fighters), thus some rebalance in that number might probably help, but I believe in the end there's not much neither you or LV can do apart from suggesting your downloaders to be careful when combining certain plugins to not overload their systems :(


BTW, it was the most entertaining battle I ever had in X3. Also thanks to CMOD that makes cap ships much less vulnerable to the sniping exploit (and my personal take on SRM where I doubled the hull points of every ship to make them feel less like tin cans with humongous shields), it was extremely well balanced and even though I was able to hold the line in my Vidar for a long while, in the end we got beaten and I had to retreat. First time I ever really felt involved in a battle that turned out in the end to be hopeless (but in a balanced way!).
From that point of view those pesky missile happy M4s were extremely relevant on the balance, since they were what most gave me trouble in my M6, as it should realistically be.
Looked like I would have not been able to make the difference alone even if I were in a M7/2, and I would have had to bring with me a small well prepared fleet to turn the tides, which is just perfect.

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 05:20

Kadatherion wrote: Seems like it's not an intrinsic issue of this plugin or RRF... it's just that when several heavy plugins begin to interact, such as it happens with RRF when it's called by these invasion events, the engine goes nuts. I hadn't that issue with RRF interacting with, for instance, Race Invasions, which also spawns rather large fleets (but with definitely less fighters), thus some rebalance in that number might probably help, but I believe in the end there's not much neither you or LV can do apart from suggesting your downloaders to be careful when combining certain plugins to not overload their systems :(
Well, it's actually not RRF or Revelations. It's the poorly written script engine. It's been proven over and over again in other threads that all most all script related lag has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU. The bottle neck is actually the game itself. And you'll see this in massive battles from time to time. The only thing you can do is reduce the number of scripts running in the sector. And while that's not an option without reducing the number of ships, one is f*4#$ when one considers possible viable alternatives.

This also happens OOS if you're running a plugin by someone who doesn't know how to write scripts. I've seen trade script and satellite deployment scripts with ship searching loops with no waits, or path finding scripts with giant loops... That said, this script is beta. While I've taken great pain to streamline and optimize, I will be making performance enhancing additions as time goes on. Right now, I'm happy that the only "freezing ship" you'll notice is if you're in sector.

I recommend everyone take a look at Jaga Teslin's work on reducing the jobs in the Universe. That is the single most performance impacting thing you can do. And in my opinion, doesn't reduce any gameplay emmersion. He's gone 50% reduction accross the board, but I've made my own that does a 75%. I feel that's fine.
Kadatherion wrote:BTW, it was the most entertaining battle I ever had in X3.
When I ran a testing scenario after reading your report, I took snapshots of the chaos that ensued. Bullets were everywhere. It was awesome.
Kadatherion wrote:From that point of view those pesky missile happy M4s were extremely relevant on the balance, since they were what most gave me trouble in my M6, as it should realistically be.
Bingo. As it should be. I'm going to have a difficult time going ahead with the reduction of fighters. They do have a role. They keep you occupied while you pretend your impreviously sniping in your thresher from a distance.

As for the Insurgence Event (where you're asked for help to take back a sector), I'm working on the jumping in issue. It works as intended right now. What you witnessed was the ships intentionally gathering at the gate during the halfway mark. They're scripted to do that. They will wait until the time is right (according to the message you recieved). Right now, I'm just testing the ability to jump in the center of a sector. This does happen in vanilla X3, so I can justify this story wise, especially with the entire commonwealth investing in their very future. If they don't stop the spread, everything that they know is gone.

I'm also implementing a countdown timer displayed via subtitle text from the sectors Admiral in charge of Insurgence Operations. He'll let you know (and everyone else) when you're supposed to jump in, co-ordinating the attack.

With the volunteer/military fleet jumping into the OCV sector, they made good headway. Spread will likely be reduced in terms of timeline. Instead of Bluish Snout being taken in 2.5 days, I suspect it will be lengthened to around 3.5 - 4 days. Maybe not a bad thing.

This was the longest post I've written, probably.

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mr.WHO
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Post by mr.WHO » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 09:50

I recommend everyone take a look at Jaga Teslin's work on reducing the jobs in the Universe. That is the single most performance impacting thing you can do. And in my opinion, doesn't reduce any gameplay emmersion. He's gone 50% reduction accross the board, but I've made my own that does a 75%. I feel that's fine.
Could you provide us with the link to Jaga Teslin's reduced jobs? I scanned the mod archive topic and didn't found it :(

SLeeZeCoRe
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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 14:25

Litcube wrote:
Requiemfang wrote:from the sound of the timer it sounds similar to RRF invasion fleet timer. The RRF's fleet invasion timer allows you to set the interval of the attacks. If my guess it's correct Litcube was sort of trying to do the same thing?
Nope.

The timing is directly related to the speed at which the OCV ships transport wares from the home base to the front lines. Once the station recieved enough wares and builds enough ships.

I feel using a timer for random enemy spam is arbitrary and tacky.

RRF, isn't tacky, though. It's a different system for a different purpose. Here, it would have been tacky. Like wearing a silly hat to a no-hat party.

Dude, if you want to alter things, it's more complicated than that. You risk breaking the plugin.

The rate of expansion slows dramatically as the bases get further and further away from the home sector. However, the transport ships are smart enough to run a supply chain, akin to a line of folks at a well, a bucket, and a house fire; they pass er' along in a chain.


Okie doke I'll leave it alone and consider letting get past the first sector, althogh I did 'give' OTAS a shipyard inthere, so there is going to be some really pissed off dudes coming over from Legends Home when that goes up lol

Random screenies....

Oh my god...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v203/ ... n00019.jpg

OH MY LORDY...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v203/ ... n00014.jpg

and

Kill the RingOfFire, Kill the LoWP, but you aren't making it to the next gate against a battery of Point Singularity Projectors
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v203/ ... n00021.jpg
(lol Tyr parked and set to defend position).


I don't think any of the blue ships in the sector have been lost yet, altough I've lost 33 laser towers and 2 large orbital weapons platforms. Get this though, I have a random Harrier in there that I forgot about, he's survived 4 assaults :lol:

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 00:06

mr.WHO wrote: Could you provide us with the link to Jaga Teslin's reduced jobs? I scanned the mod archive topic and didn't found it :(
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=260355

I spelled his name wrong. Jaga_Telesin.


@SLeeZeCoRe:

Nice pics!

Folks, I'm glad you're sharing stories. It helps me see how this package effects gameplay. The more the merrier. Some things I'd like to know:

1) How many sectors has the OCV infected in your game now?
2) Have you had any significant asset loss from them?
3) Have you re-captured a sector from the OCV yet?

SLeeZeCoRe
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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 01:12

They haven't got out of their own sector yet, the 42 LT ringoffire and 3 LOWP have kept them at bay, with a few random incursions by myself to nuke a few Cap ships.

It just seems to be an alert every 10 minutes, which is why I wanted to change the timer is all.

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Post by Kadatherion » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 03:56

Managed to conquer Gannet back after one helluva fight that got really really lucky for the good guys. Me trying to lure some xenon cap ships away from "formation" so that they did not outnumber the commonwealth forces definitely helped, though it is technically exploiting the AI, but I wanted to see what would happen :D


As such, some further feedback:

- The 0 m/s issue is still there even without RRF. It is much less severe though and doesn't always happen, and - both in a defensive and in that offensive engagement - it seemed to affect only the OCV M5s. Everything else flew and fought flawlessly, but the M5s just stood still where they were. In the case of the Gannet reconquista, they even stood still around the Xenon station even after most of the enemy fleet was gone, only coming "back to life" when I got to 'em and began firing at 'em. Same goes for some M5s that were frozen around the north gate to Tokyo.
Seems like when the engine goes into that emergency mode, or whatever is the basic issue, it begins stopping the smaller ships first... :roll:

- After blowing up the station, some of its wares (plutonium, deuterium, chemicals, around 50 units each) were expelled in space for the taking. But they are worthless. Thought it could be nice to implement some sort of "mini mission" where bringing back a certain amount of this spoils of war would reward the player with something.
My first bet would be the neat "unknown object" alias the xenon special M3, which is completely working except it needs some rebalance in the tship file to actually make it useful (in vanilla it has humongous hull, and no laser energy). In my game I use it as a personal "bomber" (since I hate missiles and in general ammo based weapons), slow and vulnerable to fighters since it hasn't any turrets, but with the ability to fire a couple of psp salvos before running out of energy and having to run back to safety.
Of course this would need adding a mini mod to the script, and as such it might be out of your scope. But some reward after a lot of frontline fighting to save the universe yet again would be nice to add some variety.

- A potential conflict with the HUB struck my mind. I thought I could, if things were to evolve pretty bad for the good guys, try to connect both N and S gate in Bluish Snout to outer sectors (maybe even xenon) to slow 'em down should the time come.
But two potential issues come to mind: the hub sector's ownership is Unknown, would they try to settle in as usual or would that make 'em ignore it and as such stop? And, most of all, they need to destroy every station to take over the sector and begin building up for the next invasion. However, the Hub itself is indestructible... :wink:

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 04:13

As always, good thoughts.

Firstly, I haven't done the hub plot. I don't even know what's involved save hauling a spam load of wares to a station. Then you get to re-align gates or something like that.

From what I gather: You're right. If you intercepted a gate so that you cut out, say, Unknown Sector Omega, and it now leads to an Unkown sector, the plugin is totally worthless.

You suspect right. The OCV will not spread to Unkown or Xenon sectors. I have no fix for this. unless my "search for a conquerable sector" gets more complicated in that it "jumps" a sector to see if that's viable. Could you try it? Let me know?


As for rewards, I scripted Revelation within a day. Then I ran it for a week, and checked in to make tweaks and adjustments. I tried to keep it simple, and always remembered your beef with the Phanon reward (which was totally justified in terms of grade A beef, I ended up nerfing it considerably).

You're right about changing the TShips. Beyond the scope. I dreaded having to include a cat file just for the 00749.bod, but its sorta necessary to see what the hell is going on. I need more suggestions for rewards. I was thinking of possibly changing the drops to useful wares. Like lasers, missiles, and shields. I mean, that's where these ships are getting equipped right? And that might be useful to a player.

Yeah, 0 m/s is annoying. I ran a few tests and came to some conclusions. I rewrote the !fight.attack.object script to be a single loop with a move around command. And that's all it is. Jumped in with 250 ships, and everyone was moving. Turrets were still firing.

I'm going to try editing the !fight.attack.object to see if I can streamline it. If I can do that, I'll just use that instead of the vanilla one. This will leave the other Universe ships alone.

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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 04:25

Wait what the TandiTech/Phanon thing has rewards ?

I just farm them for Gladiators :shock:

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 04:51

Adjusting the morale on Phanon ships has been on the TODO list since conception. I'll call it the SLeeZeCoRe fix.

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Post by Kadatherion » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 05:05

Litcube wrote: Firstly, I haven't done the hub plot. I don't even know what's involved save hauling a spam load of wares to a station. Then you get to re-align gates or something like that.

From what I gather: You're right. If you intercepted a gate so that you cut out, say, Unknown Sector Omega, and it now leads to an Unkown sector, the plugin is totally worthless.

You suspect right. The OCV will not spread to Unkown or Xenon sectors. I have no fix for this. unless my "search for a conquerable sector" gets more complicated in that it "jumps" a sector to see if that's viable. Could you try it? Let me know?
Thought you did since your new sectors are linked with the HUB special gates (marked with triangles, squares or circles) instead of vanilla NSWE ones, which actually makes 'em not linkable by the hub.
In short, once you have the hub working you have 3 sets of gates, each one of 'em you can link to a gate to insert the HUB sector BETWEEN the two sectors that gate was linking before. So, for instance, if I link a set of gates to the S gate in Bluish Snout, now the Hub is between BS and Ocean of Fantasy.
Usually it's used to affect trade routes, and as such create an heavily trafficked area to enhance the output of your megacomplexes... or to make it so Xenon Core and Paranid Prime are just two sectors away and see hell break loose :lol:

So, since the new sectors use these special gates, you can't cut out Unknown Omega or any of the new sectors, since the HUB link command does not work with 'em (just tested to be sure). As such you can't stop 'em until they get to vanilla space. Then you could do it however, linking both sides of Bluish Snout. This is also why I can't really test it now, since I would have to wait for the OCV to take over all those new sectors until the first one with regular gates.

Not worth wasting time at recoding anyway, I guess, as long as the players knows it. In a way, it also offers an intriguing way of affecting what path would the OCV take in spreading into the universe: by excluding all paths except one with HUB links, you can make it so they go towards a race you're at war with, for instance. And it's even not really "lore unfriendly", since The Hub sector is supposed to be a Xenon installation, and as such there could be a "logical" (well, for an A.G.I. anyway :P ) reason why the OCV don't decide to "infect" it.


Litcube wrote: You're right about changing the TShips. Beyond the scope. I dreaded having to include a cat file just for the 00749.bod, but its sorta necessary to see what the hell is going on. I need more suggestions for rewards. I was thinking of possibly changing the drops to useful wares. Like lasers, missiles, and shields. I mean, that's where these ships are getting equipped right? And that might be useful to a player.
That also would be nice, but personally I'm not really fond of the straightforward "drop" mechanic. There are anyway already lots of nice weapon drops after those battles with all the biggies blowing up everywhere.

It is, however, as you said where the ships are built and equipped supposedly using those very same materials, then maybe, bringing those rare materials for studying and "reverse engineering" at military outposts could then reward you with aforementioned weapons, non modded xenon ships or maybe a bunch of overtunings for one of your ships.
Let's say we are given a 'lil reward sheet, where each reward costs a certain amount of deuterium etc. You really want that OOS supership called "Q" you've never been able to board? Bring us amount X of deuterium, plutonium and chemicals, and we might be able to RE it for you. An LX would "cost" much less, supertuning your engine using xenon REd technology would have yet another "cost" and so on.

Maybe even throw in the idea that the outpost that can do this research and offer these rewards has to be the closest one to OCV conquered space, and that greater rewards also needs longer times to be produced after you bring in enough materials, so there's the need to defend it in the meantime should the OCV decide to invade while you wait for the scientists and engineers to do their magic.

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Post by Litcube » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 05:21

Kadatherion]Thought you did since your new sectors are linked with the HUB special gates (marked with triangles, squares or circles) instead of vanilla NSWE ones, which actually makes 'em not linkable by the hub. [/quote] Oh. Neat. I thought they were just there for added awesomeness. So I righteously added them. Turns out, I'm not as awesome and righteous as I thought. I'll recode if it's a problem. [quote= wrote:Maybe even throw in the idea that the outpost that can do this research and offer these rewards has to be the closest one to OCV conquered space, and that greater rewards also needs longer times to be produced after you bring in enough materials, so there's the need to defend it in the meantime should the OCV decide to invade while you wait for the scientists and engineers to do their magic.

PPpfffffff.. Holy frustration. I like that idea. Makes sense that a research station must loom near its subject. So you're big on the unattainable ship thing. I'll see what I can do. I like the general "cache in this amount of OCV wares for X" in a menu system. That would be rad.

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Post by Kadatherion » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 07:31

Ahah, well, it's just that I don't see many other possible fulfilling rewards around as long as one needs to keep things as much vanilla as he can :P


Anyway, an interesting thing that should testify your theory about the 0m/s issue is correct and is related to the engine itself rather than just CPU power: I followed your suggestion (thanks for pointing that thread out!) and edited my jobs file much like what Jaga_Telesin did (but following another suggestion there with the unflagging of set average speed for traders so that halving their jobs number wouldn't hurt the economy in the long run).
Fired up the game and after a while the OCV strikes back in force; jumped to Gannet and took part in the battle. The M5s still showed the stopping issue (especially a wing of Decas that got in later, the very first Ns didn't seem to be affected, but most of the enemy fleet had still to jump in when they arrived), but overall I had MUCH better frame rates than before as it seems the CPU was definitely less strained.

So, even with more system resources free the issue repeated itself quite like before, apparently unaffected by that improvement and as such unrelated to the CPU.

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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Wed, 14. Jul 10, 13:27

I wouldn't worry about going mad with rewards anyway, I've got a Baldric and a Caiman stuffed to the gills with missiles and guns from popped OCV ships, and a J, K, and 3 LX's have been claimed off them.

As for CPU load, I'm running a slightly overclocked E5200 which is a pretty bottom of the barrel chip and I've not really had any bad slow downs even IS (I do believe there are currently about 20 cap ships patroling at the mo).


Ok edit time, there are now 100+ Neutral/Friendly Capships plus figther support.

Can't really go in there now lol.

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Post by Guest » Thu, 15. Jul 10, 03:40

The false patch contains the "view" for your galaxy map only. It will flatten everything. I'm hoping to get some help on simply keeping the vanilla map's contoured and akward style, but adding the Omicron Channel sectors in there for those who don't like flat maps. If anyone can lend a hand, please do.
i have used gmax to splice your sectors into the normal map. i also made those a little more 3D and added sector name boxes (B1X-Y). would you like me to email it to you?

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Thu, 15. Jul 10, 03:42

sergoba wrote:i have used gmax to splice your sectors into the normal map. i also made those a little more 3D and added sector name boxes (B1X-Y). would you like me to email it to you?

Absolutely! That would be appreciated.

Can you PM it to me?

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Post by Wintersdark » Fri, 16. Jul 10, 07:47

This looks fantastic, I'll have to give it a try! I'm a huge, huge fan of your mods.

Anything that makes the universe more alive is good to me. Particularly when one can have multiple "players" in the game at once - I've just started running your PhanonCorp mod as well.

The whole notion of competing corporations pursuing their own interests, Improve Races with Hot War stirring things up between the default factions, and now this pursuing an armageddon-esque scenario too... Everyone caught up in their own machinations while doom lurks just out of sight.

Fantastic!



More! More! =)

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