Thank you for your very kind words, I am very pleased that you feel it "adds a missing layer to the game" as it was certainly one of the goals I was trying to achieve.Realspace wrote: ↑Sat, 1. Oct 22, 17:50Hi Moonrat, hope you're reading this. First of all thanks for this important mod, it adds a missing layer to the game. In my XRSGE mod, Encounters is of paramount importance because I enlarged the sectors up to even 50.000kms and put derelicts far in the low orbit.
In answer to your questions...
As far as I can recall there is no absolute value within the scripts which defines where deep space begins, this is typically derived from the game engine variable "player.sector.coresize" (this does not change regardless of how far out the player explores). Most un-modded vanilla sector core sizes are defined at anything between 400km -> 600km and so deepspace begins at half that value with encounters being generated starting at distances 300km from the sector center. If your new sector core sizes are much bigger than before, deepspace encounters should simply occur further out, but that's probably worth testing.
That's the good news out of the way... however, the types of encounters and the variability on the objects with increasing distance are based upon calculations using an absolute value. I did this so that there were greater rewards (and more danger) the further the player explored outward from the sector center plus also I tried to keep in mind what might fit with game "lore" (and common sense). At the mod's inception, I carried out some informal market research and it seemed most players only traveled a few thousand kilometers out and so I implemented (and tested) a phased distribution of encounter types and variance up to a maximum of 4,500km. If there are new sectors within your mod that are now effectively 100x the existing vanilla sector sizes (eg. the sector core size is 50,000km), my mod may only start to generate encounters at 25,000km. Although the encounters mod should function OK generating content and warping 'encounter' ships in, the encounters which might have occurred before 25,000km will be "lost" and all generated encounters will be way beyond anything I may have coded for.
All may not be lost however in that I could in theory change the relevant code to take account of what the defined 'player.sector.coresize' is and expand the distance values based on any increased size accordingly... but probably only in a later version. I have quite a lot of content in the pipeline I want to include (but real life is busy and so my free time is in short supply).
My mod isn't too fussed with sectors or clusters except for the following due to lore reasons... Reductions of xeno encounters within most (but not all) Terran sectors and the ToA DLC sectors where other reductions occur. So if there are new sectors and clusters being added to the universe all existing sectors should be Ok, however any addition of new sectors to the Terran & ToA clusters will not be included in the exclude lists. There could in theory be a way to append these so that any new sectors you have added could be optionally included (again in a later version).
Apart from below, I don't think so... but like all good mods, it should be tested for really
How much faster are ships now traveling?
The encounters ships are warped in are traveling at whatever speed they were when the mod grabbed them, so if they're at an increased high speed then they'll be at that same speed when they appear. On earlier versions, I received some feedback that ships using travel drives that were very fast encountered little or nothing when using the mod. This was primarily due to them whizzing through space so fast that anything generated was either only seen rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror or that nothing appeared to be generated. I have already implemented some code that I believe helps mitigate ships traveling extremely fast by reducing the "sampling" time between encounters so that the probability of experiencing an encounter became greater, but there are limits on that. However, there is still the issue that ships traveling at a very, very high speed will simply whizz past anything generated by the 'Encounters' mod so fast you'll never see it, including warped ships. Large objects are often generated in space very distant to the player prior to being encountered (out of radar range) so that any modification to the object including operations like yaw, pitch and rolls have been completed before the player sees them. If a player ship is moving so fast it could be that these will then become visible and that would look odd.
Again I think it all comes back to how fast is "fast"?