[MOD] EFS (Exodus Fleet Ships) 12-08-07 V5.51

[Solfi]

Nice one JakeSnake . So are those fixed models distributed somewhere, or are you waiting to see if XTM are interested in having them included in their packs?

... and with that out of the way - Back to your Exodus-cage monkeyboy!

[jackleonfraust]

I guess some good things happen when i go walkabout.

i'm glad to see you have recovered.

Happy holidays

[Jakesnake5]

With 2.5, there's an entirely NEW wrench in the monkey.

You've read about the new script commands, and heard about the Mission Director.

The MD is very interesting. It does have a bug or 2, but as it wasn't really meant to be released, it's pretty good.

It gives modders a new tool to create 'event' driven missions. This has some usage, and the MD can execute scripts, when it's own capabilities can't deal with the job.

Something you may or may not know about: Using Custom Starts (no the Egosoft alternate starts) prevents the Bala Gi mission from running. I'm hoping to create a Bala Gi 'Simulation', to fix this, and allow the player to 'acquire' the ships, and HQ they wouldn't normally get.

All in all, it should be interesting.

Back to scripting the 'ship production' corrections.

BTW: Exodus SHOULD work with 2.5 without any modifications. But let me know if you find any 'strange' things happening.

[Jakesnake5]

O.K. Just found out what happens when the ShipYard has enough resources. Very amusing.

The SY WILL run production cycles. Unfortunately, this is cycles of 8 items each, and the resources used for each item in the product list is that same. So for the player, this isn't a good thing.

Going to set it so that when/if you 'acquire' the SY from Kaahn, it's production cycles are stopped.

This still leaves us with the odd behavior of having a station that sells ships: It still thinks it's a ShipYard, and will sell the ship as such, at full price, without the construction requirements.

I'm not sure how to resolve this, but I'm investigating.

[u24j7x5]

hello,

@jakesnake5

i´m working on the german translation of the t-files.
if you find it useful, i would try to finish that during the christmas holidays.

[Jakesnake5]

i´m working on the german translation of the t-files.
if you find it useful, i would try to finish that during the christmas holidays.

Anything will help, as I don't think using my Babylon translation software will be very good.

There may be additions to the language file later (updates from converting language in the scripts to the file), but I'll just add it to your translated version to save time.

Thanks for the help

[u24j7x5]

hello,

german translation finished.
after jakesnake5 will release it, please be encouraged to look for some mistakes.

[Jakesnake5]

@u24j7x5

I thank you. You also did me a favor by translating the text files for some of my other scripts/mods. Only the xx6868 was for Exodus, but still I thank you.

@All

Somehow, I seem to have a reputation, which has proceeded me into the XTUniverse website (home of XTM).

I fixed their Thor Mk2's slight grapical problems, and made it new engine flares. They seemed to like this.

Then one of them wanted me to look at their P Raider to see if something was amiss with an engine cowling. Couldn't find anything there, but noticed some nasty artifacting in Max. Turns out, parts of that ship had some 4th dimensional layers causing the artifacting.

What I mean by 4th dimensional layers, is a bit complicated to understand for most. But for me, it is this:

Dimension 1: Width
Dimension 2: Height
Dimension 3: length

For most of us, this is how 3D objects are defined. For X3, it's how we make shapes, apply textures and such. These shapes, however, are one sided. They have an 'exterior' (that which you'd see in the game) and nothing else.

A 4th dimensional object has an 'interior'. This 4th part can have textures too. This can come in handy at times, but not for a ship which you'd not normally SEE the insides of anyway. It also adds verts/polys that are not used, and as such take up space, make the object load longer, etc..

I removed what caused the artifacting. The result was a somewhat smaller ship vert/poly count.

I let them have the modifiecations I made to the 2 ships. They are extremely happy.

They also are going to set up a 'consultancy' area on their site, and have me as one of several 'consultants' to help them, and other mods makers (there are several at the XTU site) with problems, optimizations, or ideas.

The moral of this, is it gives me a look at their mod in detail. I may snag an idea or 2, including one that looks good for 'patching' a mod.

What they've done, is set the core of their mod to work as a 'false patch' (one above the last of Egosoft's real patches), and any 'fixs' they make are distributed as smaller 'patches', with only that which has changed included.

This idea does work for me. But it raises a slight problem with you users. It would require you to have a dedicated X3 directory for Exodus (you can have multiple directories, with whatever mod you want, I have 9).

I'll leave it to you to decide how you want me to deal with this.

Current Activities

I'm making way with rewriting the ship construction script for SENTINEL. And with a few extra scripts, allow specific selection of EFS ships in the build command. This will help some of you, by eleminating the 'hunt and choose' method we have now.

I'm also 'borrowing' one of DD's ships from the DDRS mod (with permission from long ago), and will add sufficient guns, shields and other stats, for it to perform as a Ware/Ship recovery vehicle.

It will take me a bit to get the scripts that will control this ship created. Then redoing the Quest to allow you to 'find' one (will be after you discover the Genesis, so you don't have this hog parked now where with nothing to do. )

Once I get the ship construction scripts done, I'll release them as a 'live patch'. You'll probably have to shut the SENTINEL down before you install them (since SENTINEL does do ship construction by itself) so that it will use the new requirements.

Ship repair is also something that will be included in the update. This will make ship repairs closer to what the HQ would do.

Another aspect I'll be including, is you being ASKED what to do with a damaged ship that docks. The choices will be:

1) Repair - This will put the ship in the the Repair queue, and it's hull will be repair'd over time
2) Scrap - All tradeable wares on the ship will be offloaded, including shields and weapons. The ship will then be passed to Eladan's Scrap Ship at Carrier script for deconstruction. The materials from the deconstruction is based on the ships type and hull condition. The scrapping of the ship will return 15% less materials than would be returned if the ship was scrapped at the Player HQ.
3 Ignore - SENTINEL will not do anything with this ship, even if you launch it and dock it again (won't even ask you what to do with it on docking). This can be handy if you get a ship you'd like to send to the Player HQ (if you get it) for reverse engineering, or you plan on doing something else with it.

With option 2, I am toying with the idea of removing Upgrade's as well, storing them in an 'array'. I'll modify the 'Ship Upgrade' scripts to check this array for parts, and, if found, install one instead of sending a ship out to 'collect' them.

With this idea, I'd also create an option 4, Ignore but remove Wares/Upgrades. This would REALLY be useful if you did want to reverse engineer a ship, but didn't want to lose any 'valuable' upgrades.

With the release of the scripts, I'll either disable Gene's recovering of ships you own that are less than 50% hull, or change it to a question. It's not always useful to have Gene poping in to collect a ship when you have Traders servicing her.

We'll see how this pans out. Hopefully, things go ok.

[Solfi]

... dammit, here I am sitting around without a proper gaming computer (my own rig is currently in molecules, packed in moving crates in an apartment a country away ... and the new one I'm building is missing CPU / GPU / memories until the end of the month *sigh*).

Me - WANTS - my X3 fix!

[u24j7x5]

the german translation in not perfect, yet. as jakesnake5 told in a post above, a lot of text should be transfered from the scripts into the t-file.
currently, a grman/english mix may occur in some cases.

[Heretic666]

Hello to all

My last post was about 6 months ago in the old Exodus topic, I come back to find this new one has been released so I'm pretty happy

Jakesnake5: Nice work sorry again about your loss last year glad to see you've moved on from there

Just a few questions about the mod:

It's been a while since I played this game, can I install this mod and still play through the storyline?
Also is it compatible with the latest 2.5 patch, as well as the Bala-Gi missions (which I have also never completed lol)

Thanks for your replies and nice work so far keep it up

[Jakesnake5]

It works fine with the story line, and 2.5 didn't do anything major. And since it doesn't use a Custom Start, Bala Gi works with it too.

So you can do the story, or use one of the other Egosoft starts.

Been refining the Claymore's model. Reducing the Vert/Poly count.

Going to look at adding Level of Detail to the ships. Might fix a couple 'odd' behaviors I've noticed with the textures.

[Heretic666]

Sweet thanks for the reply.

[Gelnak]

just to let you know that the SPK file download link is not working is there anything you can do about it?

[Jakesnake5]

You are using FireFox. Switch it to IE Tab, or right click and select Save As.

FireFox doesn't know how to deal with .spk files. Only with it in IE Tab mode can it process them properly.

[Heretic666]

You said the final mission with the Claymore wouldn't start on it's own, so how do I start it?

I've typed 'START.END.QUEST' into the master console, got the message from Claymore, and it said I would be contacted in 1 hour, but nothing has happened..

What do I do now?

[Jakesnake5]

No clue.

I'm busy with other bits and bobs of the scripts, haven't played with the 'end-game' bit yet.

[Heretic666]

OK when I typed this into the console again it gave me a message that the quest state was false, then I checked Argon Prime and the ships belonged to me..

Strange..

[u24j7x5]

hello,

i played around with the venegance and found out that docking of a fighter does not work, because the registration of the docking point, 10495, is missing in the dummies.txt (sdtype_animations).

greetings

[Jakesnake5]

You have to understand, the Vengence was never 'IN' to begine with, just something Andras had for some reason.

It is primarily an X2 model he kept when he updated most the other ships.