[X3AP Bonus Plugin] Hephaistos Corp. - Station building service

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jlehtone
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[X3AP Bonus Plugin] Hephaistos Corp. - Station building service

Post by jlehtone » Wed, 14. Dec 11, 23:52

Hephaistos Corp. - Station building service

Version: BP 1.0
Scripter: X2-Illuminatus
Thread for development version
Bonuspack index

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Overview

The Hephaistos Corporation welcomes you and appreciates your call for its services.

The Hephaistos Corp. is a Terran universe-wide working corporation, which specialises in building stations. To clear entrepreneurs of their exhausting everyday work, the Hephaistos Corp. takes care of the purchase, delivery and construction of ordered Stations, without the need for the customer to permanently observe the building process or even to be present in the building sector. This service is not cheap, but the labour saving is surely worth each credit.

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The brief instruction
  1. Assign a key to the "Hephaistos Corp. build service"-hotkey in the Controls menu.
  2. Press the hotkey and follow the given instructions.
Image

The function

The complete interaction with the Hephaistos Corp. is managed with the set hotkey. After pressing it and depending on the current order and fortune situation of the player different menus or messages will be activated, which let the player order stations (including paying them) or inform him about the current status of his order.
  1. The order -- After pressing the hotkey for the first time the Hephaistos Corp. will check, if the player has at least 1,000,000 Credits on his player and station accounts and if he can buy any stations from the different races. If this is the case, the player gets a welcome message. Confirming it, will open the actual "Select station menu", which is divided into three sections:
    • Under "Current order data" the already selected stations, the current price (including the building fee), the money on player and station accounts as well as an button to end the order will be displayed. Have stations already been added to the order list, will a click on the "already selected stations''-entry show a list of these stations. A click on one stations will let the player remove that station. Another click on the "already selected stations"-entry will close the station list again.
    • Under "Filter stations by races" you're able to select a certain or 'all' races. The buyable station list will then only contain stations of that race.
    • Under "Buyable stations" the stations that can be bought by the player are displayed together with their price.
    After selecting a station the desired amount of that station has to be entered. Afterwards the stations will be added to the order list and the "Current order data" will be updated. The stations won't be added to the order list, if:
    • An amount less or equal zero ('0') was entered.
    • The maximum amount of stations would be higer than 125 with this input.
    • The total price would exceed the player's total fortune with this input.
    After that you will be able to add more stations or to end the order. If you want to abort your order, simply press Esc, while you are in the "Select station"-menu.
  2. The payment -- While all accounts will be recognized, when checking the player's fortune, money to pay the costs will always just be debited from the player account. When the order is finished and enough money is on the player account to pay the costs, the money will automatically be debited and the delivery will be started. If there is not enough money, the order will be saved and the player has to transfer money from his station accounts to his account. When he has done this, pressing the hotkey again will result in debiting the money from the player account and starting the delivery.

    If the costs exceed either the maximum possible amount of Credits on the player account or the player's currently available fortune, it's also possible to pay in installments. Each time after pressing the "Hephaistos Corp"-Hotkey the maximum available money will be taken from the player account to pay the remaining debts.
  3. The delivery -- After the payment was made, the stations will be transported to the selected sector by station transporters (TL class ships) and built at the selected coordinates. At this position the first station is built, which will be the upper left front corner of a cube. Note that the stations won't be connected with each other using Complex Construction Kits! (There is simply no command for that in the Script Editor.) During the build process the player can get status updates of the build process by pressing the "Hephaistos Corp"-Hotkey. After all stations are built, the player will get a message informing him, if and if yes how successful the building process was.
Additional information -- Barred from the order are stations that can't be connected with each other (Equipment Docks, Trading stations, Headquartes), stations that can not be bought by the player and Mines. It's only possible to have one order at once. First after getting the information message that the ordered stations were built, a new order can be made. Also note that the station building service will not work with Station building missions.

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Known problems and workarounds

Attention: A test version that should fix the below mentioned bugs is available now. Please refer to this post for further informations.

Below some of the known problems and workarounds are listed. These problems will be fixed with the next version.
  • Problem: Under certain circumstances it can happen that when pressing the Hephaistos Corp. hotkey, the player gets a message that he cannot order stations due to not enough money, although the player has more than enough credits on his accounts. - Workaround: Make sure that you have not more than one billion credits on your player account.
  • Problem: The game freezes, when confirming the initial Hephaistos Corp. message, if the player just has the Terran rank to buy stations. - Workaround: Increase your rank with one of the other races, so you can buy their stations.
  • Problem: There's no progress in the delivery process, if the building place is a sector without jump gate or jump beacon. - Workaround: If you want to have stations built in such a sector, you have to manually place a jump beacon there. (According to some posts in the X-Universe forum, you should be able to get them, if you kill RRF ships.) If you already have started a building process in such a sector, the script will hang. If this happened, you have to load a savegame from before you started this building process. If you don't have such a save anymore or if you don't want to go back that far, you'll have to wait for the next version of this script. This will definitely have a function to abort building processes that have stopped (or hang) for whatever reason.
  • Problem: The positioning of Solar Power Plants doesn't work correctly in 'complexes' that consist of different stations. The SPPs will slightly collide with some of the stations. - Workaround: Connect all stations with Complex Construction Kits. Afterwards, they won't cause any collision damage anymore.
  • Problem: The station sizes for the new Terran stations added with X3AP update 3.0 are not yet part of the t file, so that the stations will be built at arbitrary positions *somewhere* in the selected sector.


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Credits
  • EGOSOFT for the X-Series and the Script Editor
    -Dusty- for the original idea of A.R.E.S for X3:Reunion
    Gazz for his Get object size script library
    Ketraar for creating the Hephaistos Corp. introduction picture in the Egosoft forum topic
    Saetan for the station sizes from his object size database

dougeye
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Post by dougeye » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 17:52

so the stations can be placed in a grid array of sorts?

how is this effected when the player manually tries to link them with complex construction kits?

+will this add a modified tag as part of the bonus pack?
I used to list PC parts here, but "the best" will suffice!

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X2-Illuminatus
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Post by X2-Illuminatus » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 18:34

Currently you can just select the position of the first station on the sector map. That station position will be the upper left front corner of a cube. All other stations will then be placed accordingly to their size as compact as possible.
how is this effected when the player manually tries to link them with complex construction kits?
Not at all. The linking with CCKs is the part of the complex building that the player still has to do himself, as there is simply no script command available to do this.
+will this add a modified tag as part of the bonus pack?
The Bonus pack just contains signed scripts that doesn't mark the game as modified.
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Post by paulms1980 » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 18:42

does it line up the nodes for the construction kits?
building tidy complexes was never something i got right lol

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Post by dougeye » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 20:49

yeah thats similar to what i was asking, dont mind linking them myself but will adding a cck make the nice neatly ordered stations do strange things?lol
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Post by pja » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 21:49

On the Terran start, this script froze the game everytime I tried to use it at the point where you click the OK button on the first message. Now that I have raised my Teladi rep to the point I can buy some stations from them it seems to be working. Looks to me like a bug in a situation where you can only buy stations from one race (Terran in my case).

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Post by EmperorJon » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 21:55

Maybe there were no available stations to buy at all or something.
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Post by pja » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 22:04

ChristmasJon wrote:Maybe there were no available stations to buy at all or something.
No, several Terran stations were available to me, but no other races.

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Sesk
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Post by Sesk » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 22:06

I would just get the no-station-tubes mod. I don't know if this flags your game as modified (it's a model modification/replacement, I assume not), but it removes the tubing, making your complexes pretty. And less laggy.

Anyway, I've always wondered, how does this script manage adding stations to existing complexes. I know you can't add stations to complexes via script, but if I select the same position as the original complex, does it "expand" it?

I.e:
Complex 1 - 4 SPP
Complex 2 - 4 SPP.

Building Complex 1 as 0,0,0 then complex 2 at 0,0,0. Will the result be a 2x2 cube ? Or 2 2x2 squares placed according to collision avoidance ?

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Post by Coruskane » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 00:26

Sesk wrote:I would just get the no-station-tubes mod. I don't know if this flags your game as modified (it's a model modification/replacement, I assume not), but it removes the tubing, making your complexes pretty. And less laggy.

Anyway, I've always wondered, how does this script manage adding stations to existing complexes. I know you can't add stations to complexes via script, but if I select the same position as the original complex, does it "expand" it?

I.e:
Complex 1 - 4 SPP
Complex 2 - 4 SPP.

Building Complex 1 as 0,0,0 then complex 2 at 0,0,0. Will the result be a 2x2 cube ? Or 2 2x2 squares placed according to collision avoidance ?
+1

Can complexes, even if necessarily having been previously built with Hephaistos, expand at a later date?

I will probably just Gazz-CC them all anyway, but I would be interested to know :)

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Re: [X3AP Bonus Plugin] Hephaistos Corp. - Station building service

Post by Sir Warwick » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 00:31

jlehtone wrote:Note that the stations won't be connected with each other using Complex Construction Kits! (There is simply no command for that in the Script Editor.)
I would have paid the price of AP just to have thius issue fix so I never have to link up a complex ever again!!!!

Egosoft - pleaase please please do something about this - make complex linking scriptable again - lack of this is THE MOST hateful horrible aspect of X3 - great otherwise.


Good work on the mod :)

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Post by The Cuban Nightmare » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 00:39

Sir, my hat is off to you. You have made it so that complexes may be made without me wanting to gouge out my eyes. Previously I used the logain abler mods, but that has some issues in being moved over to AP, but this is a great fix. It's not as convenient as having just one station with all the production inside like it will be in X-R, but this is the best station builder for all those who don't want to come over to the dark/modified side. Well done.
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joelR
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Post by joelR » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 01:49

Whats the version number in the BP? Is it the same as the one in the development thread?

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Post by paulms1980 » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 12:07

does gazz's complex connector work with AP?
never done modding/scripts with X on steam before, always brought the DVD instead.
dont wanna break my game, i dont build massive complexes anyway.

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Post by X2-Illuminatus » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 12:15

paulms1980 wrote:does it line up the nodes for the construction kits?
No, the stations sorting and building algorithm is only based on the stations sizes. Biggest stations are built on the first floor, smallest stations on the last floor of the cube. Solar power plants are build behind the cube.
dougeye wrote:yeah thats similar to what i was asking, dont mind linking them myself but will adding a cck make the nice neatly ordered stations do strange things?
That shouldn't happen. At least no one complained about that in the development threads.
pja wrote:On the Terran start, this script froze the game everytime I tried to use it at the point where you click the OK button on the first message.
Thanks for the info, I will have a look.
Sesk wrote:Anyway, I've always wondered, how does this script manage adding stations to existing complexes. I know you can't add stations to complexes via script, but if I select the same position as the original complex, does it "expand" it?
No, while such a function is planned, it isn't included yet.
Coruskane wrote:Can complexes, even if necessarily having been previously built with Hephaistos, expand at a later date?
At a later date = As soon as I have time to implement the necessary code in the current script.
Sir Warwick wrote: make complex linking scriptable again
It never was possible via script in the first place. And as far as I'm aware it won't be possible in the future.
Sir Warwick wrote:Good work on the mod
Thank you.
The Cuban Nightmare wrote:but this is the best station builder for all those who don't want to come over to the dark/modified side. Well done.
Thanks. :)
joelR wrote:Whats the version number in the BP? Is it the same as the one in the development thread?
The BP version is currently newer than the development version. The dev version however will get an update in this or the next week. That version (beta 0.7) will then be almost equal to the BP version 1.0.
paulms1980 wrote:does gazz's complex connector work with AP?
I have no idea, you will have to ask that in the the mod's thread.
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Post by apella » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 13:48

great addition, thanks for the mod!

anyway, small detail: the link to the bonuspack index takes you to the X3:TC version of the bonuspack, not the AP version.

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Post by akaifire » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 21:17

Awesome script :D

One problem though... I noticed I had a few colliding stations, 3 Cahoona Bakery Ls and a Solar Power Plant XL (pic here), when I used this to build this complex (without the mines, of course).

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Post by X2-Illuminatus » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 23:32

apella wrote:anyway, small detail: the link to the bonuspack index takes you to the X3:TC version of the bonuspack, not the AP version.
I'll write a X3AP specific index topic after Christmas.
akaifire wrote:One problem though... I noticed I had a few colliding stations, 3 Cahoona Bakery Ls and a Solar Power Plant XL
Thanks for the screenshot and the complex information. I actually thought that I fixed this problem twice now already, but as it seems this bug is a little bit more complicated than I originally thought. I'll have a look at it after Christmas.
In the meantime, as soon as you connect the stations with Complex Construction Kits they shouldn't do any collision damage anymore.
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Post by Garnuba » Tue, 27. Dec 11, 18:48

pja wrote:On the Terran start, this script froze the game everytime I tried to use it at the point where you click the OK button on the first message. Now that I have raised my Teladi rep to the point I can buy some stations from them it seems to be working. Looks to me like a bug in a situation where you can only buy stations from one race (Terran in my case).
This needs to be looked at. I started a fresh game as Terran Commander and the game crashed when I tried using the script, however once I got some teladi rep everything was fine.

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Post by X2-Illuminatus » Wed, 28. Dec 11, 11:59

Found the problem, which causes this freeze. It will be fixed in the next version.
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