Version: BP 1.0
Scripter: X2-Illuminatus
Thread for development version
Bonuspack index
Overview
The Hephaistos Corporation welcomes you and appreciates your call for its services.
The Hephaistos Corp. is a Terran universe-wide working corporation, which specialises in building stations. To clear entrepreneurs of their exhausting everyday work, the Hephaistos Corp. takes care of the purchase, delivery and construction of ordered Stations, without the need for the customer to permanently observe the building process or even to be present in the building sector. This service is not cheap, but the labour saving is surely worth each credit.
The brief instruction
- Assign a key to the "Hephaistos Corp. build service"-hotkey in the Controls menu.
- Press the hotkey and follow the given instructions.
The function
The complete interaction with the Hephaistos Corp. is managed with the set hotkey. After pressing it and depending on the current order and fortune situation of the player different menus or messages will be activated, which let the player order stations (including paying them) or inform him about the current status of his order.
- The order -- After pressing the hotkey for the first time the Hephaistos Corp. will check, if the player has at least 1,000,000 Credits on his player and station accounts and if he can buy any stations from the different races. If this is the case, the player gets a welcome message. Confirming it, will open the actual "Select station menu", which is divided into three sections:
- Under "Current order data" the already selected stations, the current price (including the building fee), the money on player and station accounts as well as an button to end the order will be displayed. Have stations already been added to the order list, will a click on the "already selected stations''-entry show a list of these stations. A click on one stations will let the player remove that station. Another click on the "already selected stations"-entry will close the station list again.
- Under "Filter stations by races" you're able to select a certain or 'all' races. The buyable station list will then only contain stations of that race.
- Under "Buyable stations" the stations that can be bought by the player are displayed together with their price.
- An amount less or equal zero ('0') was entered.
- The maximum amount of stations would be higer than 125 with this input.
- The total price would exceed the player's total fortune with this input.
- The payment -- While all accounts will be recognized, when checking the player's fortune, money to pay the costs will always just be debited from the player account. When the order is finished and enough money is on the player account to pay the costs, the money will automatically be debited and the delivery will be started. If there is not enough money, the order will be saved and the player has to transfer money from his station accounts to his account. When he has done this, pressing the hotkey again will result in debiting the money from the player account and starting the delivery.
If the costs exceed either the maximum possible amount of Credits on the player account or the player's currently available fortune, it's also possible to pay in installments. Each time after pressing the "Hephaistos Corp"-Hotkey the maximum available money will be taken from the player account to pay the remaining debts. - The delivery -- After the payment was made, the stations will be transported to the selected sector by station transporters (TL class ships) and built at the selected coordinates. At this position the first station is built, which will be the upper left front corner of a cube. Note that the stations won't be connected with each other using Complex Construction Kits! (There is simply no command for that in the Script Editor.) During the build process the player can get status updates of the build process by pressing the "Hephaistos Corp"-Hotkey. After all stations are built, the player will get a message informing him, if and if yes how successful the building process was.
Known problems and workarounds
Attention: A test version that should fix the below mentioned bugs is available now. Please refer to this post for further informations.
Below some of the known problems and workarounds are listed. These problems will be fixed with the next version.
- Problem: Under certain circumstances it can happen that when pressing the Hephaistos Corp. hotkey, the player gets a message that he cannot order stations due to not enough money, although the player has more than enough credits on his accounts. - Workaround: Make sure that you have not more than one billion credits on your player account.
- Problem: The game freezes, when confirming the initial Hephaistos Corp. message, if the player just has the Terran rank to buy stations. - Workaround: Increase your rank with one of the other races, so you can buy their stations.
- Problem: There's no progress in the delivery process, if the building place is a sector without jump gate or jump beacon. - Workaround: If you want to have stations built in such a sector, you have to manually place a jump beacon there. (According to some posts in the X-Universe forum, you should be able to get them, if you kill RRF ships.) If you already have started a building process in such a sector, the script will hang. If this happened, you have to load a savegame from before you started this building process. If you don't have such a save anymore or if you don't want to go back that far, you'll have to wait for the next version of this script. This will definitely have a function to abort building processes that have stopped (or hang) for whatever reason.
- Problem: The positioning of Solar Power Plants doesn't work correctly in 'complexes' that consist of different stations. The SPPs will slightly collide with some of the stations. - Workaround: Connect all stations with Complex Construction Kits. Afterwards, they won't cause any collision damage anymore.
- Problem: The station sizes for the new Terran stations added with X3AP update 3.0 are not yet part of the t file, so that the stations will be built at arbitrary positions *somewhere* in the selected sector.
Credits
- EGOSOFT for the X-Series and the Script Editor
-Dusty- for the original idea of A.R.E.S for X3:Reunion
Gazz for his Get object size script library
Ketraar for creating the Hephaistos Corp. introduction picture in the Egosoft forum topic
Saetan for the station sizes from his object size database