Overtuning ships, repair laser and 2nd HQ in TC vanilla. Exploit howto with pictures)

[glenmcd]

So, you actually cloned the damned thing? Congrats Was it in EQ? Because I didn't have any luck in the HUB.

It was in the EQ, but I'm confident that it will work in the others also. Going back to modded game now and I've got the hub there so will know for certain soon.

[kurush]

Ok, we got our repair lasers thanks to glenmcd. Now the question of the day: what would be the best ship to use as a repair drone? I think it should be something agile and capable of equipping repair lasers everywhere...

[VincentTH]

Ego should ask glencd and the OP to be their beta testers for X:R

(But no, I am not interested in these exploits).

[Aro]

Can the PHQ reverse a ship that's been transferred to stock or does the ship need to be docked naturally?

[Rhox]

Ok, we got our repair lasers thanks to glenmcd. Now the question of the day: what would be the best ship to use as a repair drone? I think it should be something agile and capable of equipping repair lasers everywhere...

I don't think that lasers everywhere make sense as the ship would only fire them at enemy ships. And that's the last thing you want to do
I'd suggest the Vidar. It can mount up to 10 RL's in the front, which should be the most of all ships if I'm not mistaken. Furthermore it has quite a good laser reactor as a M6 so continuous fire should be more than possible...

best regards,
Rhox

[glenmcd]

As per Nanook's request instructions for generating vanilla repair lasers moved here:
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This is a bug exploit. Unless you've played Terran Conflict for at least 200 hours, you really would be better off not reading further. For now at least.

Spoiler

Show

This exploit uses Kurush's menu-jumping exploit (OP in this thread):
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=303682
I'll assume from here that you've read the above thread enough to know how to use it. With this exploit, you can generate wares that did not previously exist, and do so in a player equipment dock or Xenon Hub. The list of wares includes "normal" wares such as weapons. food, bio, tech etc, plus factories and repair lasers.

To generate repair lasers usable on ships:
Dock at your player EQd in your spacesuit. Use dockware manager to add repair laser. Then remove any ware that is past repair laser, when viewing the list from the trade menu. In other words, wares/factories/ships/others that start with S-Z should be removed. If you've got stock of those in the hub you'll need to remove the stock first. Activate Kurush's menu jumping exploit (I won't explain here as Kurush has done this very well above). Use the trade menu from any ship, place the cursor on the top item in the price-setting region. This is the second section of the trade menu for player stations. Press the "Home" key. Wait until the menu jumps down a line, and then press enter. Whatever ware/factory/ship/other the cursor lands on, will suddenly have maximum quantity in your EQd. For repair lasers, you'll have 10,000 of them. So the critical thing is to have the item you want generated last alphabetically. Transfer the wares elsewhere, and then either generate more or delete that ware from your EQd list and generate the ware that replaces it in the list.

Repair lasers use only one cargobay unit, all prices (min/av/max) are 64 credits. You can have thousands of them in a ship if you want, and xfer to other ships as desired. Because you're using from a ship, you're free to use SETA during all repairs, and of course you don't have to eject before repairing. To do SETA repair, hold down left control and J keys together.

To generate factories, transfer the wares list (all) from any factory of your choosing, including enemies such as Xenon. Although it appears you can generate ships, I haven't taken this all the way through to actually flying one of them. But it works well for generating factories that you don't have the rep (or credits) to buy yet.

[glenmcd]

Here's another CLS exploit that doesn't involve menu jumping. You have two of your ships docked at one of your factories. Ship #1 has a cargobay full of some ware that your factory has as a resource (product probably works too). Ship #2 is running a CLS2 waypoint list that loads all of the ware from ship #1, wastes time by unloading one unit of the ware into factory and back a few times, and finally unloads all units of ware back into ship #1. Meanwile, player is using trade menu to the factory, and moving wares back and forth in the normal manner while at same time, the wares are not always in the ship. There's windows of time in which the wares get cloned. I haven't narrowed the timing of that window too much, but the fact that I started with 7,000 ECs between both ships and factory, and ended up with 17,000 (factory had 10,000 unit resource storage capacity) confirms that this exploit does work. If the exact sequence of required events can be worked out, then the exploit may also be usable at NPC factories. While this may not be particularly attractive in play in comparison to other more lucrative exploits, it's still one that should be of interest to anyone working on closing exploits. Although it may seem that the responsibility must surely lie with CLS software to close these exploits, it may in fact come down to something in the X3TC engine itself or perhaps some vanilla script. At a basic level we've got an engine that is designed for synchronous operation, but has had asynchronous operation forced on it via CLS2 and perhaps others. Even Trade Command Mk I may present opportunities for exploitation. For example you command ship #2 to buy some ware, meanwhile you're in ship #1 and you manually trade with same station, but pausing between specifying quantity and pressing enter, to allow ship #1 to do its thing. If this works as an exploit, I'd say that it's confirmation that ES needs to look at its own code, rather than put pressure on the author of CLS. In another thread I mentioned that the Mission director taking wares from a ships cargobay on conclusion of a "Wares required" generic mission also presents an opportunity for ware cloning. It's not the trading scripts. It's something at a lower level. One thing that would close most of these would be to block any moving of wares of credits at a station, while another trading operation is happening. In other words, disallow asynchronous operation (per station) at the lowest level possible.

[kurush]

Although it may seem that the responsibility must surely lie with CLS software to close these exploits, it may in fact come down to something in the X3TC engine itself or perhaps some vanilla script.

I have to disagree here on CLS as it in fact has nothing to do with the bug. I am 90% sure you can get the same results with "supply ships" command from vanilla. It also happens for deliver ware missions.

I'd say that it's confirmation that ES needs to look at its own code, rather than put pressure on the author of CLS.

Yep. Luckily, it is not going to happen until TNBT comes out with its own fancy bugs And those bugs are usually are useful. We now can address several major deficiencies in vanilla game: lack of PALC, absence of repair laser, absence of a method to overtune ships, and finally disappearance of EEMPC

[glenmcd]

I have to disagree here on CLS as it in fact has nothing to do with the bug. I am 90% sure you can get the same results with "supply ships" command from vanilla. It also happens for deliver ware missions.

I said it wrong; we're actually in agreement.

Luckily, it is not going to happen until TNBT comes out with its own fancy bugs

If X:Rebirth does support multi-core and is a total rewrite, it implies that much of the code is inheritly parallel (very many threads offering parallel execution). This places much more pressure on ensuring that data in flux is not accessible to other threads/processes ("Semaphores" etc). If this hasn't already been effectively addressed in the design/writing of Rebirth, then threads such as this one if nothing else demonstrates the issue's capacity for game spoiling as well as their resistance to quick/cheap workarounds. As most people believe that exploits in this thread are nothing but bugs in the bonus pack CLS software, this demonstrates that thinking needs to come around to the real issue, and the necessity of addressing it in Rebirth if not in TC. Even if there's a V3.2 release of TC, I'm not expecting to see any changes in CLS. I'd be surprised if CLS could even offer a workaround, let alone a fix.

[Aro]

The first appearance of this bug was way back in X2, or at least that's my recollection of it occurring. There have been a few similar bugs as well but this one takes the cake.


Been trying to create repair lasers. Used the hub and an equipment dock with no luck. glenmcd, could you make a save game with it set up and workable?
Will try that other save to see if it will still work.

[glenmcd]

Been trying to create repair lasers. Used the hub and an equipment dock with no luck. glenmcd, could you make a save game with it set up and workable?
Will try that other save to see if it will still work.

Will do. But you need to understand that getting repair laser into your EQd wares list is quite different to actually generating some of them. With adding the repair laser as a ware, I got that from Kurush above. Just dock at your EQd in space suit, use dockware manager, add ware, lasers / repair laser. If you're not docked in your space suit then this option won't show.

[Aro]

Already done that silly
Having problems on the creation of the ware part. The menu always resets the value to zero.
Tried the 05 save and having the same problem.

I now know why repair lasers are not available:
On that hype, stick a full complement of repair lasers and a pbe to weapon group 1.
Group two will be one repair laser and a pbe.
Go attack a ship using weapon group two.
When the hull gets low swap to group 1.
Repeat until it bails.

Could prob use two pbe's but one worked quite well. So yeah, why would you use repair lasers in a turret? For the insanity! Cap ships, board ships, etc! No wonder they are not available.
*glares at the BoP mission*

[kurush]

Having problems on the creation of the ware part. The menu always resets the value to zero.

The RL must be the last item on the list. Also, I used the CLS setup from glenmcd that was slightly modified. Basically, it unloads a 25mj shield to my TL, moves a single EC back and forth 3 times, loads the shield back, moves EC again. It didn't work from the first try but eventually I got them. You need to try multiple times as the selection line jumps up and down It is not as reliable as overtunning on an NPC EQ.

I now know why repair lasers are not available:
On that hype, stick a full complement of repair lasers and a pbe to weapon group 1.
Group two will be one repair laser and a pbe.
Go attack a ship using weapon group two.
When the hull gets low swap to group 1.
Repeat until it bails.

This is exactly my plan It happens to be the only way you get an adequate chance to complete those return stolen ship missions.

So yeah, why would you use repair lasers in a turret

May be you are role-playing a goner? Spreading the love of GOD?

[Aro]

God? No, it's the good news! You have heard the good news right?

What product did you use as the base to create them? Squito missiles?

[kurush]

You have heard the good news right?

Indeed. Remember, we got RL in Vanilla

What product did you use as the base to create them? Squito missiles?

Looks like you missed the important part of glenmcd's find. Initially, I missed it as well. You do not use any products. You actually make sure RL is the last item on the list and go to the top of the price selection section of your dock. In that section you press Home and wait until it jumps.

[Aro]

So it is using the price change list not the ware? Wasn't sure on that point. Will give it another go.

[glenmcd]

Already done that silly
Having problems on the creation of the ware part. The menu always resets the value to zero.

http://www.glenmcd.com/tc/X01.sav
Your cursor will almost immediately jump up to Repair Laser, and a few seconds later to the ware above that. You need to put your cursor on the top price-setting ware line, and that's for 200MJ Shields in this case. As the menus are moving up/down, you need to have the cursor on correct line when menus are up. Then hit Home key. Then wait. Menus then move down, cursor effectively jumps up to Repair lasers, then you hit Enter and you will then have 10,000 RLs in stock. Transfer to ships as required.

http://www.glenmcd.com/tc/X02_microchips.sav
In this one, it's setup to generate microchips. Like the above example, put your cursor on the top price-setting line while menus are in down position, which in this case will mean you're on the CIG lasers line.

It is critical that the ware on top line of price-setting region is expensive. If you only have a cheap ware there, then of course the menus will always reset to zero.
I suspect that this particular point explains why in the old method (using quantity of an actual ware rather than its price) accounts for that methods flakiness, and why wares that were cheaper (and thus more likely to have higher quantities in my ship) worked but others didn't. I mentioned before that I've taken to modifying TShips file to give myself enormous cargobays. This led to massive quantity of wares, and this in turn allowed the exploit to work for me before others. By using the price instead of the quantity, this gets around the issue of not always having a large quantity of wares on the line under the ware you want to generate.

[glenmcd]

Kurush have you been able to get OWPs listed in your EQd too? I noticed that they too are a form of ship, and you can even communicate with the "captain" of them. They have a race, but AFAIK are not listed in any station, and don't appear in the default CLS lists. Your trick with listing the repair lasers suggests that a bit of creativity/exploration may lead to some interesting vanilla ware generations.

You guys are talking about using the repair laser for increasing bailing chances?? I don't understand the connection. They have some interesting destruction properties, such as 2.2KM range, and extremely high speed. Hull damage per energy usage is incredibly bad for its energy usage tho.

[kurush]

Hull damage per energy usage is incredibly bad for its energy usage tho.

LOL!x2 It is so bad that it is actually negative. RL was used by several people to bail those zombie ships that appear from time to time (flying with 0%hull and not dieing). Basically, you can configure your hyperion so that your target ship will never die under fire. We don't yet know how negative damage of RL affects the bail chance of regular ships but I suspect it would be similar to those zombies.
Did I mention that ErrorSoft bugs are the most fascinating part of the game?

Kurush have you been able to get OWPs listed in your EQd too?

What is OWP? I actually haven't started TC since I got my RL.

[glenmcd]

Hull damage per energy usage is incredibly bad for its energy usage tho.

LOL!x2 It is so bad that it is actually negative. RL was used by several people to bail those zombie ships that appear from time to time (flying with 0%hull and not dieing). Basically, you can configure your hyperion so that your target ship will never die. We don't yet know how negative damage of RL affects the bail chance of regular ships but I suspect it would be similar to those zombies.

Kurush have you been able to get OWPs listed in your EQd too?

What is OWP? I actually haven't started TC since I got my RL.

Thanks I got you now. Damage and repair at same time
OWP = Orbital Weapons Platform. The large ones can't be matched for defence capabilities.