[X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

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StopBanningMe7_III
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[X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Sat, 19. May 18, 12:24

I don't know how much point there is in uploading this at this point, but I suppose it couldn't hurt. A while back I played a LOT of Litcube's Universe, and along the way I tweaked and changed all kinds of things. After a while I had made enough tweaks that it seemed almost like some kind of deliberate mod, but given the total lack of any cohesion I have hesitated to upload it for more than 18 months now. If I don't just do it, I never will.

The primary addition here is the well tested and very much functional port of MARS fire control to LU. A good turret script was otherwise sorely lacking. I uploaded a much hackier and less well tested version of this way back in 2016ish. If anyone is still out there playing LU, I can't recommend adding MARS to the game highly enough. It is a game changer. If you've never used it, just know that with it every ship can fill every role, swapping between cannons to flak to medium guns to anti-missile guns and back and forth as much as necessary. And it doesn't cheat, either. Reload times are honored, and of course only loadable turrets are loadable.

Let it be quite clear that I did not write this mod. At this point I've read every line of it and tweaked a bunch of it, but it is definitely not my work. However, the original is also definitely not maintained. I will include the whole thing here. If the original author takes offence to this then of course I can remove it. Otherwise, it's just much easier to do it this way.

OTHER CHANGES

As I mentioned, I tweaked quite a few things as I was playing. It's been long enough since I did play that I have probably forgotten most of them, but the ones I remember (or, more precisely, the ones I actually documented) are, in no particular order:
  • 1. Added many features to the MLCC system. It is now possible to redeploy ships at will. During long, tedious battles against waves of ships (ie the ones you do to gain reputation) your fleet usually gets scatted and disorganized. I made it possible to have all ships jump to your beacon whenever you want them to, not just when they're at home in port like before. There are a few settings for this, tactical redeployment will only make ships in the same sector jump, not busy will make all ships not doing something jump, home is the default behavior. Furthermore, expanding on this I added a command to allow any ship to jump to your beacon at any time. The energy shuttle in particular makes good use of this.

    2. HQ Bulk build. You can now queue up up to 100 of a particular loadout of ships to be built at your HQ. This is much more convenient than using the normal menu system. The ships will be built, configured, outfitted, and then will fly to a designated station in the same sector, which will become their homebase. If that station has "reserve" in its name, the ship will be renamed to `reserve TYPE NUMBER`, and will be made available to the automatic replacement system.

    3. After battles, MLCC ships will automatically repair themselves at your HQ. Carriers will offload damaged fighters to the HQ and receive replacements from a nearby reserve facility, if they are available. They won't wait for the fighters to finish repairing, but you DO have plenty of replacements available, don't you? Once fighters are repaired, they fly to the reserve facility and are in turn available for replacement. This system also makes it easy to keep everyone stocked up on missiles. Just dump lots in the reserve facility. Ships will go home after repairing.

    4. Added additional functionality to carriers. They can now function in several roles. An assault carrier is one that launches it's fighters, and then proceeds to carry out an assault operation, as if that had been it's primary goal in the first place. This makes it far more practical to load up your fleet of Valhallas (you DO have a fleet of Valhallas, don't you?) with fighters. If you had assigned them as carriers before they would cower off in the corner. Now they can take part in the battle like they ought to. Also, it is possible for ships that can carry bombers to function as a bomber carrier (or even an assault bomber carrier). They must only carry bombers. They will launch bombers like fighters, thus saving you from wasting storage space on energy. Furthermore, empty bombers will return to the carrier and be replaced by a new one. Only a handful will launch at once to save you from a 3fps slideshow.

    5. Several other tweaks to MLCC that I've largely forgotten about. Some changes to the UI along with a few new diagnostics.

    6. AI plugin to automatically drain money from stations. It will run every minute and drain stations down the a configurable low water mark (0 is recommended, unless you're crazy enough to have stations that need to buy things...). The HQ has it's own low water mark setting, and can optionally be made exempt from the system entirely. This little script just takes away the need to constantly grab money from your factories.

    7. Modified an ancient "remember homebase" script to actually work (previously it didn't do anything). Now ships will always remember the homebase they had before you personally hopped aboard, rather than having it reset to nothing. Very convenient.

    8. Your freighters and traders will ignore being attacked by lasertowers. Normally they jump away at the first sign of trouble, which gets infuriating later on when phanon has 40 lasertowers in every sector. They now only jump away when their shields get below 40%, which is very rare. Lasertowers usually do nothing.

    9. Freighters NEVER buy fighter drones. Ever. You will save billions of credits.

    10. A whole bunch of hotkeys. My favorite is "next enemy (ignoring drones)" which does what it says on the tin.

    11. Added laser information to the "ship compendium".

    12. Fixed the broken player evaluation script. It didn't account for stocks.

    13. Ported the ring of fire script. It's OP as @%&!.

    14. Integrated the phanon+ and revelation+ mods and changed them quite a bit.

    15. Rewrote the player console to use the litcube fast menu system. Also rewrote several other menus for the same reason (including the MARS menu, which took a very long time).

    16. Integrated the satellite monitoring script, and added the ability to remotely send the reaper shuttle to systems with lots of loot. Furthermore, you can give the shuttle a queue of sectors to loot.

    17. Integrated smartturrets, and fixed its missile frigate system. MARS has none. This system will dump exactly as many missiles as required to destroy a given target, and with it you can wipe out sectors.
Please also note that Smart Turrets, Sattellite Monitoring, Revalation+, Phanon+, Ring of Fire, and MK3 Traders Improvement are NOT my work. They are merely required to use the changes I made to them, so I'm bundling them. If anyone takes offence to this then as before I will address it immediately.

Since there are so many little mods here, and because Litcube will not work with the standard mod manager, I've also included JSGME, the generic mod enabler. It simply copies and pastes mods over the original files, while backing up those originals. When you disable a mod, the original files are restored. See this post for more information. viewtopic.php?t=387322&highlight=

I've tried to make it as easy as possible. Since mods are sensitive to the order in which they are installed, I've included two scripts for JSGME. All you have to do is copy all of the sub-mods in the archive to a directory named MODS in your base X3 folder (where the binaries are), and copy JGSME.exe to that same top directory (not with the mods). Start the program, click on "tasks", "load profile", and select either the "ALL.mep" or "NoTraders.mep" files that I included. This will activate all submods and all submods except the ones that make traders ignore fighter drones and lasertowers, respectively. You can then activate and deactivate submods as you please. It's very easy to use, just keep in mind that it is important that you put everything in the right place.

Here is the link. I haven't looked at this code in a long time, so hopefully things aren't too broken. If anyone actually does download this, let me know if anything weird happens.

EDIT: Reuploaded to mediafire because I hate Mega.
EDIT2: Fixed small problem with hotkeys overwriting defaults. Things should work now. Reuploaded.
EDIT3: Fixed broken MLCC system.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/tazm8icmk ... 2.zip/file
Last edited by StopBanningMe7_III on Wed, 31. Oct 18, 01:13, edited 7 times in total.

moxica
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Post by moxica » Sun, 20. May 18, 14:18

Link is borked.

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X2-Illuminatus
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Post by X2-Illuminatus » Sun, 20. May 18, 15:09

Fixed.
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StopBanningMe7_III
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Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Wed, 23. May 18, 23:35

Thanks. I tried to make the link work but just couldn't get it to highlight properly. I figured that the system just didn't work with Mega for some reason.

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Thu, 24. May 18, 18:10

Is this compatible with XRM?

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Post by Joubarbe » Thu, 24. May 18, 20:02

Is your mom compatible with XRM?

StopBanningMe7_III
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Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Wed, 30. May 18, 01:30

Joubarbe wrote:Is your mom compatible with XRM?
???
Litcube wrote:Is this compatible with XRM?
I don't know how it could be, XRM has nothing to do with your mod. Did you mean XM-R (X-Missions Reloaded)? If that is the case, then I can only say that I don't know. I haven't used it. It might be. It would be mostly dependent on whether laser and ship data were changed significantly. As to most of the sub mods, I would think they would work fine. But I haven't tested that at all, whereas I can say that there were an embarrassing hours of hapless debugging that went into testing it for LU vanilla.

If you did mean X-Rebalanced then the answer is a very definite no.

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Litcube
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Post by Litcube » Wed, 30. May 18, 03:28

Ok, thank you.

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Post by radcapricorn » Wed, 30. May 18, 07:04

Oh, you guys, you nasty nasty guys. How could you?
:lol:

Chokeslam
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Post by Chokeslam » Thu, 31. May 18, 02:01

This looks awesome! Thank you for taking the time to upload and explain it all. Looks like I'm gonna have to pry myself away from Mayhem soon.

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Post by fiby » Sun, 3. Jun 18, 03:15

Hi, thanks for the mega upload, installed your mod to a fresh X3LU install and the MLCC assign task for ship is broken.

Whether I select "All Other" or the ship itself, when I set up the task and push back the task is assigned then unassigned in a fraction of a second.

To confirm I have followed the install using JSGME - All.mep

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Post by vellarain » Wed, 6. Jun 18, 02:34

Hmm, does this work with Mayhem by chance?

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Post by Sirrobert » Wed, 6. Jun 18, 13:50

IIRC, Mayhem now changes the laser stats. So that part is borked
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Post by Uncle Benis » Sat, 16. Jun 18, 01:41

Any chance of getting a full changelog?

EDIT: Also when starting a new game Im getting READ-TEXT errors when choosing the MARS Open Menu option from Additional Ship Commands. Naturally since its a new game no MARS related software is installed, is that normal behaviour? Everything works fine on an older save before I installed this pack.

EDIT 2: Also MLCC options are gone from the menu.

EDIT 3: Aight so it looks like the scripts are not firing on a new game start, they only engage when you load a save. Now Im concerned about how this delay would affect the rest of the game.

Kerbouchard
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Re: [X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by Kerbouchard » Sun, 17. Jun 18, 03:36

Litcube Hotkey (like fire chaff,ect..) are overwrite by yours.
Can you add yours without eliminating others?


I think it's the hotkeys of the setup.HotKeys.xml file, which are overwritten by the same file of "My Hotkeys" mod.

Valtarien
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Post by Valtarien » Thu, 13. Sep 18, 03:05

Does Phanon+ and Revelation+ require a full restart of the game? I just got rolling in a new game, but just found this. Everything else seems to work fine, so far. Thanks for all your hard work!

StopBanningMe7_III
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Re: [X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Mon, 8. Oct 18, 01:14

Sorry to everyone for not responding to problems sooner. I've been busy lately, and moreover actually resolving problems would mean booting into Windows ( :rant:) which is not something I look forward to doing ever again. Furthermore, I can't use Vim to edit the scripts. I might as well use a quill pen and my own blood to write them. There isn't even a Vim emulation mode in any of the available editors! Horror!

Has anyone been using this mod lately (or at all)? A few people mentioned that it broke things unless a new game was started. That was one thing I definitely forgot to test. I assumed it would be fine because I made most of the changes to an ongoing game incrementally, but I should have tested before uploading. Also, can anyone confirm that it is breaking MLCC or overwriting hotkeys? I can think of a few ways to maybe address that, but I just don't have the time these days to play video games so I probably won't be able to do any testing for a little while. I can say that I am not actually sure whether phanon+ or revelation+ require restarts. I don't think so, but X3 can be weird sometimes.

Of course, if necessary I can do it anyway. Playing videogames... what backbreaking work...

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Re: [X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by Yuof » Mon, 15. Oct 18, 22:49

Yeah , i have been using it.
Most Stuff works and is rly nice but i can confirm the MLCC part being broken(cant config ships). I disabled the MLCC parts and the rest works fine.

StopBanningMe7_III
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Re: [X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Tue, 30. Oct 18, 10:34

I have no idea why MLCC would be broken. I looked at the code and don't see any obvious problems. And it works for me. What exactly isn't working? I spent probably the most time on the MLCC stuff so I'm a little dismayed to hear that it doesn't seem to work

In any case I fixed the mixup with the hotkeys and uploaded a new version. The whole thing's small enough that I just reuploaded everything rather than a patch. Required for anyone starting a new game with the mod already enabled, since I accidentally overwrote the default hotkeys...

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Re: [X3LU] MARS Fire control for Litcube's universe & many additions and tweaks

Post by StopBanningMe7_III » Wed, 31. Oct 18, 01:00

I normally hate to double post, but I think this might be worth a little update. Apologies in advance if it is, in fact, not.

I've solved the problem with MLCC. A sloppy, stupid error on my part. As long as at least one ship was already configured, everything worked. If none were configured, the settings were being reset afterwords. So it was both impossible to set up from scratch and couldn't be noticed during a running game with things set up already. Dumb. It should work fine now. Will re-upload the mod in the top post. Highly recommend that anyone using this thing update it.

I'd just like to note that I'm so rusty with this language that the above debugging took 4 hours. :evil: Also, sorry for posting two patches in rapid succession. I wasn't sure last night whether I wanted to track down the MLCC problem, so I uploaded the hotkey fix just in case.

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