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

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Kadatherion
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Post by Kadatherion » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 01:07

Litcube, it's astonishing, you keep making things that perfectly fit my playing style: AL plugins bringing action to the universe in an orderly fashion, instead of random chaos all around.
Not to mention the position is perfect for building up my multi-sector player empire, as long as I'm able to defeat and conquer those sectors of course. Another nice goal to aim for before the end game when we usually just nuke everyone else out :D

Kudos for the great work, I'll fire it up as soon as I finish balancing some things between other AL plugins, and I'll begin a new epic game thanks to you :thumb_up:

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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 03:02

I've had a small problem.

Every gate in the universe is dead :lol:

You just go through the middle of them.

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 03:06

SLeeZeCoRe wrote:I've had a small problem.

Every gate in the universe is dead :lol:

You just go through the middle of them.
Huh? Is anyone else having this problem?

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ezra-r
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Post by ezra-r » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 05:01

Looks like the thing I want to try ;)

Kadatherion
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Post by Kadatherion » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 05:48

Litcube wrote:
SLeeZeCoRe wrote:I've had a small problem.

Every gate in the universe is dead :lol:

You just go through the middle of them.
Huh? Is anyone else having this problem?

Everything seems fine here. They have already took over the first sector and no bugs spotted for now. Just one thing: once I got the attack alert I warped to the Tokyo sector to take a look at how things would have gone, but even after some minutes in SETA nothing came through the gate. I then flew into their core sector just to check if they were actually there, and they indeed did... in force :P
At the moment I thought the alert was triggered by a minor "invasion" repelled by the blockade before I got there, so I flew away to mind my own business, but then after a while (maybe half an hour or so) the sector actually got conquered. I suppose then the invasion alert comes quite ahead of time?


On another note, a couple of personal curiosities: I see that once a sector has been recaptured it goes back to the race that did own it at the moment of plugin activation. Does it need the actual "we are going to try to recapture sector X" to happen, or wiping every xenon there yourself would be enough?
What happens to the sector once it is recaptured and ownership is back to the legitimate race? Repopulating it with stations is left to the engine's GOD or some script kicks in to spawn some stations and ships back?

I was considering the idea of editing the script so that once a sector is recaptured the ownership goes either to unknown (to be then claimed by me through STO, RRF or similar scripts without enraging any race) or directly to me. I see that to do so I would have to change a bit of code since right now it decides which message to send you on a successful recapture depending on the new ownership, but that wouldn't be much of a deal. How would the spawning be in those sectors, though, is a bit more of a mistery to me.

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 05:58

Kadatherion wrote:Everything seems fine here.

Thanks for confirming. I'd say 40% of bug reports in this forum are improper installs.
Kadatherion wrote:Tokyo sector to take a look at how things would have gone, but even after some minutes in SETA nothing came through the gate.
By the time you get the message, all OCV ships are set to attack. There's a calculation I made that basically detirmines how long a ship has to wait for the slowest ship in the group to get to the gate at the same time as itself. Sounds confusing, but basically, the conquer script makes it so all ships, m5 or M2, reach the gate at the same time. The traffic jam them ensues. But the delay you experienced is normal. Unknown Sector Omega is massive.
Kadatherion wrote:Does it need the actual "we are going to try to recapture sector X" to happen, or wiping every xenon there yourself would be enough?
There's no need to wait for the cavalry. Give it a go. :) Once the station is gone, it's returned to the rightful owner.
Kadatherion wrote:What happens to the sector once it is recaptured and ownership is back to the legitimate race? Repopulating it with stations is left to the engine's GOD or some script kicks in to spawn some stations and ships back?
My jobs script will repopulate the military and colonists. Stations are handled by the GOD engine, and surprisingly fast.

Kadatherion wrote:I was considering the idea of editing the script so that once a sector is recaptured the ownership goes either to unknown (to be then claimed by me through STO, RRF or similar scripts without enraging any race) or directly to me. I see that to do so I would have to change a bit of code since right now it decides which message to send you on a successful recapture depending on the new ownership, but that wouldn't be much of a deal. How would the spawning be in those sectors, though, is a bit more of a mistery to me.
I guess.

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Post by Kadatherion » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 07:58

Nice, then if I set an exception to those new sectors to be handed over to unknown race or player race on recapturing, this should prevent GOD from stepping on my toes too much. Well, I might give it a go in the future, for the moment second sector conquered, and I'm still in the Cutlass doing the first terran Plot: man, that's what I call a good incentive at growing up fast!

Also, absolutely no noticeable performance impact for me, and I can't say I have a powerful CPU, quite the opposite. :thumb_up:



EDIT: more testing, and finally stumbled upon two issues.

1- Performance. While when things evolve OOS I couldn't notice any impact, when I finally had the chance to participate in a battle (a counterstrike on Gannet), I stumbled upon the feared ships stopping in mid air at 0 m/s issue that has been seen before in other plugins. Mind that I have other AL plugins enabled which, of course, also tax the system, but my guess is that there are just TOO MANY ships involved when such battles evolve IS.
While I know there's the intention of letting epic, cinematic scale battles develop (and man, it sure looked epic), I would suggest a decrease in the number of ships involved: a fair chunk of the fighters we could live without, I guess, and even though a single fighter doesn't tax the system as a cap ship with several turrets scripts active, every fighter requires pathfinding, gunnery, collision detection calculations etc. It's the cap ships anyway what most creates the cinematic feeling, sacrificing those M5s, M4s and leaving in mostly some of the M3s shouldn't hurt too much.

2 - After experiencing the issue, I reloaded before beginning the assault, to uninstall RRF and see if that could help (RRF is known to be quite taxing, even though it's a great plugin). So, this time, I stood still behind the Ares-Gannet gate while the commonwealth strike force began to assemble in front of it and then began crossing.
Problem is, once the vanguard (AKA the small ships) went through, most of the big ships were left behind struggling with their autopilot to manage approaching the gate... and then, after a bit... PUFF! They vanished in thin air. I immediatly jumped to the other side just to see that entire fleet was gone.
From the look of it, seemed like the forced split of the strike force made them believe the assault failed once those first ships went through and were killed, and then the script removed any leftover, even though it was most of the actual fleet...

To avoid such issues - and in general unfair and/or odd results of gate bottlenecks - a good solution could be what's implemented in Improved Races: a single ship is tagged as the strike force leader; once that ship has crossed the gate in the target sector, it works as a beacon, and the rest of the strike force makes a gateless jump appearing immediatly in its vicinity. Then hell can break loose :P

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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 12:57

The only thing I can think of that might be conflicting with this is the gate creator script (which I haven't actually used yet). I'll have a fiddle about with it later.

I've been messing with mods since X2, can't be too hard :wink:




EDIT: Ok I had a quick dillydally before I go out. I reverted to a save that I had jst before I installed it. I erased everything from the mod out of my directory except the CAT/DAT (which is number 15 in mine), this fixed all the gates in the universe, but kept the new sectors you've made.

Even thogh all the scripts are gone the sectors still have names read out by Betty, and full populations of stations and ships :)

But when I enter the new sectors I can't use the universe map, its blank. But I jumped to Bluish Snout in the first place so the map works outside of yours.


Odd things, but interesting.

SLeeZeCoRe
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Post by SLeeZeCoRe » Mon, 12. Jul 10, 23:12

Deleted everything and re-appled the mod, works fine now. Something must have been wonky the first time :lol:


Three things though...


1: is that a TandiTech TS flying towards those Cefa's, oops not anymore.

2: which script can I alter slightly to reduce the Attack frequency timer?


1 million internet points for flattening the stupid default map, I prefer it 2D and sequentual :D

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Tue, 13. Jul 10, 01:27

SLeeZeCoRe wrote:1: is that a TandiTech TS flying towards those Cefa's, oops not anymore.

2: which script can I alter slightly to reduce the Attack frequency timer?

1 million internet points for flattening the stupid default map, I prefer it 2D and sequentual :D
I lol'd.

To answer #2: Yes. Yes there is. But you'll have to be more specific.

@Kadatherion:

Noted points. As far as the volunteer ships and military ships disapearing, there is no disapear function. They're not supposed to dissapear ever. If they dissapeared, something in the engine went haywire. There's not a line of code in the whole plugin that destroys those ships.

As for the hang issue, let me look into it. It may require a tweak. I'll see how it goes.

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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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 :(

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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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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?

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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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