X3CT Picture Guide to Complex Building (PGCB)

[Whisperer]

This is a Picture Guide wich is intended to be uset by people new to the
game who seek illustrated information to building their first factory and
hence expanding it to a profitable complex as well as supplying general
information about building that will also be usefull in answering general
questions and tips to building.

The goal of this guide is to become expanded over time as requests
and suggestions related to building come in. For this reason, if you
have questions or information that you might think could be relative
to this guide, please feel free to drop a PM.

This guide will be organised in chapters and as such will get an index
added making searching for the information you'll seek more eazy and
faster, as well as the addition of information eazier and more clear.
And yes, also typo's and incorrect information will also be corrected
when found and/or pointed out. Bare with meas english is not my
native language...


Note that this is an example of a general complex build and is a work in
progress

For this reason to people that are interested in this post i suggest keeping
your eyes open and check in from time to time.

You can find the temporary version of the guide setup here

-version 0.5 (halfbaked)
Version 1.0 will hopefully be up early saturday morning.

[Whisperer]

Imminent change (within aproximately 6 houres)

Thumbnails are going to be removed and replaced by the corresponding URL's in an atempt to make this post less than a mile long.
DONE
.........

Guide will be re-worked and catagorized
Page one will be going to contain an index of the content of this guide.

To de added:
-Hiring a TL Needs to be reviewd
-Buying a station with a hired TL Needs to be reviewd
-Transportation of your station with a hired TL Needs to be reviewd
-Buying your own TL Needs to be reviewd
-Buying a station with your own TL Needs to be reviewd
-Transportation of your station with your own TL Needs to be reviewd
-Station locations, where to build what Editing/Writing
-Station building pending
*the sector map
*station building basics
-Complexes, why? pending
-Complex building pending
*preparations
*use of the advanced satelite
*use of complex construction kit's (CCK's)
*complex types
-Station management pending
-Complex management pending
-Traders and tradelanes pending

So far these things are already on the list to be added to the guide with the possibility of aditional information/chapters added if the demand should arise

[Whisperer]

reserved... (as well)

[Dis Astranagant]

Wow

I've been playing X for at least 6 years and didn't even try to make my complexes that beautiful but that will now change as i finally have to make some crazy complexes for the hub and this time around I'm gonna make them at least organized so that they don't go across half the sector.

Thanks mate for this really good guide .

How long did it take you to finish it?

[Whisperer]

Made the complex first time round in about 1 houre with 2 TL's shifting freight around and taking pictures on the go.

(had to build the complex a second time becouse i was missing pictures and decided to build it in this kind of fasion:
Build station,
Fly around it to take a picture,
Open the picture in windows paint to edit it,
Go back to the game and build the next station.
This took me about 32 houres the second run, mostly becouse of the problems of editing the text into the pictures and having to take new pictures on more than one occation.)

Looking to do a re-build again to enable me to make a clear Index wich makes searching the relevant pages for users more eazy, as well as correcting a cart load of typo's...

(didn't notice the typo's due to a seriouse lack of sleep,... My weekend only has 38 houres due to the fact that i work 6 days a week )

[TTD]

It would be ineresting to see how it would look using "New-Tech Complex" construction.

Well done mate for your time and patience.

This must be up there with the old "How to build Sexier complexes" .

[Whisperer]

Could you explain, "new tech"?

you mean building with the aid of mods or third party software?

[Smacksim]

Very cool Whisperer. How about posting it as a PDF so we could ogle the pretty pictures without click-click-zooming each one?

[TTD]

Could you explain, "new tech"?

you mean building with the aid of mods or third party software?

See pages 13/14 of my Trader's Adventure.(linked below)

No Mods or scripts.
Vanilla plus Bonus pack in the game played.

It was an idea that many players have thought of trying.
It only works in TC afaik.

Say for example that part of your complex has 3 Cahoona Bakeries.

Just build 3 CHBs in exactly the same space as each other.

Thus you save the space of 2 CBs for other factories.

[Triaxx2]

*scream* CURSE YOU PNG FORMAT!!

*cough* I hope someone volunteers to make this into a PDF when it's finished.

[Whisperer]

Hey there, smacksim. Thanks, i'll see what i can do about the pdf-file format. Hope i'll be able to do something about this by the end of the week. Can't promice it will all be done by than, but hopefully i will be able to have the basic build of this complex reworked and chopped up into chapters for eazy browsing and in pdf format. True enough this setup for the guide is far from ideal, especialy since i'm having a whole list of stuff that i want to ad. So yes,.. There will deffinatly be a change in this area.

Sorry for the delay, TTD. Thank you for enlightening me. Turns out i do know what you mean. Seems there is a whole bunch of describing this style of building. Talked about this with my nephiew a couple of times as well though we refere to this as "4 dimensional building". Any way, you are true about this also being an option for building complexes.

First off, let me say i was not aware of you having a guide for building complexes like this. However i am glad you pointed this out. The guise i'm setting up is solely based on my experiance of building and building style. As such i have requested feedback so i can also try out different styles of building and complex setups. Since you already created a guide to building complexes by placing stations on top of each other i'll not go that way. It's not my intention to start tredding in someone elce his/her waterways. If you already have a guide for this i'll simple link it in my work in progress.

In any case, when i'll get to it i will be sure to dive into that guide of yours and be sure to check it out (with a bit of luck lateron today).

Also, i'll be editing the first reserved post to draw out in general lines to the things i'm working on in this guide and what you can expext of this work in progress.

If anything turns up feel free to give me a nudge;)

[Whisperer]

lol, don't worry, Triaxx2 already have that covered. When i get home i'm gona pull the thumbnails and drop the url's there in stead.

Also yea, when done i will try and compile it into a pdf file. No idea yet how, but i'm sure i'll figureit out somehow.

Hope i didn't couse you any permanent damage...
Sorry, software and computers just don't seem to like me that much,....

[Triaxx2]

Not a problem. It's just that I have dial-up and my computer seems to hate PNG images. And people love to put things in PNG for some reason. But thank's, I'll eagerly await the PDF version.

[Kirlack]

Wow, excellent guide Whisperer That's the mark of a truly dedicated X player

It's a shame you couldn't get this done before the Superbox came out, I think this could be classed as essential reading for new players.

[Whisperer]

been googling like a madman to learn as much as i can about the "Portable Document Format" or PDF file request. Since learning about this is someting i can do with my mobile phone, i've now been digging for about 2 houres and than some. Problem is i can't find any info concerning the quality reduction when converting BMP (i think that's what windows paint uses to save files) to PDF...

I'm getting a bit conserned about the quality that the pictures will end up with. Seems they'll undergo a massive compression wich i know usualy does not bode well if you'r trying to go for the best quality.

I managed to cram my brain full of useless information, but came up empty on info that's of use. Any would be greatly apreciated.

[Deadbeat_Spinn]

@Whisperer

If you want to make the post shorter when displaying the images you have, rather than press enter after each one you could press space and have the page numbers underneath.

As an example using your images,
[ external image ] [ external image ] [ external image ]
Page 1...........................Page 2............................Page 3

However you don't usually want to go more than 5 images across since it can start be problematic.
You could also simply state that each picture represents a page.

You can convert the BMP/PNG images to JPEG if you want something thats a smaller volume size and quicker to upload and quality remains virtually the same. A good program that can do bulk converting of the various image types is IrfanView and it's free, just google it (IIRC it was Ketraar and Alex Vanderbilt who informed me of that program).

You could also 7-zip/winrar the images into a single and upload to a hosting site (FileFront/MediaFire/etc) as a temporary measure until a PDF is ready. That way people can still have access to the information without having to be online.

I can't really help on the PDF front since it's been well over 10 years since I did anything PDF related even though my guides have a PDF version of them.


And your post isn't that big, my first guide when I made it was rather small but after I was done with all the updates and fixes it ended being two posts since I managed to exceed the maximum size/length that a posting could be.

[Whisperer]

Thanks a lot, Deadbeat_Spinn. Guess i'll go and have a run for that Infranview and shrink some of the files than. Seems that the Image shack makes things turn rather problematic for some.

As far as the tumbnails go, i'll align them for now the way you did, this should indeed reduce the length of the post (significantly). This will only be temporarily and as far as the guide goes since i'm going to try to have an index going with the basics of the building. (should be done in a fairly short time)

Apart from that once the guide is reworked to the general i'll upload it to the Filefront site and pull the pictures and work from the filefront map onward, only posting updates in here.

Thanks for the insight to the sites and solution for my "long" guide issue. Gona change this right now.

[Whisperer]

Wow, excellent guide Whisperer That's the mark of a truly dedicated X player

It's a shame you couldn't get this done before the Superbox came out, I think this could be classed as essential reading for new players.

Nah, i'm not sweating it to much. Reason for me making this is to be of help to new players to the game and possibly offer an amusing guide to look over for the more seasoned players among us.

Besides, i'm not here to try and put my name on something. Making this guide becouse of an earlier post. If other people posted guides on certain parts of the game i'm not gona touch that couse i'm not the kind of person that's got a competative spirit. (guess that's also why i ended up hating EVE after playing it for far to long )

Also when the superbox came out i was still to buzzy trying to figure out all the controlls and interfaces. This game has quite the steap learning curve.

[Carlo the Curious]

Re. PDFs, you can use recent versions of OpenOffice or Word to create a document (just past the images in) and save as PDF.

[suiren]

Good guide for those new to complex building, well done.

Downloaded the pages and made the PDF here (6.5 mb)

I've not really pay attention to those CCK links before, I just thought they connect somewhere near the docking clamps and just put the fabs a few Ks above or below others, though it does not matter since I use the no complex tube mod lol, still good to know though for when I feel artistic or want to play on slide show frame rates