Bullwinkle's List

[Xannn]

And yet again, I'm here with my newbie questions and problems...

This time is the Improved Boarding Script ("Hacked" edition).

I was just in the mood to capture an special m7 I encountered (Heavy Centaur Prototype) and though "Let's check the boarding transporter feature", but there was no option or hotkey to be assigned.

Checked the Readme and the Script post and nothing about how to use the feature, so I checked the original version. I saw that it is an special hotkey, which for some reason doesn't appear to me. Further analysis of the original post gave me what could be the "problem":

Once installed on your ship, you can assign a hotkey to use. The device can only be used on the ship your currently flying.

So I though that since I haven't bought the ware I don't have the special hotkey to assign and hence can't use the feature.

As it seems for the light glymse I took at the plugin code that the ware was swapped to the normal transporter device in checks and stuffs, so since I haven't bought a transporter device personally on my ship after the installation of the script it could be the issue.

Will check tomorrow, now there is 4:16 AM here and well, my body ask for rest xD...

Have fun ^^.

[DrBullwinkle]

You will need to purchase a Boarding Transporter (sometimes called "Boarding Transporter Extension") at a Split Equipment Dock before you can use the Boarding Transporter.

However, the hotkey should be in your Controls/Interface/Extensions pane even if you do not have a Boarding Transporter. If you are playing AP, then you may have a corrupt saved game. Try starting a new game to see whether the hotkey works.

[Xannn]

Thanks for the tips, I finally managed to fix it .

Tried what I said without luck, so I checked a new game and the hotkey was missing too.

The thing is that the other three hotkeys from the plugin were showing perfectly, so I checked what could affect that one specially. Checked the original requeriments and it said it required the WareManager Plugin, so I looked on my script folder, and it was missing. Downloaded it and voila, the hotkey shows now.

Didn't find the Boarding Transporter on the Split Equipment Dock, but as your hacked version don't require it, it isn't a problem at all . Just find a bit odd that you need that plugin to just see a hotkey, when no new wares are needed at all, that's all.

Now I got that ship, but at high price. Lost a lot of Reputation with Argon Federation, From Hero to Marshall . Tried to follow the boarding tips post, but when my marines enter in the ship, I lose recognition at each deck, and when they are hacking the core the game don't let me apologice to the capitain or any of the tripulation, so if I want the ship I have to accept the reputation loss...

Well nothing more, thanks again for the help and have fun ^^.

[DrBullwinkle]

Good point. I will remove the ware manager requirement in a future version. Thanks.

Rep loss is normal when stealing a ship. To the previous owners of the ship, you appear to be a pirate.

Mostly because you are.

[Bertone]

Hi, Doctor!
Just to start congratulations for your nice scripts, I use a lot of them. I also modded a little using your guides, absolutely the most complete ones in the whole forum.

I'm CONSTANTLY looking for a particular script, since X3:R, with absolutely no luck. I tried to "do it myself", as suggested by many scripters on this forum, but I'm not a scripter/programmer/modder.

I'm trying to give Boron ships a little hull regeneration capability. ALL boron ships. That's because their ships are (or at least they look like) "organic".

Not knowing anything about scripting, I really don't know if it's a difficult script, so what I'm asking is: do you have time to do something like this?

Thanks a lot in advance, kind regards!

[jack775544]

It's not that it would be hard to do it is just that it would consume ALOT of computer resources. You think, if every Boron ship in the galaxy had this script running in them then it would chew up CPU speed like there's no tommorow. If you did do it then the ships would only regenerate hull points every couple of minutes (since you would need to have alot of waits in there), so there would be no point in doing it.

[DrBullwinkle]

Thanks for the glowing report, Bertone.

And what an excellent idea! Yes, the Boron should have organic hulls!! Also, it would help to make up for their otherwise weak ships.

Is the primary role to make Boron enemies more challenging? Or a way to repair your own Boron fleet? Both can be done, but I am thinking about which way to balance it.

I assume that we are discussing self-repairing hulls that do not require marines, right? Should there be a charge for organic boron repair? Or should it be slow and/or incomplete repair? Like repair up to 75% hull automatically, and use a different repair technique otherwise? Alternatively, we could make organic hulls repair themselves very slowly, so that it will not help during battle, but it would help between battles?

@Other_Jack: I don't think performance will be an issue. It's all about *how* you do it. And I know how to do it right.

[Jonas801]

Omg you are awesome Dr. Many thanks for the the added content, scripts and guidance. Most usefull. I cannot wait to try this one out.
PS: Organic Boron Repair between battles sounds interesting, too! Otherwise it probably would be to overpowered.

[Bertone]

Thanks for the glowing report, Bertone.

Are you kidding? Thanks to YOU!

Is the primary role to make Boron enemies more challenging? Or a way to repair your own Boron fleet? Both can be done, but I am thinking about which way to balance it.

Well, both solutions are amazing, IMHO.

Alternatively, we could make organic hulls repair themselves very slowly, so that it will not help during battle, but it would help between battles?

I think this is the best solution... A little advantage that makes Boron ships (not paintable, and quite weak) at the same level of the stronger races. BUYABLE, in a simple word!

And I know how to do it right.

You can trust this man... Just try his scripts!

[DrBullwinkle]

Here you go, Bertone. It is lightly tested; be sure to report back if you run into any problems.


Organic Boron Hulls
Organic Boron Hulls
[ external image ]

Features

• Boron ship hulls self-repair over time (as you know they should).
  This is not a "freebie" to overpower your fleet. Enemies heal four times faster than your own ships!
  Repair speeds are configurable in the t file.
  Lightly Tested -- Your test reports are important!

[Bertone]

Let me wipe the drool and run to download it!

O.O

[fobboy]

I have a problem when using the boarding extension. When my marines have successfully boarded using the boarding extension hotkey, a whole bunch of duplicate marines get released out in space. I know they're duplicates because when the battle was over, I checked some of the marine names and they were the same as the ones I have in freight. I also can't eject or do anything with the duplicates except check stats.

Anyone encounter this before?

Edit: I think I know why...I think it's because the opponent's marine bay can't hold all the marines I'm sending at it. Must be some glitch where it duplicates the marines for some reason.

[DrBullwinkle]

Good report, fobboy! I have experienced a problem with duplicate marines during boarding ops, but I could not narrow it down to Improved Boarding. If that is, in fact, the culprit, I will try to see if I can find the bug.

If you have the time to test with different enemy ships, it would help me to have a way to reproduce the bug. So, if you can confirm that it is marines on the target ship which cause the duplicates, then that would be helpful.

Thanks.

[fobboy]

I tried boarding (boarding transporter extension hotkey) on a larger ship M7, which I believe can hold 20 marines. My own ship can hold 20 marines and is fully loaded with said marines. The boarding was unsuccessful, but at least when marines started to board there weren't a whole bunch of duplicate marines being ejected into space.

My hypothesis is that if your ship has too many marines for the opponent's marine bay then duplicates, for whatever reason, get ejected into space. I'm also not sure if duplicates of the opponent's ship gets ejected as well or just yours.

When it happened for me, there were ALOT of marines that got ejected out into space right after boarding started. On various info screens though, it says 9 of my marines are fighting on the deck and I have 11 in the freight bay for a total of 20. Some of the 11 I could not eject or do anything with as I assume they were duplicates while others operated normally. After the battle ended, when I try to pick up these marines floating in space, many of them got destroyed.

I'll do some more testing in this regard.

[DrBullwinkle]

I'll do some more testing in this regard.

Yes, please do.

I understand your theory, but I need to be able to reliably reproduce the bugged behavior if I am to fix it. So verifying the conditions that cause it will help me very much. The problem is uncommon enough that I have not been able to track down the conditions that cause it.

When marines board a target ship that has marines, that target's marines may be ejected into space (where you can pick them up and use them yourself). I believe there is some code that calculates the exact conditions leading up to ejecting those marines; possibly including friendly casualties during the process. The boarding process is mostly hard-coded, so I cannot "see" the details.

[Andyrids]

Great mods... especially the mining one !

Something I noticed though with the Upgrade Kits mod, I wondered how my Demeter Tanker has a max speed of 115 when the others are 110...

So today I boarded a HCP gave it the upgrade kit and selected to install the jumpdrive only option... all fine... then after some repairs I notice the max speed has gone from 154 to 161 ! It appears that the engine tunings are like the "Pandora ones" rather than shipyard upgrades is this intentional or a bug ?

I have not tested what happens if I remove the jumpdrive and install again though using the upgrade kit would that give another +5 on the ships max speed ?

One more thing is I was surprised to note that the upgrade kit/s themselves do not disappear after using them on a ship, in fact using one creates multiple more in the ships INV... The info said I needed 5X for the upgrade I required on my Ryu and after the upgrade I think it was an additional 7X spawned in my INV lol... So all you really need to buy is 1 and after a few full upgrades I got enough to start my own market stall with ... Now surely that is a bug ?

[DrBullwinkle]

Thank you for the kind words, Andyrids, and for the report, as well.

The 5 m/s "supertune" is probably a small bug. It has happened to me a couple of times, although not often enough to narrow it down. I will see whether I can find it from your report.

Yes, the info is wrong. Most of the Equipment Packs do consume a single Upgrade Kit, but they may also *include* one or more Upgrade Kits. That was intentional, especially during testing. I will remove them for the next update, although I do not have an update planned anytime soon.

If you want to remove the added Upgrade Kits, you can modify plugin.deliver.jd.getlists yourself (in the Script Editor). It should be fairly obvious which lines to comment out.

[Andyrids]

No problem its cool just to have mobile miners that actually "mobile mine" ! lol... I still miss that break up asteroids command from Reunion and the ship dropping a sat next to the debris to mark the spot, though it was a bit hit and miss to get the miner to actually start and continue with the command at times... But this works well enough if not better in a few respects so I'm happy.

The +5 supertune is pretty consistent in my game with what I am doing at the moment and that is boarding Hydra's to train up marines, if you have difficulty trying to reproduce the bug then I can report back the case scenarios in more detail if need be.

[DrBullwinkle]

The first step in fixing a bug is to be able to reliably repeat it. That gives developers two things:

1) It helps us to identify what part of a script is bugged.

2) It gives us a test case that will show us when the bug has been fixed.

So, yes, it would be helpful to know the exact steps required to reproduce the bug.

[Andyrids]

Just an observation and possible suggestion / solution to the problem :

Looks like what is happening is the $free variable is checking the ships current state rather than checking to see what quantity is already installed and if there is room to add more without over tuning... Since the ships current state (being engine tunings and current max speed in this case) I thought that maybe the variable that shows the amount of tunings in the ships info pane would be a better variable to check against as that always shows the correct amount of tunings ? since I suspect that internally when the ships hull is damaged it must be the engine tunings variable that gets reduced temporarily someplace and hence if you install the JDK with a damaged hull and you already have max engine tunings installed on said ship this produces the "super tune" I am seeing ?

I suspect this is possibly the place it would need to be altered / adjusted :

plugin.deliver.jd.install

0224 $free = $ship->get amount of ware {Engine Tuning} in cargo bay
0225 $upgrade = $ship->get max upgrades for upgrade {Engine Tuning}
0226 $math = $upgrade - $free

If I am on the wrong track with that then I shall be playing AP in a few hours time and will make some notes for a report on said bug so you can reproduce it in game yourself (I know I said I would do this a few days back but I just got busy and no time to play AP)
Thanks.