Annoying Problem!

[RedGlobe]

Today I threw myself, for the first time, at the modding of XRebirth, with more or less success.
I wanted to change something "simple": the speed of Cargolifter Drones!
Because it annoyed me how slow they pick up ware containers! It simply takes forever to pick up a whole dropped batch from a station. So I wanted that changed and I managed, after hours of tinkering, to increase the speed of them.
But well, now they are fast, but a new annoying problem has arisen:
They are too fast to leave my Scaldis after launch. They just get stuck inside the Scaldis!

On the other hand, trading with trading ports (drone exchange) is absolutly no problem, works seamlessly. Docking again at the Scaldis after successfully leaving the Scaldis works seamlessly (Yeah, I happened once that a Cargolifter Drone could escape it by accident).
But just the crappy launch is a problem, I just dont get the drones out on the field.

The vanilla speed of a Cargolifter Drone is 44m/s. I have increased it to 176m/s (four times that) and left the other parameters alone. 66m/s and they still can undock, try above that and it gets ugly, but it is simply to slow for me. Tried to tinker with the forward accelleration, but to no avail.

So enough of my frustration text, my question: Anyone got an idea how to fix it or work around it? Maybe different engines, one slow one at start and after that it switches over to a faster one, if it is possible, how to do that? Is there a way to turn off the collision of the drones?

I would be very gratefull for any answers! Thanks a lot!

PS: I havent tested it on a different ship than the Scaldis yet, but if it aint working with it, well, then I see no point in changing the drones speed.

[Ginger470]

Assuming it's colliding with the geometry, maybe when a drone is launched you could do a distance check and use

Code: Select all

<disable_collisions_between object="$thisDrone" target="$carrierShip" />

then enable_collisions_between once it's far enough away?

Never used this function so no idea if it'd work, but something to play with until someone more knowledgeable comes along

[RedGlobe]

Yep, it is colliding with the geometry, that is excatly the problem. Tried to add the "nocollision" to the tags of the Connectors but that did not really help. Some drones were able to leave the carriere while others still got stuck. Furthermore it caused weird flight behavior.

I will check that out what you posted and tinker a bit with it. Thanks for your reply!

By the way, is there somewhere a function reference I could use? That would help a lot!

[linolafett]

not only increase the top speed, you also have to increase the agility. so that you wont have a fast but not turning ship

[RedGlobe]

I guess I got it working now! My sincerest thanks to Ginger470!

I was even able to speed up the docking process by altering the docking script. Though you can just do so mutch as the pathfinding allows. I found out, that the drones seem to follow a preset nav-path of the station, most of them fly the same route and at some points of the station route they have problems with the path doing odd moves. But as far as I see it I cannot change a stations pathing or have to very little skill to do so. Maybe it is even hardcoded, so there is no way doing it at all.

But never the less it got speed up insanely. It is very nice

@linolafett: Yeah, did that too, they are as agile as any fighter out there. It is a bit weird yes, but for me it is not immersion breaking in any way. It actually is quite fun to watch them do their job now. Though setting their agillity to high may result in them doing circle moves infinitely, quite annoying when they do that. Quicksafe and Load helps there

If anyone is interested in this little mod just say so, might be willing to share once I adjusted it right

[Ginger470]

@RedGlobe

Glad it worked . And sharing is caring, so let it into the wild once you've balanced it