[Mod] Hull Engineer v.6 released 12-3-13

[Shenzo]

Hey Kierk!

I'm loving your mod,

Any chance you can mod the marine officer to be able to repair sub systems?

or make the engineer have a return to skunk tab like the marine officer?

It would make pirating so much more fun!

Anyway thanks for this mod its nice being able to repair my ships!

Shenzo

[Pimpace]

Erhhh... guys, sorry for noob question, but do I have to got some components on my own? In player inventory, like jump driver parts, engine parts, etc., scrap metal (or whatever)? Are these needed if I want to repair? Or drones do their jobs as it is, just by themselves?

[wwdragon]

Erhhh... guys, sorry for noob question, but do I have to got some components on my own? In player inventory, like jump driver parts, engine parts, etc., scrap metal (or whatever)? Are these needed if I want to repair? Or drones do their jobs as it is, just by themselves?

Not needed

[NBCDumb]

But the proposition is quite interesting, using scrap metal as a reparation prerequisite and consume one every X hull points restored...
Makes it just a little more role-play while not being so much annoying (you can buy some), making the reparations a bit less *magical*.

[Kierk]

Yeah, one of my plans was to have hull repairs 'cost' construction drones depending on the severity of the damage, and allowing engineers on board to make new drones from scrap metal, engine parts, entertainment consoles and small arms (take out the laser elements from the small arms and combine them to a makeshift welding laser, make a hull out of scrap engines to move it around and consoles for the cpu stuff) but I need to find a working way to remove drones from inventory.

[NBCDumb]

May I have a look on your current progresses about this? seems very interresting! (if me stealing your ideas again is not a problem ^^')

[Kierk]

Code is gone I'm afraid. I had a few emails back and forth with ES where it looks like the remove_units function wasn't designed to subtract things from the cap ship inventory, really only for marine boarding stuff.

The first step was to allow drone trading between ships, without a way to easily replenish supply, removing drones doesn't make sense. I set up custom conversation options in the engineer dialogue. The first was to manage drones, and opened up a window for i want to give you drones and i want to take drones. Each choice opened up a further option of give(take) 10 or all.

All was simple, just does a count, then add units to the receiving ship and subtract from giving ship.

10 used a conditional to give 10 if it has at least 10, otherwise give the max.

oh and I also used a unit check to make sure if the receiving ship ran out of space it would fill up but not overflow.

The giving part worked fine, the ship would get the right number of drones
but I couldn't get the giving ship to lose drones :/. There might be some kludgy workaround but I wasn't really interested in that. Once this method failed I went and created the code that uses the drones already onboard the skunk if docked. Its just a workaround for not being able to trade.

One possibility i've recently thought of for trading between non-playerships is to use the mass traffic to launch the drones and either have them dock with the new ship, or if thats not possible destroy them and add units to the new ship. Still, thats on the back burner at present as I'm currently neck deep in combat code.

[NBCDumb]

Code is gone I'm afraid. I had a few emails back and forth with ES where it looks like the remove_units function wasn't designed to subtract things from the cap ship inventory, really only for marine boarding stuff.

The first step was to allow drone trading between ships, without a way to easily replenish supply, removing drones doesn't make sense. I set up custom conversation options in the engineer dialogue. The first was to manage drones, and opened up a window for i want to give you drones and i want to take drones. Each choice opened up a further option of give(take) 10 or all.

All was simple, just does a count, then add units to the receiving ship and subtract from giving ship.

10 used a conditional to give 10 if it has at least 10, otherwise give the max.

oh and I also used a unit check to make sure if the receiving ship ran out of space it would fill up but not overflow.

The giving part worked fine, the ship would get the right number of drones
but I couldn't get the giving ship to lose drones :/. There might be some kludgy workaround but I wasn't really interested in that. Once this method failed I went and created the code that uses the drones already onboard the skunk if docked. Its just a workaround for not being able to trade.

One possibility i've recently thought of for trading between non-playerships is to use the mass traffic to launch the drones and either have them dock with the new ship, or if thats not possible destroy them and add units to the new ship. Still, thats on the back burner at present as I'm currently neck deep in combat code.

Have you already tried giving a negative number of drones to the origin ship?
But this is probably a dead end, as drones appears to never be killed (or am I wrong? My Rahanas used alot of drones, some got shot, and I allways have the same number of drones, just some being "unavailable"...
It is possible to discuss with ES? I'm really interested about this ^^.

[SyberSmoke]

I was curious, had either of you considered allowing the player to deploy the construction drones from the Skunk to another ship with out docking? Something simple...like say the the skunk to the engines of a ship, select them, then use the contextual click menu to get an option [Repair this Subsystem]. Select it, and off the drones go to do their thing.

The problem I see though is that when a subsystem is destroyed, it can not be selected...So a way to select a specific destroyed component would be needed. But it would allow the player to repair a second object on the hull.

As for the 1.19 fixes...they did a good job in getting there...but for some reason if you leave the area or enter a station all of the sub systems are locked into being destroyed. So I am investigating alternatives.

[NBCDumb]

I was curious, had either of you considered allowing the player to deploy the construction drones from the Skunk to another ship with out docking? Something simple...like say the the skunk to the engines of a ship, select them, then use the contextual click menu to get an option [Repair this Subsystem]. Select it, and off the drones go to do their thing.

The problem I see though is that when a subsystem is destroyed, it can not be selected...So a way to select a specific destroyed component would be needed. But it would allow the player to repair a second object on the hull.

As for the 1.19 fixes...they did a good job in getting there...but for some reason if you leave the area or enter a station all of the sub systems are locked into being destroyed. So I am investigating alternatives.

I'm not having that bug with vanilla.

Yes, we did consider such options (I can only talk for me, I'm pretty sure Kierk did also), but interactions are much more complicated that "simple AI rework", being event driven in an XML language not really fitted to this. So for now, we are trying to choose the thing we can make with a high benefits/work ratio, this allowing us to bring more contents in less time. We are also beginning discussions about a potential merge between our features in a modular/configurable script. (Sorry Kierk if I said something you do not agree with).

[Kierk]

Yup, tried adding negative, no dice but good thought. I was curious about destroying drones in space so thanks NBC for that. Still plan to check it out a bit as there might be some way to do that.

Problem with the repair drones is that they're handled as mass traffic unlike other drones which are real ships. Doing anything really complex with those would require learning the mass traffic system pretty well. Since I'm already working on engineer, ship movement and combat adding a whole 4th system is a lot more work than I really want to do.

[SyberSmoke]

I do have one other thought, I was thinking about it earlier as I was looking to cause stations to blow up ships. The thought then gelled when I heard about you all pondering using materials.

THE THOUGHT: A tweak to the mining laser...or wrecks, to allow the mining laser to destroy wrecks (ones generated by destroying ships) and drop components for the repairs.

I have been blowing up a few...a lot of stuck freighters and want a way to get rid of them. But even if it happens after freighters get unstuck, it would be an interesting way to stock up after a battle. Eve if you blasting little S Class fighters.

[NBCDumb]

Yup, tried adding negative, no dice but good thought. I was curious about destroying drones in space so thanks NBC for that. Still plan to check it out a bit as there might be some way to do that.

Do not give up just because I think that drone destruction is not being taken into account, that could be my savegame which is broken (started with an early game version) and I only have checked this for combat drones.

I think mass traffic is just a flying space coordinates system bound to the position of another object, relative coordinates (in the map, you can see harvesting drones being displacing within a space coordinates relative to the owner ship, as they travel very fast in circle if the ship is turning), but I may be wrong about that. I'm also interested in any information about mass traffic.

[Vim Razz]

I think I read somewhere in file comments that mass traffic paths are built with the spline navigation system (the same way that cap ship docking paths and highway tube paths are).

That is: the endpoints and possibly a few intermediate waypoints have to have fixed coordinates, then the rest of the navigational spline is interpolated between them.


How that might relate to the influence region of cap ships is something I hadn't considered. Does the game recognize the local offsets from caps within a zone as valid navigational coordinates in the same way it recognizes local zone offsets from center as coordinate within a sector?

The idea sounds kind of bizarre. Caps move; zones don't. Then again, we do have areas of influence around caps built into the game -- possibly not for player convenience shooting turrets so much as for AI navigation. It would certainly account for the sort for behavior you described with the harvester.

Dunno. It's worth considering at least, and keeping an eye out for any observational or other data that might support or disprove the possibility.

[NBCDumb]

How that might relate to the influence region of cap ships is something I hadn't considered. Does the game recognize the local offsets from caps within a zone as valid navigational coordinates in the same way it recognizes local zone offsets from center as coordinate within a sector?

The idea sounds kind of bizarre. Caps move; zones don't. Then again, we do have areas of influence around caps built into the game -- possibly not for player convenience shooting turrets so much as for AI navigation. It would certainly account for the sort for behavior you described with the harvester.

You can observe in savegames some object being tied to a local coordinates system.
I think in early version, drones were not moving using the parent ship relative coordinate systems, as their were so many problem for drones to (un)dock with its owner ship being turning. (again, pure speculation)
I do think that only utility drones use the parent ship space coordinates (not combat ones) as they have many interractions with parent ship.

[NBCDumb]

You can observe in savegames some object being tied to a local coordinates system.
I think in early version, drones were not moving using the parent ship relative coordinate systems, as their were so many problem for drones to (un)dock with its owner ship being turning. (again, pure speculation)
I do think that only utility drones use the parent ship space coordinates (not combat ones) as they have many interractions with parent ship.

Seems like I'm saying rubbish: I just checked a liquid collector drone from a savegame and I've seen no real clue that the drone is moving in a ship tied coordinate space.
Sorry about that.

[Kierk]

that feature exists, I've seen references to it in my work on move scripts not sure if drones use it though.

[mevko]

Hi there,
First of like to thank the author of the mod for nice work, this is an excelent mod.
Now on to a problem I'm having with it , for some reason when I place a engineer on a newly captured Balor, and I exit the ship and reenter it my game freezes.
Now I do have other mods installed,and have gone mod by mod disabling them to determine which one is it and it seems to me this one. This problem occurs with the v1.20(campaign and freeplay) of the game.

Anyone else have the same prob?

[NBCDumb]

Now I do have other mods installed,and have gone mod by mod disabling them to determine which one is it and it seems to me this one. This problem occurs with the v1.20(campaign and freeplay) of the game.

Anyone else have the same prob?

Did you ran several tests? This mod is unlikely to cause such annoyance and the game makes crashes be somehow very random...
I'll download last version to check quickly the code.

[mevko]

I run the hull engineer newest non debug version, I am now trying the other one it seems ok so far.