[2.7.1 MOD] X3TC Naval Shuffle

[Sorenson]

As of late I have been getting a number of reports of unusual turret behavior and other ship-related bugs. In order to increase the liklihood of me being able to determine what mechanics are at work behind these occurrances, anyone reporting bugs and the like are requested to provide the following information along with their description of the bug in question:

A) Game patch version (IE, 2.7.1)
B) Game distribution version (IE, Steam, Retail, etc)
C) Whether you CONTINUED an old PRE-SHUFFLE save game ar STARTED a NEW GAME after installing. if you continued a new game, congratulations: you most likely found the reason things are screwing up.
D) List of all MODS being run alongside the Naval Shuffle (IE, Complex Cleaner, Tubeless Complexes, etc)
E) List of all SCRIPTS being run alongside the Naval Shuffle, both those used with Plugin Manager and those of the direct-install variety

Download 1.2 from Filefront, or use this megaupload mirror if Filefront is being a dick for some reason.

Installation/Removal
Extract the contents to your X3TC main directory. To remove, simply delete the main mod from the mods directory and delete the included \director and \script files.

Huh. Naval Shuffle. What's going on with this Naval Shuffle?

The Naval Shuffle, like just about every other mod released for this game that wasn't a quick custom-ship job, is an attempt to assess a number of issues that, while overlooked or viewed by the developers in a different light, prove problematic or eroding to players and derive and execute solutions to these issues to make X3 Terran Conflict a more enjoyable title.

Of course, given that everybody has their own opinions on what ails the game, a more apt-but-still-pretentiously-ambiguous description is "The Naval Shuffle addresses issues I think deride from the game, and if you disagree, tough luck".

Get on with it, man!

More specifically, the Naval Shuffle, as its name implies, is a shake-up of current conventions employed by many-to-all of the ships available in Terran Conflict. While not nessecarily earth-shaking (ba-dum-pish) changes that rewrite the roles and capabilities of every vessel and item in TC, it is fairly extensive in its reach and effect.

This mod operates on two principles:

A) Finding and dealing with stuff that holds the game back from being more fun. At the core of this is speed (or the lack thereof for anything that isn't an M5) which manifests particularly badly in capital ships, which move with all the grace of a pig stuck fast in mud and which take eons to get anywhere without the use of jump drives.

B) Finding and dealing with stuff that makes you go "That's odd...". For example: why do ships use certain shield configurations that are less effective than if they used a single more powerful shield? Why does a regular TS have better cargo capacity per cargo module than the Superfreighter version? Why does the space suit have such terrible forward acceleration and decelleration, but has angular acceleration almost four times as fast as its max speed and about 25 times as fast as its regular acceleration?

This mod operates on the belief that Terran Conflict is a game, and that gameplay and the fun derived from such take precidence over "balance" and believability unless said believability works in the interest of gameplay as it is. Those who prefer their space games to be hardcore nitty-gritty simulations, or who think the current TC setup and sense of "balance" is fine as-is, definetily aren't going to find anything of interest here.

OK, but what does this mod REALLY do?

Currently, as in the latest build of this mod, Naval Shuffle institutes the following changes over vanilla TC:

A) Ship Characteristics Overhaul: The core component of the Naval Shuffle, ships have been thoroughly altered in numerous ways:
*Speed Curve Reassessment: The initial and core purpose of this mod. Ship speed and maneuverability has been reworked to reduce the considerably-large dropoffs in speed often experienced when moving from a lighter ship class to a heavier one, as well as increasing the speed and maneuverability of the heavier ship classes to make them more useful and appealing in both a utility and asthetics sense. Fighting an M5 as an M3 means combat is now an actual dogfight instead of a jousting match, and fighting in an M2 means getting to the fray in a timely manner and actually being able to maneuver instead of simply sitting in space and hoping your shields hold out. Ships still follow the same general speed hierarchy as in vanilla, however, and while ships are certainely faster they don't go beyond the realm of reasonability. Furthermore, ship tunings have been reworked: normal ships now use a flat system of 10 tunings for engines and rudders, and tunings are now used for determining the speed characteristics of the ship varients, having more or less than their patron ship.
* Ship Varient Standardization: While the Hauler/Raider/Vanguard/Sentinel system followed a set of general rules as to what you could expect each varient to do, they were never iron-clad and as thus you could never be too sure as to what specific changes were instituted until you brought up the stats of the ships in question and compared them. Naval Shuffle makes these varients both more adhering to their name and more adhering to varient stat tweaking rules: Haulers are better-shielded and carry more cargo, Raiders are faster with better weapon energy but lacking in shielding, Sentinals are slower but better shielded and have stronger hulls, and Vanguards are all-round improvements to the original design.
* Pirate Ship Equalization: The pirate versions of the main race ships have been brought back up to match their patron ships. Some ship designs aren't completily identical due to the presence or lack thereof of turrets, which I'm loath to try and impliment for fear of cataclysmic failure.
* Weapon Compatability Reassignment: Weapons are now divided into three groups: Universal (IRE/PAC/HEPT/PPC, etc) Foundation Guild (PRG/ID/IPG/IC/PBC, etc) and Profit Guild (FBL, PBE, ISR, TBC, etc) with Argon and Boron vessels pulling from Universal and Foundation Guild, the Paranid and Split ships drawing from Universal and Profit Guild, and the Teladi, Pirates, Yaki and Xenon pulling from all three. Terran weapons are still exclusive to Terran ships save a few logical exceptions (Xenon and those ships). Additionally, turrets have been reworked to use a Primary and Secondary compatability system: for M1/2/TL vessels, front and side turrets now hold the heaviest weapons the ship can wield while the rear and top/bottom turrets use lighter weapons, and M6/7s have their Primary weapons on the main guns/front turret while all others (save the heavy corvettes, which are special cases) use secondary allotments. Additionally, the Commonwealth and Terran beam weapons (Phased Array Laser Cannon, Plasma Beam Cannon, Tri-Beam Cannon and Fusion Beam Cannon) have been integrated into ship compatabilities as per camp associations, and factories are now capable of producing the aforementioned beam weapons. And those weird offset guns on the ATF Mjolnir and Valkyrie have been effectively removed (gun number for those slots set to 0). Finally, as of Geekey's request, turrets that used to have only one gun assigned to them now have two - this gives some ships a considerable boost in firepower, particularly the Tyr, which regains its horrifically-destructive 16-gun broadsides like it used to have in Xtended. Due to the way certain ships (the Colossus, for example) have some of their turrets set up I'd have to actually mess around and add additional entries to the Guns in Turret field in the editor, which I frankly do not want to do for fear of causing some kind of massive pileup.
* Cargo Space Recalculation: The cargo bay statistics for scouts/interceptors/fighters have had a considerable rework. Minimum cargo space is now 1.5 times the volume of a ship's full equipment loadout - a Nova, for example, has 8 HEPTs (48) 2 PACs (54) and 3 25 MJ shields (84) times 1.5 (126) - with the maximum a multiple based on the race: 2/3/4/5/6 for Paranid/Split/Argon+Pirates+Yaki/Boron+Terran+Xenon/Teladi - the aforementioned Nova, thus, has a max cargo capacity of 504. Additionally, the capacities for several of the TS ships have been switched around; basic ships start at 2000/2500/3000/3500/4000 and end at 3000/3500/4000/4500/5000 for the Paranid, Split, Argon, Boron and Teladi, medium TS' get double those values, and the large superfreighters get four times those values. Finally, the TLs got some tweaking as well: the Mammoth's been dropped down about a third in price, the Orca got its cargo volume changed to 80K, the Albatross has been kicked up to 100K and has been given boosts to shields and weapons energy owing to its sheer massiveness, the Atmospheric Lifter's capacity has been increased to 120k, and the Ryu's been kicked up to 70K, with additional RelVal tweaking going around to reflect these changes save on the Mammoth. In addition to the above, many of the frigates and capital ships got boosts to their cargo capacities to make way for extra guns added during the turret optomization process, as well as other ships having rather low amounts considering their purpose (the Panther, for example, is a mini-carrier but has a rather low amount of cargo space for supplies for its carried fighters).
* Destroyer Weapon Energy Cutdown: The extremily large gap between the weapon energy capacities between carriers and destroyers has been addressed by a 50% reduction of destroyer weapon energy capacities. Only the most draining of weapons, such as flak guns and beam weapons
, were able to put a signifigant-enough dent in the energy reserves of destroyers, but prolonged engagements with the enemy now make energy depletion a very firm reality. This also makes the use of high-energy weapons (IE beam and flak weapons) a major consideration, as fighter defense might cut into a ship's ability to fight off other capital ships.
* Gamestart Ship Loadout Adjustment: Many of the gamestarts have been tweaked to provide more optimal equipment and to comploy to new ship and weapon compatabilities.
* Boron Ship Reevaluation: Boron vessels have been given some considerable tweaking and overhauling to make them both more viable and distinct from the other race versions of their craft. Boron vessels are now the most heavily-shielded of the commonwealth races, which combined with their high speed makes them dangerous and durable opponents. In contrast, their weapon energy capacities have been adjusted to be 65% of that used by their Argon counterparts, so while they are able to engage in skirmishes as well as other races they are not quite as effective in prolonged engagements. Cargo capacities have also been adjusted to compensate and to fix some errors made during initial calculations.
* Corvette Adjustments: Corvettes have been re-evaluated and adjusted to fix several problemss related to their use. Corvette weapon energy has been doubled from vanilla values, allowing them to make use of their more powerful weapons for longer periods of time and to allow their turrets to be used without compromising the main battery. The differences between the normal and Heavy corvette varients has also been further cemented, and some corvettes whose heavier varients were almost identical to their regular counterparts were tweaked to make them actually worth buying.

B) Shield Optomization/Adjustment: Naval Shuffle makes several changes to shields and the ships that use them:
* Loadout Optomization: A good number of ships had shield loadouts that were simply inefficient given the power requirements and/or volume of generators in use and that they could potentially use: ships that use three 1 MJ generators have been kicked up to a single 5 MJ models (same volume, lower power requirement) while four 5 MJs were upgraded to a single 25 MJ (less volume, lower power requirement) six to eight 25 MJs became one 200 (far less volume, equal-to-lower power requirement) and four and five 200 MJ loadouts were kicked up to 1 GJ setups (need I even say it) and sixpacks were kicked to 2 GJs (you'll see why in a second). A few ships (namely the Kha'ak Corvette) were left as-is due to the way X3 groups weapons - kicking them up to 1 GJ shields would also give them Gamma Kyon Emitters, and they carry nearly as many as destroyers (15 to 18).
* High-End Shield Adjustment: 1 and 2 GJ shields got a bit of tweaking. Their power requirement/recharge rate has been raised from 2000 KW (a mere 25% over the 200 MJ ones) to 5000 KW, and as a result now recharge much faster and thus make their host ship far less susceptable to chip-damage death from fighters as well as making capital ship battles longer and more savory. 2 GJ shields also got their volume decreased from 222 to 150, and all shields now have a flat 1.0 efficiency value.

C) Laser Adjustments: The Naval Shuffle makes a number of alterations to the various laser entries, particularly in regard to the capital ship main guns:
* Beam Weapons: The non-Kyon beam weapons have been adjusted in a few ways. Their bullet speeds have been increased to the point of making them near-hitscan like the Kyon beam weapons, and have had their lifespans reduced to similar levels; the Phased Array Laser Cannon, Tri-Beam Cannon and Fusion Beam Cannon now use the same bullet body as the Plasma Beam Cannon, as this removes the blinding fuzz surrounding the beam and decreases its effective hitbox, solving its supposed friendly-fire issues; the PALC, PBC, TBC and FBC have had their bullet lifetimes reduced to .5, .6, .675 and .4 respectively, and their ROFs were changed to 120 and 150 for the PALC and FBC; the PBC and TBC have had their volumes cut down to 60 and 68 units respectively; and the FBC has had its shield damage increased to 6000, allowing it compete with (and surpass, as it should) race shield DPS without being too overpowered (I used 8500 initially, and while the end result was certainely fun, 20K+ SDPS is a little too much, especially with its high HDPS as it is).
* Kyon Weapons: the Kyon Beam Emitters have gotten boosts ranging from minor to substantial in order to make the Kha'ak a much more dangerous enemy as the game would make you believe. Alpha Kyon Emitters are now roughly equal to High Energy Plasma Throwers and have a range just slightly under that of HEPTs, and've had their volumes changed to 5; Betas have gotten a small boost to their damage output to put them slightly over Concussion Impulse Generators, and're now 25 units of volume and Large cargo; and Gammas've had their damages nearly doubled and their range increased half again to 6.28 km, about 350 meters short of PPCs, and if you haven't guessed, have had their volumes increased to 125 units.
* Capital Ship Weapons: The Photon Pulse/Ion/Gauss Cannon, Incendiary Bomb Launcher, and Point Singularity Projector have received some tweaking. All of them but the PSP have had their firing rates cut to a quarter of their vanilla values, but have had their bullet and turret tracking speeds increased to twice their vanilla values. In order to make them worth using as compared to just loading up on the race beam weapons (which some of us'll do anyway because c'mon, frickin' laser beams!) they've had their damages doubled (save the PSP, which is ship-shatteringly strong as it is) the PPC's charge multiplier has been set to 2 (which keeps charged shots roughly on par with non-charged PSPs as per developer's seeming intention) and their fire delays set to 2000 for the Commonwealth chargeables and 2500 for the PSP (convenience more than anything else).
* Ion Weapons: The Ion Pulse Generator and Ion Cannon have had major reductions to their hull damage, keeping them in line with the Ion Disruptor's use of 1/315th shield damage for hull damage. This should make them much more useful for the purpose of capturing ships, as they now leave much more of your big payday intact. The Ion Cannon's speed drain ability has also had its duration increased to 7.5 seconds (long enough for a refire) so's to make the ability actually USEFUL, and its energy drain ability has been strengthened to corrispond with its doubled damage.
* Electro-Magnetic Plasma Cannons: EMPCs have been given a 25% boost to bullet speed and 75% boost to firing rate, giving them longer ranges and higher DPS than their vanilla versions and putting them roughly on-par with High Energy Plasma Throwers. The experimental versions have received identical boosts.
* Ion Disrupter: The Ion Disrupter's bullet has been swapped from the Zig-zag type to the Beam type. While this removes its ability to affect more than one target at once (the impact effect is a deceptive holdover) it also reduces the liklihood of accidentally hitting a friendly target and turning the entire sector defense force against you. To compensate for this loss the beam speed (and thus range) has been increased half again, giving it a smidge longer range than IREs.
* Flak Weapons: To make the anti-fighter flak weapons more useful, they've gotten boosts to their max ranges: flak guns can now fire their ordinance out to 2.5 km, and their firing rates have been tripled to increase their usefulness in missile defense situations, with damage cut to a third to maintain DPS. The fragments released by these weapons have also received damage boosts, being 1/10th of a direct hit as opposed to the near-nonexistant damage they do under vanilla.
* Repair Laser: The repair laser has had its lifetime cut down to .2 seconds from .5 and its speed increased to 11000 m/s to maintain normal range. Its energy drain has been reduced to half, which should give uou about 25-30 seconds of repair time before needing a recharge versus about ten seconds in vanilla. Better still, repair lasers are now available for sale at Light Weapon Complexes for all the races and the Argon Special Weapons Complex, and all fighters are capable of using them in their front gun slots.
* Pulsed Beam Emitter: The PBE's been given a bit of a restructure. Its ROF has been knocked down to half vanilla values, but its range has been doubled, putting it on par with the PAC and about 350-400 meters short of the PRG; this will let the AI be able to utilize it more effectively. Its volume has also been halved.
* Mass Driver: To make the mass driver more appealing and economical to ues, it's received some boosts and adjustments. Its firing rate has been cut down to 371 rounds a minute, range has been doubled to 1.996 kilometers, and its bullet damage has been multiplied by 8 to 120 points per round, giving it Hull DPS on par with the Particle Accelerator Cannon.
* CIG/ISR/HEPT/MAML/IPG: The aforementioned weapons have received 25% boosts to their bullet speeds, save the IPG which got a 56.25% speed increase because I'd forgotten about work I'd done on it earlier (though since said speed increases simply brings it up to par with the other corvette weapons I'm hard-pressed to care enough to recalculate it).
* Corvette Weapons: the Ion Shard Railgun, Concussion Impulse Generator, and Matter/Anti-Matter Launcher have received adjustments to their damage, bullet speeds, and in the case of the ISR and CIG, energy consumption: they are now fairly more powerful than the HEPT and thus more suitable for use in long-ranged anti-M6/M7 combat and allow for more prolonged engagements in the case of the ISR and CIG.

D) Globals Modifications: Various global values have been tinkered around with: radar ranges have been increased from 10/20/30 km to 25-50-75, with station/orbital platform/nebula ranges changed to maintain their relation to said values. Freight scanner range has also been raised to 8.75 kilometers - while this makes it easier overall to do en masse scannings, especially with that autoscan script, this also allows frigates/destroyers/carriers to scan their opponents and get an idea of just what they're packin' without seeing it firsthand. Finally, complex construction range limits have been increased from 20 km to 2,000, so go ahead and make them as big as your GPU can handle.

E) Galaxy Modifications: A few changes and additions have been implimented into the galaxy map and TBackgrounds file. The fogs seen in a lot of sectors have been removed, and visual ranges have been increased to be on par with the average distances in clear sectors. Furthermore, the home sector shipyards for each race (save the Terrans, since the Torus is a nightmare to try and work with) have had all possible race ship and station entries added, including the Phased Array Laser, Plasma Beam, Tri-Beam and Fusion Beam forges, and their home sector equipment docks have been similarly stocked with all compatable weapons and wares.

F) Missile Adjustment: Missiles and missile compatabilities have been adjusted to remove some of their extreme power while still making them useful. Missiles now come in speeds of 500 m/s (anti-fighter missiles) and 375 m/s (anti-capital missiles) with accelerations based on their missile class: 250 for Lights and anti-fighter missiles, 167 for Mediums, 125 for Heavies, 75 for Heavies intended for anti-capship use, 66 for Bomber ordinance, and 47 for capship-to-capship torpedoes. Many missiles have had their lifetimes adjusted based on their performance characteristics and intended uses - single-round fighter-to-fighter missiles typically run for 30 seconds and are enough for a single max-range strike or two-three passes at close range, while self-guiding cluster missiles have 60 to 120 seconds to permit them to continually track and change targets as the situation requires, and torpedoes and anti-capital missiles can go for between two and a half to five minutes. For fighter-oriented missiles, damage is generally equal to 3/5 the average shield capacity of the class capable of launching it, with increases for more powerful (and expensive) missiles - when fighting within your own ship class (for fighters, anyway) you won't be vulnerable to insta-kills at full shield strength. Finally, missiles have been organized into more sensible groups - hammerheads are no longer medium-class missiles that can be carried by all ships except Terran ones, for example.

G) Equipment RelVal/Dock Capacity Adjustment: In order to make endgame capital ship combat and galactic domination more accessable within a reasonable timeframe, as well as to eliminate large amounts of what I believe to be unnessecary value inflation, weapons and shields have gotten their relvals recalculated based on their capabilities. On average, RelVals have been reduced to 1/3rd of their previous values, and many affected items have had dock and factory capacity increases as a result of such. RelVals have also been equalized between NPC and player factories, as Egosoft had for whatever reason set player production times for many items 20% higher than NPCs. In addition, several of the Ware files have had their entries adjusted: Basic materials have RelVals of 6 for plant-based resources and 24 for animal-based ones, Foods have received similar patterns (6 for cloth rimes and 20 for meatsteak cahoonas, for example) and all of these entries have had their volumes dropped to 1 unit of cargo (presumably cubic meters).

H) Player HQ Adjustment: To make the player HQ much more effective (and actually desireable) to use, some of its characteristics have been tweaked. Its capacity to hold resources and products has been boosted tenfold from 500K units to 5 million units (which is primarily important for the storage of energy cells, of which copious amounts are required for the construction of high-end vessels) and ship construction is now instantanious so as to make construction viable versus simply buying the desired ship at a shipyard. The resources (or rather the amounts) required to build ships have also been altered: credits are no longer used, and the material component requirements have been boosted to compensate, as well as readjustments based on the actual average value of the component in question. Repairing, recycling, and reverse-engineering still takes time, but the timeframes for such have been reduced to 10% of their originals (5% in the case of reverse-engineering) to make the headquarters' abilities much more viable.

I) Solar Power Plant Adjustments: In order to enable the exploitation of resources in silicon-scarce sectors, Solar Power Plants have been made completily resource-free: a script removes the crystal resource from any player-built SPP soon after construction, and NPC stations no longer accept crystals as secondary resources. Furthremore, the prices for solar power plants have been reduced to 10% of their originals: given the essential nature of energy cells, the enormous cost of power plants (along with the cost of the nessecary support facilities like food production and crystal factories) SPPs are enormous moneysinks despite energy cells being a bottom-tier ware.

(Because a number of people on numerous forums have voiced concern over it, you can opt out of the crystal-free SPP system by deleting the Permenant Crystal Remover file in the Director folder after installing the Shuffle or simply not extracting that directory when extracting the Shuffle from its archive. The factory prices are a bit more permenant being part of TFactories, though using the Complex Cleaner version avoids that entirely.)

What'cha got planned for this mod?

*Special M7 Adjustments: Currently, as it was in vanilla, the special M7 varients that are normally supposed to be unobtainable are statistically identical to the normal M7s you can find zipping around and for sale wherever. Since they weren't supposed to be available in the vanilla game the devs apparently didn't think it nessecary to expand upon them, but since the Shuffle makes them available (or so I think - it's two AM as I'm writing this, so I can't be absolutly sure) many people've noticed this and asked for some rectifying of the situation, so I'll see what I can get done after all the messes from the 2.7 patch are cleaned up.

Stuff I've been mulling over, but won't impliment until I get some feedback on:

Nothing in particular at the moment, actually.

And stuff that's been brought to my attention by forumers, whose requests the dude may abide if he sees fit:

A) Turret Gun Slot Rework: Complete!

What issues should I know about?

Just like every other mod, there's bound to be a few snags:

A) Auto-pilot difficulties: The escapades and travesties of the auto-pilot are well known. For some people, the autopilot is nothing more than a little digital hate machine, doing everything in its power to make the game as miserible for the player as is possible. It'll flip-flop more than the griddles of an IHOP when trying to maneuver around ships, it'll make suicidal charges to plow straight into the station the player's docking at, and cranking up ship speeds is going to make this only worse.

The auto-pilot, however, seems to be rather selective to whom it doles out its daily rations of wrath. For some people, it is a terror that makes the game unplayable, but for others it's a mostly-functional AI who occasionally gets baffled by certain high-density situations. For those whom the autopilot deems worthy of its service, there shouldn't be any problems since the modified speeds are still well within the range the AI was programmed for. For those the autopilot has chosen to hate, though, I wouldn't reccomend this mod for obvious reasons. Them's the breaks, unfortunetily.

B) Script Compatability: While the changes this mod enacts are extremily basic (if not copious and comprehensive) and thus shouldn't interfere with scripts by egosoft and modders alike, the mere fact that anything is being changed at all warrents that I give a warning on the matter. I would in fact be very much appreciative if those of you who are using this mod who find any kind of major incompatability report such - I can't guarentee that I'll fix it since I have exactly zero skill in scripting asides from opening them up and fiddling with one value or another, but I'll at least put up a warning of such incompatabilities in this here OP.

C) Plot-related conflicts: Like with scripts, while I should hope that nothing goes horribly wrong with any of the plot-related entries, the mere fact that anything is changed at all warrents a warning on the subject, and once again I would be greatly appreciative if anybody testing this mod who finds such a problem was to report it. One thing I've noticed is that missions of the X Must Die or X Must Be Punished variety are going to be a bit more tricky overall as the local law can now get on the scene a lot quicker to deal with the target, especially if they already start off hostile.

D) Complex Calculator Inaccuracy: Because Bio and Food wares had many of their RelVals switched around or changed, the results from complex calculators designed for X3 vanilla will not completily correct, particularly in the case of Split, whose Rastar Oil was cut down to a RelVal of 20 (about 292 spacebucks average) from 40 if I remember correctly (584 give or take). The good news is that bio and foodstuff RelVals now follow the pattern set by Argon goods, so when trying to calculate the bio and food resource needs of any complex you can simply use the Argon examples and they should be applicable across the board.

D) Mod Compatability: As the Naval Shffle alters many of the more commonly-tweaked Types files (backgrounds, bullets, globals, lasers, missiles, sheilds, ships) it's not likely to play nice with other mods that alter the same files without prehand tweaking and merging. Make sure any fake patches you have installed don't conflict.

The list of confirmed conflicting mods at this time includes:
Engine Colours + Particle Trails by Killerog (Tships)
Complex Cleaner by Gazz (Tfactories): The Naval Shuffle changes the assigned models for a number of the Terran Factories to make them complex-compatable the old fashioned way, which conflicts with Gazz's complex cleaner TFactories file. To get around this problem a secondary version of the Shuffle has been included which lacks the changed factories file, which lets the Shuffle and the Complex Cleaner play nicely together (and believe you me, they do).
MARS Fire Control by Gasz: The data that MARS uses to do whatever it does is coded into the script files themselves instead of calculating based on current game data, so MARS doesn't work with the Shuffle owing to the changes made to many weapons. I KNOW I should get around to fixing it, but in the meantime Creidiki posted a fix of sorts that takes into account most of the older Shuffle changes (Corvette weapon changes were made after the fact, unfortunetily) which can be downloaded here.
PSCO1's Cockpit Mod: PSCO makes alterations to the Tships file in order to accomidate all the new models and whatnot that the cockpits make use of, and Tships is the absolute core of the Naval Shuffle. Removing PSCO1's Tships file won't allow it to function with the Shuffle, since (based on the reports I've read, anyway) it seems that many of these models also call for camera positions and whatnot to be changed in order to accomidate them, and without this camera data things just sink into a state of general disarray.

E) Save Game Compatability: Because the Naval Shuffle changes a whole slew of things, including weapon and shield compatabilities, save games from previous versions, vanilla TC and other mods are not going to be compatable. YOU MUST START A NEW GAME IF SWITCHING TO THE SHUFFLE. People keep trying this, and it keeps screwing things up, SO DON'T USE OLD PRE-SHUFFLE SAVES.

F) AI Ship Equipment Generation: Because of the way that Egosoft designed the system for generating AI ships, the expansion of most-to-all ship weapon compatability lists has led to ships spawning with rather perculier and/or mixed loadouts. While I've tried to fight this by restricting compatability on certain ship types (M7s and M1/2s specifically, with anything below a Pulsed Beam Emitter or Phased Repeater Gun being unavailable) there's only so much I can do without having to essentially reprogram the game to change how the process of ship generation works, and I would rather to suffer some quirkiness on behalf of AI ship generation than to go back on one of the more central aspects of this mod. Thankfully Gazz has kindly allowed me to bundle his AI ammo script along with the shuffle, which will maintain AI ship munitions stocks if they spawn with ammo-based weapons.

I like this mod and want to contribute.

That's great! The Naval Shuffle can only become something worth a darn if people propose ideas and give feedback about its current and planned states. There are also things that I want to do but have no idea how, and anyone with the expertise in fields related to these goals are welcome to take a crack at them.

That said, the Naval Shuffle is largely a one-man affair - most to nearly all of the changes are statistical in nature, and it's nothing that this one codemonkey can't do with enough time to mess around, so there's no need (as of yet, anyway) for more than one person to waste their evenings working on this stuff. I also don't want to actually form some kind of team only for people (IE, me) to drop off the radar because some new game has completily taken their fancy or their current X drive has run out of steam or what-have-you; I don't want people to have to wait on me (more than you already do, anyway) to do something, nor do I want to have to wait on other people.

That said, if you feel you can do something to make the Naval Shuffle a better mod, please do so. Although I do request that if it's any kind of statistical changes and whatnot that you simply post your propositions instead of tinkering with a .pck and throwing it up for me to download; I'm constantly tinkering with the files, so having to shift to a new one means redoing whatever work I did.

What sort of stuff do you need done?

A) New Beam Weapon Bodies: Currently all the non-Khaak beam weapons look the same exact way, and I think that's rather boring. I'd like to give the Commonwealth beam weapons a new paintjob to make them a bit more interesting and to help distinguish them better from the other ones, if somehow you got in a frackas with another ship using beam weapons. I need someone to make three new laser bodies and their textures for me: use the bullet_PlasmaBeam body as a base and dupe it to make bullet_PlasmaBeamRed, bullet_PlasmaBeamGreen and bullet_PlasmaBeamBlue, and then copy the regular bullet_PlasmaBeam texture to make three new ones and color them a deep-ish red, not-too-bright green, and not-too-bright blue. Tie the textures up to their associated bodies, and that's it.

Folks who've done services for the Naval Shuffle in one way or another:

* Geekey265 suggested that I double the guns on turrets which had only one gun slot to them, since all turret models have two barrels. You traders whose freighters can now actually defend themselves can thank him for that.
* Shadow_Wolf32 is being a real champ and mirroring the downloads, so thank him if Megaupload/Rapidshare is messing up.
* Amurph0 and Eldyranx3 for letting me appropriate their ATF Shipyard script so that Terran stations are buyable right from the start of the game.
* Nividium was cool and let me borrow part of his Nividium Processing Plant to form the basis of the beam forge reactivation script. While I eventually found a way to enable them without scripts, the data from the NPP script let me optomize the Buyable Terran Stations one, so thank him for the ~90 kb saved in script size.
* Aquitaine for reminding me in a way that I hadn't fixed the Ion cannon weapon energy drain and for prodding me to make the ion cannon speed drain worth a darn.
* Gazz for permitting the use of his AI ammo cheat script to solve the issue of AI capital ships being rendered helpless if they spawn with gauss cannons.
* Bobguy for providing an autonomous crystal-removal script for player-owned power plants.
* Creidiki for posting an update to MARS files affected by the Shuffle's changes a while back.

I'd like to use some of your ideas in my mod.

Go ahead. All I ask is that you give credit where it's due, to me and the people who might've suggested the ideas you're using in the first place.

[Sorenson]

The Other Crap I've Been Working On post

Energy Cell Eliminator

Do you find the idea of space-faring civilizations capable of razing entire planets relying on solar power plants for their industrial energy needs laughable? Are you sick of having your entire industrial empire being limited by the relative scarcity of silicon? The Energy Cell Eliminator frees you from the shackles of Big Solar by eliminating the need for energy cells from your stations, and comes in a variety of flavors to suit a variety of preferences. Energy cells can be eliminated either from mines, thus freeing the energy cells otherwise invested into further EC production for use in other goods, or from all stations outright, and can be eliminated either from only player stations or from ALL stations of that particular type.

To install, extract ONE ECfree script and its corrisponding setup.ECFree script into your \scripts directory. I'd've included .spks as well, but the spk packager was acting weird and throwing in other files than what should've been there.

The basis of this mod was formed from the nividium.processing.plant script from Nividium's script of the same name: considering the mechanical nessecity and inevitability of almost every component of the script set, however, I believe there to be no issue in the release of this pack as such, not to mention that I've his permission from months ago to use the script for the Shuffle.

The Big Honkin' Specific List of 2.7 Changes

F.A.B. shot me a PM a little while ago and surprised me with a nice gift of a specific list of all the stuff that 2.7 changed, and it's way too dang useful to keep to myself (even if at this point it's probably proliferated like mad) so I'm stickin' it here as a reference and reminder while I go and re-fix the Shuffle.

[Geekey265]

i only have one word.
Epic


any way if your going to have all this work done to the ships can you implement my small fixes for any ship that has a twin barrel turret you can easily change this from the tships.

[Sorenson]

[Geekey265]

it is just a simple number switch for most but i gave the ships more power to compensate

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=260284&highlight=
where mine is

[Gazz]

[Sorenson]

Whereas being able to improve engine performance to 350-400% of its factory-fresh specifications seems equally ridiculous. Besides which, considering that tunings now actually have an overall increased effect (since each one's a flat 10% derived from the ship's base speed) you'll still get a good variety of speeds depending on whom the Rangom Number God or whomever controls tuning allotment favors and whom he spits upon.

[F.A.B.]

sounds great! if you do a better job than i did, i would be glad to combine your mod with mine if i may...

[Shadow_Wolf33]

Do you have any sort of excel sheet or reference document so snoopy people like me can compare/contrast the stock speeds with the new ones?

Also, I JUST last night started a new game, if I installed it now and kept trucking away on my new game would it act screwy at all? or am I best to just start fresh since I've barely done anything yet anyway?

Edit: I would also like to point out that rapidshare is horribly annoying to use as a download provider.

If that is your only option for hosting, send me a PM or something and I can host it for you on my webserver.

[Sorenson]

[Shadow_Wolf33]

Would using this make missiles less effective at all? since everything is going faster, that would seem like even the slower bathtubs could outrun the slow missiles.

I really do like the idea of faster freighters though...

[Sorenson]

Just as a heads-up, I've finished the next chunk of work and've started doing some testing of it, so expect beta 2 to be available in 24 to 72 hours, hopefully no later than sunday.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about the missile issues, and I've had two ideas I think could go somewhere:

A) All regular missiles have a max speed of 750 m/s (anti-missile missiles have something like 850-1000) but have variable amounts of maneuvering and acceleration based on their power and other effects. A light missile like a mosquito or firefly can get out the gate and up to top speed in a jiffy, but heavier stuff (particularly of the anti-capital/anti-station variety) will take a lot longer to get up to speed. What's nice is that, particularly in the case of capital and station attacks, this gives you first-strike capabilities from a great distance, and launching your missiles from afar gives them time to build up considerable speed, potentially making it more difficult for anti-missile systems to intercept them before they hit.

B) I want to try and divide missiles into two different groups: Armor Piercing, which does the highest damage of a general class (light/medium/heavy) of missiles, and Shrapnal, which does less damage but is specifically designed for large area-of-effect attacks. As you move up along the damage curve, you tend to get bigger blast radius', and when you've got fighters and other ships lobbing these suckers around while other ships are dogfighting it out what with the greater speeds most ships are given you've got a lot of fratricide, so toning down the blast radius' of the commonly-used missiles and maintaining/increasing those of missiles specially-designed for such should prove a big help.

I've also got to remember to take a look at reworking these missile galaxy subtypes, because medium fighters being able to use missiles capable of nuking everything in a 1200 meter radius is just wrong. Especially when said missiles are supposed to be Terran-only and every joe schmoe with an M4/M3 can use and potentially spawn with them.

[F.A.B.]

[Sorenson]

Beta 2's finished and ready for download. Lesson learned from working on it: while putting Plasma Burst and Phased Shockwave Generators on the front guns of corvettes and frigates is awesome in theory, the reality of it is decidedly less so.

EDIT: It came to my attention while in the shower that the big heavy capital ship guns didn't have their energy costs per shot doubled as to match their doubled damage. I've fixed that for the next release, and I don't think it's much an issue anyway since M7/1/2s're the only ones able to use them and have stupid amounts of weapon energy to burn anyway.

[Shadow_Wolf33]

I was going to mention that with the upgraded maneuverability and speeds of capital class ships and M7s, that it has become a royal terror trying to hit them with PPCs/IBLs as even the AI has been able to dance around my shots to irritatingly good effect. I see with how you modified the IBL/PPC shot that you upped the speed though, does the speed increase essentially make them impossible for the player to evade now?

Also with this business of a Universal weapon camp, and PPCs being in there, does that mean I'll be able to mount PPCs on my Tiger? or are they restricted to M1/M2 class?

Ugh, all these changes alongside no real GOOD method of exporting the statistical data from the X2 Editor makes for a very interesting time for the compulsive min-maxers out there (like me! ). Even from your beta 1 I took the time to write a small app that read out the export data from the exported TShips and converted it to CSV so I could make my own little statistics excel sheet, which might be completely out to lunch now.

Oh, I've also found my save games to be very friendly in terms of mucking with ship data like your mod does. Didn't need to re-buy anything when I fiddled with stats, so essentially I'm hoping to NOT have to start over my game at every release.