[SCR][MD][TC][AP] LIFE-V0.95b (update: 06-May-2014)

[PDouma39]

Ah well, that means audio for maker race right? This way my playerships will call their race-actor as a voice, maybe female or male, will try out later this weekend.
Never took to much attention to the audio before to be honest, found it a really cool feature which adds immersion to the game.
Will look/listen more carefull this time.
But as I said for npc's the actors are not allways from the same race or male/female.

[Centurion2008]

@Shush

Just spent couple hours listening to voice actors in war zone and for the most part they seemed to be correct, every once in a while you get a male voice for a female, or other way around.
still think the Terran lack of voice actors has something to do with it, i have to equip a wing of argon fighters and try the voice's on them.

also I think i saw a mod that added Terran Marines to the game, and i think he had a script that told game to default to argon voices for Terran actors.

[Tom5Cat]

How about the idea of rare solar- and/or other storms, that, depending on the kind of storm, either render your shields depleted for a while, slowly deminishes them as long as you stay in the storm or even nibble on your hull?

I'd love to do something like this, i.e. bring back an updated version of X2's localised hull eating nebula's. But I'm not a modeller/artist and even if I was I would be reluctant to turn LIFE into a fully fledged mod because of the usual incompatibility issues it entails.

I believe there's a creative way around making it a mod to do this and just introduce the changes by scripting...

A number of sectors are misty/cloudy in vanilla. You could check which ones are, verify their colour for exemple and depending on colour introduce another effect it has on ships (reduce speed, eat away at shields/hull, make ships 'drift' (loose their bearing) in a certain direction, make the jumpdrive inactive, make ships less maneuverable, render all shields inactive (maybe except for the ones inherent to the local race, who found a solution for the problem?), ...). So you wouldn't have to actually create (mod) the storms (nebulas) yourself. They're already in there! Sector wide nebulas! That would make for some interesting battles!

- Or you could just do it for one or two specific sectors and make special very dangerous missions for it. Could be unknown sectors and you could build an entire story around it.
- Or flying in the ficinity of a pirate station renders your shields inoperitive because they have an ion-particle emitting device onboard.
- Or, I don't known if it's possible (at all/through a script), but you could have a sector with an asteroid field in which the asteroids actually move, each one in a different direction and with different speed, making it much more difficult to travers the field. Should be something like 'the big bang', so first expanding, then retracting, or it would be over real quick to never happen again
- Or destroying enemy ships could leave behind tuning-containers (like as if the debrie helps you enhance your own ship). Just one single tuning should suffice and of course not every kill should provide one (overkill > overtuning).
- Or you could introduce a special weapon (a device, a ware), to be bought at pirate stations, that could have a hotkey attached to it. Using the device would let it emit an EMP-wave up to 5 km out, rendering all ships in the ficinity defenceless for a short amount of time, lowering their shields, making their engines stall and powering down their weapons. It should be briefly and the device should only work once, after which a new one would have te be installed for a next EMP-wave.
- Or politics could be introduced into the game, with elections. Every race could have a kandidate. BBS would report on the evolution of the campaigns and the election. There would be adds to support the different kandidates. The player too would have to cast his vote. In the end, one would be elected president of the joint races. This would have repercussions in the galaxy (the elected race would become just a bit stronger (faster ships, better shields, more ships (military), more stations (a boom in its economy), ... possibilities are endless). There could be reports of corrupted officials, assassination attempts, a military coup, war (!), ...

Just some thoughts

[Shush]

But as I said for npc's the actors are not allways from the same race or male/female.

Just spent couple hours listening to voice actors in war zone and for the most part they seemed to be correct, every once in a while you get a male voice for a female, or other way around.

Even though there are bugs in X3 with pilot voices and faces, (mainly related to plots), I did find some issues in my code when selecting race/face/sex for ships that are killed in 1 hit or kill another ship before they are attacked. I've refactored large parts of this code and it should now work more consistently in 0.89b. There are now six available options covering both NPC and player owned ships.

• 1 NPC Random - Chooses random race/face/sex; this is probably not what you want to use for NPC's, but I've made it available anyway.
  2 NPC Maker - Chooses race based on ship's maker, random face/sex.
  3 NPC Pilot Name - Chooses race/sex using pilot's name, random face. This is the most accurate option for NPC's.
  4 Player Owned Random - Chooses random race/face/sex.
  5 Player Owned Maker - Chooses race based on ship's maker, random face/sex.
  6 Player Owned Pilot Name - Chooses race/sex using pilot's name, random face. This is the most accurate option for mods/scripts such as CODEA, (this only works with mods that use the inbuilt text page 30-35 names).

For all Maker options; if voices don't exist for a particular Maker race, then the code falls through to Random.

[PDouma39]

Thanx Shush for the upcoming update, I tested some more, not so much because of the very nice weather we are having overhere in The Netherlands.
I had a (one of my ships) centaur which in battle had an argon male voice, so that's okay. This was in vanilla AP.
The thing is in heavy batlle it was were I had the overal (combat) voices from the different races, no matter if it's XRM or TC for AP, or just vanilla AP.
I think this is and vanilla behavior and LIFE behavior together, and because of LIFE we, as I stated before, are now aware of those random pilots which are not exactly what they appear to be (like female argon with Paranid or Boron name, but with male appearance(the com picture)).

Edit: just encountered a yaki male with split name, argon female voice with male picture, must be vanilla I guess

[Shush]

Haha, nice long post, that deserves an equally long response!

A number of sectors are misty/cloudy in vanilla. You could check which ones are, verify their colour for exemple and depending on colour introduce another effect it has on ships (reduce speed, eat away at shields/hull, make ships 'drift' (loose their bearing) in a certain direction, make the jumpdrive inactive, make ships less maneuverable, render all shields inactive (maybe except for the ones inherent to the local race, who found a solution for the problem?), ...). So you wouldn't have to actually create (mod) the storms (nebulas) yourself. They're already in there! Sector wide nebulas! That would make for some interesting battles!

These are all good ideas, but I absolutely detest X3's current way of handling nebula, dust clouds, etc. Sector wide cheap fog is visually 1st gen GPU's and offers no strategic interest whatsoever, the X2 localised versions were so much better and had so much more potential for scripters/modders. So for these reasons I will never implement anything sector wide and without a localised visual representation, (which will require a artist/modeller + changing LIFE into a mod).

- Or flying in the ficinity of a pirate station renders your shields inoperitive because they have an ion-particle emitting device onboard.

I like this idea, maybe a device that completely depletes a target's shields but that requires the laser energy of a whole wing of m6's to function; energy and hence size and number of ships in wing dependent on size of target. I would make this available to NPC's as well as the player of course.

- Or, I don't known if it's possible (at all/through a script), but you could have a sector with an asteroid field in which the asteroids actually move, each one in a different direction and with different speed, making it much more difficult to travers the field. Should be something like 'the big bang', so first expanding, then retracting, or it would be over real quick to never happen again

This is totally possible and another good idea, the only caveats are that there might be a performance penalty on some systems with a full universe and overloaded with mods. Plus on leaving the sector and coming back to it, all asteroids would be reset to their default positions unless I can store their forced position as a local var on each asteroid.

- Or destroying enemy ships could leave behind tuning-containers (like as if the debrie helps you enhance your own ship). Just one single tuning should suffice and of course not every kill should provide one (overkill > overtuning).

LIFE already does this as part of the rewards for the dynamic missions, it's very rare though as it's only a 5% chance that a ship surviving with 25% or less of it's hull will drop them.

- Or you could introduce a special weapon (a device, a ware), to be bought at pirate stations, that could have a hotkey attached to it. Using the device would let it emit an EMP-wave up to 5 km out, rendering all ships in the ficinity defenceless for a short amount of time, lowering their shields, making their engines stall and powering down their weapons. It should be briefly and the device should only work once, after which a new one would have te be installed for a next EMP-wave.

Yup, this is similar to your idea above, I like it but it will require a lot of thought and planning to have it balanced and not an "I win" button.

- Or politics could be introduced into the game, with elections. Every race could have a kandidate. BBS would report on the evolution of the campaigns and the election. There would be adds to support the different kandidates. The player too would have to cast his vote. In the end, one would be elected president of the joint races. This would have repercussions in the galaxy (the elected race would become just a bit stronger (faster ships, better shields, more ships (military), more stations (a boom in its economy), ... possibilities are endless). There could be reports of corrupted officials, assassination attempts, a military coup, war (!), ...

Haha, this is almost another game in itself, it's possible to do something like this and hopefully one day LIFE will incorporate ideas like this. But they will be implemented one baby step at a time.

Just some thoughts

Some great ideas, thanks for sharing.

[Centurion2008]

@Shush,

Your my Hero, those voice options look perfect!

cant wait to try it out, going through jobs file now, dumping junk to free up more memory for larger battles.

[SGAJohnSheppard]

i have a problem

i play ap with mods

cockpitmod, bounce, drone carrier ,anarkis crystal free solarplant and tcplots 2.2a for ap3.1, + bonusPackage.

tried 8hours to install life but everytime the same.
50% of the menu is "readtext"
if i push a linked key i hear only a "pip"
if i contact another ship theres nothing new stuff
and never got news ( except the first install compled news, but its only "readtext")

game-language is german
followed the install instructions..many..times

can you guys help me? did I forget something to install? pls
(sorry for my bad english)

[Shush]

Edit: just encountered a yaki male with split name, argon female voice with male picture, must be vanilla I guess

Unless they are plot generated ships, then it's probably LIFE's doing, 0.89b will be much better at selecting pilot races, voices, faces and sex.

cant wait to try it out, going through jobs file now, dumping junk to free up more memory for larger battles.

It should be ready in a day or two, I've been under the weather a bit the last few months, so things are progressing slowly unfortunately.

game-language is german
followed the install instructions..many..times

You need to rename LIFE's "9500-L044.xml", (which you should have copied to your "addon/t" folder for an AP installation), to "9500-L049.xml". The 49 signifies the German Language; all of LIFE's menus, text and news will still be in English, but at least this will stop the read text errors and should allow LIFE to function normally.

I've added these instructions to the installation section of the original post, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

(sorry for my bad english)

Your English is fine.

[SGAJohnSheppard]

You need to rename LIFE's "9500-L044.xml", (which you should have copied to your "addon/t" folder for an AP installation), to "9500-L049.xml". The 49 signifies the German Language; all of LIFE's menus, text and news will still be in English, but at least this will stop the read text errors and should allow LIFE to function normally.

I've added these instructions to the installation section of the original post, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! now it works **

but after rename the file a had to change the language in the file too

thank you thank you thank you, happy dancing yeah [/quote]

[Shush]

but after rename the file a had to change the language in the file too

Doh, I knew I was forgetting something. Thanks for spotting the omission, I've added it to the installation instructions as well.

thank you thank you thank you, happy dancing yeah

My pleasure, let me know how you go.

[Tom5Cat]

Haha, nice long post, that deserves an equally long response!

I can type an even longer one if you like

[DrBullwinkle]

I have seen you do it.

[PDouma39]

Thanx for the new update and great work, still enjoying and testing this mod.

[Tom5Cat]

I have seen you do it.

lol
I swear, I will never... no, sorry, just can't do that

[Centurion2008]

@Shush

Great update Thank You.

But Sadly the pilot name option in audio dont help, Due to the fact that Codea assigns ranks to pilot names.

I tested this by moving a admiral to another m2 and he lost his rank prefix then audio was ok.

EDIT*** Just reloaded and did a reset to defaults, and now seems to be working, hmm needs more testing after some sleep.

[Shush]

Thanx for the new update and great work, still enjoying and testing this mod.

Cheers.

But Sadly the pilot name option in audio dont help, Due to the fact that Codea assigns ranks to pilot names.

I tested this by moving a admiral to another m2 and he lost his rank prefix then audio was ok.

EDIT*** Just reloaded and did a reset to defaults, and now seems to be working, hmm needs more testing after some sleep.

It should work fine for CODEA assuming that all CODEA does is prepend titles to names; all LIFE does is do a sub-string search on race arrays of names to determine, race, voice and sex, (only for the first time a pilot tries to speak). As long as the name originated from the text pages 30-35, (standard X3 names), it shouldn't matter what a mod does to the name, i.e. what it prepends or appends.

What is most likely happening is that the ship already had a voice text page assigned to it as a local variable from a previous save. If this is the case, then the new code won't run on that ship as it thinks it already has a valid race, voice and sex. I'll re-factor the code so that if you change one of the options it will rebuild the race, voice and sex even if it thinks they are already valid.

*Edit* I checked the code and I am already doing this, which means that if you go into the audio options and do the following; the race, voice, sex and face should update even for a previous save game.

• - Select a different "Player Owned Pilots Race:" option than the one currently selected, then click apply.
  - Select "Pilot Name" for the "Player Owned Pilots Race:" option, then click apply.

Now all Player owned ships should update their voices, faces, races and sex by using the more accurate "Pilot Name" option.

[46852]

I've noticed that LIFE kills/level display renames ships in a way that overwrites any possible previous renames. Well, I'm not sure if it does it to all renamed ships who get kills, but at least Lucikes military transports who get kills turn back to plain "Argon Express : K1 L0". Is there a way to make the kill display not to do this?

[Centurion2008]

@Shush

Yup sorry for bad info, was just stuck using old code working great now!

[builder680]

I'm not sure if it's just my game, but I notice the following pretty frequently:

TS with a dynamic mission (escort me). Usually it has a smallish escort of fighters already. This isn't the odd part.

Name of TS will be something like "Boron Transporter" but it'll be a Caiman or a Mercury. And the escorts might be something like "Boron Jaguar Raider." Or Split Nova. Wrong races for the ships is what I'm getting at. I just don't know if these are LIFE's ships. I know they aren't XRM jobs, paul and Mizuchi were far too thorough for that, and their job ID is always 0 anyway. Does the game sometimes do this in vanilla?