[MD]X3TC Menagerie Shipyard v2.3 Updated (04 June 2012)

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Argonaught.
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[MD]X3TC Menagerie Shipyard v2.3 Updated (04 June 2012)

Post by Argonaught. » Mon, 29. Mar 10, 20:53

Download link updated to V2.3 release

This is the first bit of coding I have ever done.
please be gently if you look at the code and it looks odd.


I can't model stuff but if I could I would have made a Custom station for this.
Station used is the large Argon shipyard.


Important
Please read the warning at the end of this post.

It explains the do not's when purchasing, and other really important things you need to know for better enjoyment.


Description:
This creates a Menagerie Shipyard filled with rare ships, and items, unavailable through normal race shipyards.
It will jump randomly around the X universe.
The Shipyards jump timer is set on a 1-2hr cycle.
When it arrives in a new sector it's timer will start counting down to a random time between the 1-2hr cycle.
It's position in Sector will be 25km in Y direction, if the sector has stuff near or in that area the station will be positioned in a safe area close to the co-ords.
It's big anyway so you'll see it.


Immersion Text
The Menagerie Shipyard is of unknown origin.
It's main function was to harvest ships that it encountered on it's travels and when full, to return them to it's creators for further study.

It was severely damaged while it was out harvesting.
It is believed, but not confirmed, that it came across something more powerful than itself.

The stations AI brain and some of it's systems sustained heavy damage.

It's racial scanners were damaged - Causing it to miss indentify approaching vessels
It's Docking Array computers were damaged - Causing the docking arrays to unlock, allowing anyone who can get to it to dock.
It's jumpdrive targeting systems and spacial recognition software were damaged - All attempts to jump home cause an unfocused jump sending it to a random sector.
Long Range communications were damaged - Meaning no help from it's creators.
It's cloaking device was damaged - Making it detectable to all.

Could this Shipyard be the fabled UFO Base that everyones been searching for?

Ships in Stock

[ external image ]


Menagerie Shipyard with 4 #Decas docked

[ external image ]



Installing
Unzip the file and place the director and t folders into your main X3TC folder.


WARNING
Never leave ships docked for to long at the station as when it jumps all docked ships are destroyed.
If your docked when it jumps you'll be seeing the start menu - you have been warned ;)

The station doesn't offer upgrades or equipment so when you buy a ship you get it as is.


Note
Orbital Weapon Platforms

S/M/L OWPs can be bought at the station.
If buying ships and OWP's, at the same time, make sure you buy the ships first and order them away from the station and buy the OWP's last.
If you do it the other way round you'll loose some ships when they hit the OWP's.
You can order the OWP's to undock and they will slide away from the station docks.
You'll need a tractor beam installed to move them.
Autopilot won't work on OWP's.
Your ship will wait in autopilot for the OWP to start moving, but since it has no engines, you'll stay where you are.
You'll need to fly manually while tractoring one.
If you need to get an OWP to another sector you'll need to use a script to move it.
They won't go through gates with you.

I recommend using Super Tractor by Gazz as it will allow you to jump yourself and the OWP to another sector.


Extra note
There are 2 small OWP's listed in the trade menu.
The one near the bottom of the trade menu is the Khaak OWP.
When info'd it's missiles will reflect that as it only uses Khaak missiles.


jump timer
The Stations jump timer is automatic and random.
It's jump drive will activate between 2-5hrs after it's landed in a new sector.
When timers up it will jump away without warning.
Please make sure you don't loose a purchase when it jumps, create a save before buying :)

[ external image ] (V2.3_X3TC)

[ external image ] (V1.2.X3AP)


Many Thanks to Ketraar and others for the helping me to understand MD code usage :)


Hope you all Enjoy.

Argonaught.
Last edited by Argonaught. on Mon, 4. Jun 12, 01:41, edited 18 times in total.
[MOD]X3TC No Fog / [MOD]X3AP No Fog / [MD]X3TC Menagerie Shipyard / [MD]X3AP Menagerie Shipyard
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Deadbeat_Spinn
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Post by Deadbeat_Spinn » Mon, 29. Mar 10, 21:06

Sweet, a shipyard with some of the ships I've always wanted.:thumb_up:

One minor question,
Why is the Medusa, Skate, Kite, Solano, & Venti on the purchase list?

The first 4 can be purchased at normal shipyards and the Solano/Venti are Corporate rewards.

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Argonaught.
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Post by Argonaught. » Mon, 29. Mar 10, 21:14

Deadbeat_Spinn wrote:Sweet, a shipyard with some of the ships I've always wanted.:thumb_up:

One minor question,
Why is the Medusa, Skate, Kite, Solano, & Venti on the purchase list?

The first 4 can be purchased at normal shipyards and the Solano/Venti are Corporate rewards.
I used a list I'd gotten from the forums so added them also as they were listed as rare.

The list may have been oldish though.

I was also very nervous in creating this for public use (first real mod) and hadn't looked really hard at what I'd added.

Anyway lets just pretend that the Station thought they were valid enough to harvest ;).

I can change it if folks want.


Edit:
If the timer for the station is too short/long I can change it to whatever is the more popular timings.


HTH

Argo.
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Re: [MD] Menagerie Shipyard v1 (29 Mar 2010)

Post by Logain Abler » Mon, 29. Mar 10, 23:15

Argonaught. wrote: WARNING
Never leave ships docked for to long at the station as when it jumps all docked ships are destroyed.
If your docked when it jumps you'll be seeing the start menu - you have been warned ;)
Argonaught.
Sounds great, I like the ramdom sector idea :) , except the docked bit :(
You should be able to force an undock of all ships prior to the jump. For the player ship you could jump it to safe distance. Check out Cycrows warp to sector script in his cheat package for a pointer.

Once I've done updating my own scripts I'll give this a go.

Again, great work :thumb_up:

LA

See Force NPC Undocking not used it myself but looks a good starting point if you want to tweak your station jump.

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Post by mark_a_condren » Tue, 30. Mar 10, 06:39

Argonaught.

Love it ! and i like the "Have a small story in my head to explain it's existence so folks don't hit me with sticks for messing with immersion ", very original.

Your first release can be a bit hard on the nerves. But i'm glad you did, this looks great.
Why is the Medusa, Skate, Kite, Solano, & Venti on the purchase list?
This will depend on the variants that are available, some of the variants are purchaseable from shipyards, but some are not. It may just take some tweaking to get it right IF they are the ones that are already available.

As you will discover, you can't please everyone, but only you have to be happy with it in the end.

I also don't mind the fact that there is a risk factor involved in getting these rare ships, just adds something extra, land, go to buy ship and :o ..... :twisted: .

Keep up the good work.

MarCon

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Argonaught.
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Post by Argonaught. » Tue, 30. Mar 10, 10:15

I had tried putting in a check to see if player ship/ships were docked and for it not to jump away, but it made the station sit there forever when it detected ships docked. I couldn't figure a way around it.

I'll take a look into Graxster's Force undock (I have that installed myself) but his are all scripts and I have no idea how to read those.

As I mess more with the MD I hope to find a way of forcing any ships docked to undock before it jumps, but as of now I haven't a clue how to do it.


The Solano and Venti only had one entry in Tships so figured they were like the Arrow #Deca etc...

The other 3 had 2 version each, one of the versions was a Prototype and theres a mod here that has those.
I didn't know they were freely available in race shipyards.

but we learn as we go and I'll fix it as soon as I figure a way to force undock.

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Post by mark_a_condren » Tue, 30. Mar 10, 11:12

The other 3 had 2 version each, one of the versions was a Prototype and theres a mod here that has those.
I didn't know they were freely available in race shipyards.
Hay, imho, make em available anyway from your shipyard, maybe people don't want to install 2 mods to get all the ships. I can understand you don't want to step on another modders toes, but yours is a totally different concept and having them all available with one mod would suit some players better, yes me for one.

The prototypes of these ships arn't available to vanilla game so if people have them they are scripted/modded/MD'ed in, the standard versions may be available in some shipyards however.

Whatever you choose to do in the future, this is a damn fine start, and as i said, i don't mind a bit of risk involved in trying to get thes ships.

MarCon

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Post by Senator Vrax » Tue, 30. Mar 10, 16:26

I like the idea a lot. As i can't script, i usually just add a couple of 'static' shipyards to my map to make these ships available.

It's good to have them there, but some of them seriously need balancing. I'm guessing you haven't touched their stats?

I go with a 'dark' shipyard in a pirate sector with pirate/yaki/xenon/khaak ships and a 'light' yard in Elysium.. with the missing 6 races/goner ships as well as the enhanced/advanced/prototype ships.
I use a modified Tships file to bring my own ideas of balance/usefulness to them. Maybe you could look into that. :P

Maybe you could adjust the pricing too. e.g. 12.5 mill for a #deca is a little low :wink:

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Post by Argonaught. » Tue, 30. Mar 10, 18:55

The prices I didn't touch as I have no idea where to do that from.
And I didn't touch ship stats as it would mess with every other ship mod out that altered the Tships file.

My plan was to have this as 3rd party mod friendly as possible by only using the MD to create it.

The only time I could see a clash is if someone uses the "other1" race slot that I used.
I had to use "other1" race slot to get around the requirement of needing the normal race reps to buy them.

But I'm still going to try tweak it if I can, hit a wall with the auto undock
if docked bit.


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Post by EmperorJon » Sat, 3. Apr 10, 17:47

Probably would have been much easier using the SE than the MD though. :lol:
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Post by Argonaught. » Sat, 3. Apr 10, 23:56

EmperorJon wrote:Probably would have been much easier using the SE than the MD though. :lol:
I found the SE to be more confusing than the MD, probably because the MD has more recognisable words in it than the SE.

Anyway, I think i did fantastically well considering I can't write or code programs.
Let me just quote myself here a mo:
Argonaught wrote:This is the first bit of coding I have ever done.
please be gently if you look at the code and it looks odd.

I'm not sure if you meant your comment to be a joke or were laughing at my effort?

I suppose there'll always be a heckler in the audience somewhere :(


Argo.
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Post by EmperorJon » Sun, 4. Apr 10, 10:52

I was just making a friendly comment, no worries bud!

I'm hopeless when it comes to MD! :P
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Post by Rednoahl » Sun, 4. Apr 10, 14:34

Just had a look at the code for your shipyard. I'm not very experienced with MD myself, but have you tried adding any docked ships to a "group" then try "any_object_undocked" when the station jumps to trigger the group undocking?

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Post by Argonaught. » Sun, 4. Apr 10, 14:47

EmperorJon wrote:I was just making a friendly comment, no worries bud!

I'm hopeless when it comes to MD! :P
Ah okie dokie then, alls forgiven :)
This coding stuff is hard on the nerves.
Rednoahl wrote:Just had a look at the code for your shipyard. I'm not very experienced with MD myself, but have you tried adding any docked ships to a "group" then try "any_object_undocked" when the station jumps to trigger the group undocking?
No, never thought to add them to a group. I'll give it a go and see what happens, Thanks for the tip.

With Ketraars help I realised my original code needs more checks and conditions so I'll be altering it more when I have a mo, so I'll be testing other ways to get ships to undock.


Argo.
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Post by Rednoahl » Sun, 4. Apr 10, 16:57

There seems to be about three or four ways of doing the same thing using the MD, so if that doesn't work there will probably be a workaround. At least you have been sensible and done something specific for your first MD code - I think (at least currently) I'm being overambitious. I congratulate you on getting the code out there.

I know what you mean by "this coding stuff is hard on the nerves" too. I keep getting one step in front of myself, then have to go ten steps back. I had a problem the other night that I couldn't find a solution to; ended up dreaming about the problem while I slept and woke up exhausted!

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Post by Ketraar » Mon, 5. Apr 10, 17:21

Rednoahl wrote:...ended up dreaming about the problem while I slept and woke up exhausted!
It still happens to me. :D

That's why you should post your code and/or question rather sooner than later. ;-)

MFG

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Post by Argonaught. » Sat, 10. Apr 10, 21:15

Main Download link updated to V2 release

not that many changes really but, good ones i think.



Changes in V2

:arrow: --- Player ship will now Auto-Undock before the shipyard jumps.

:arrow: --- The Shipyard will broadcast a subspace message 2 minutes before it jumps revealing it's location.
------- Your ship will pick this message up as a subtitle text.
------- (So keep eyes open as it will not show in your message log, don't want to make it too easy ;) .

:arrow: --- Tidied up the code abit and added extra conditions as were needed.



Note
-------player ship will undock but your purchases will not, so heed the subtitles well :twisted:

-------I will continue to try and enhance this more and see if I can add in purchases being undocked.
-------But I need a bit of a break for a while, variables almost drove me mad hehe.


-------Post feedback or suggestions and I'll see what I can do,


Many Thanks to Ketraar and others for the helping me to understand MD code usage :)


Have fun :) .


Argo.
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Post by Argonaught. » Sun, 11. Apr 10, 17:09

Main Download link updated to V2.1 release

This is a bug fix.
Fixes a bug caused by V2 code.
I'd forgotten to add a remove for older shipyards from previous versions.


have fun,

Argo.
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Post by handzon » Sun, 20. Jun 10, 10:38

can you set a ship to follow it, and or protect it ? so it tags along
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Post by Argonaught. » Mon, 21. Jun 10, 06:16

Unfortunately not.

I'll explain it story wise first and then what actually happens in the MD code.

Story bit

Code: Select all

When the shipyard Jumps it is shifted into Hyperspace. 
At the moment X universe technology hasn't advanced to the stage of being able to track hyperspace objects.
What actually happens
Spoiler
Show
The code destroys the station when the countdown is reached and then recreates it in another random sector
If you/anyone really wants to find it all the time though you could use this cool script by mark_a_condren:

MarCon Ind - Ship Onboard Computer System Interface

I used the script to check there were no duplicate stations left over after each code change and to make sure the shipyard itself was doing it's jumping around as it should.

note:
I'm afk alot in the last couple months due to offline forces but I check in every couple days/week or so.
My MD coding is on hold for a while longer :(

HTH

Argonaught
[MOD]X3TC No Fog / [MOD]X3AP No Fog / [MD]X3TC Menagerie Shipyard / [MD]X3AP Menagerie Shipyard
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