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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Exploration & Salvage  (Read 49838 times)

Harmful Mechanic

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #90 on: July 26, 2016, 04:05:32 PM »

* borgrel feeds the pet some candy

You know, if you feed pet peeves after midnight, they turn into rabid grudges.

I like being breadcrumbed towards a variety of stuff in a game; it feels better than knowing every time I get hinted at I should jump in that direction at high speed.
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Morrokain

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #91 on: July 26, 2016, 09:30:59 PM »

Hey awesome exploration is the bread and butter of these games for me! Sounds like the groundwork is pretty solid and I love the "breadcrumbs" discussion.

As a modder, one thing I wanted to ask in regards to the procedural generation portion of exploring and content:

How "easy" do you anticipate it to be for a modder to get their own stuff into the procedural portion of the game? Will this be supported at all?

I ask this specifically because the move to procedural generation made fleet spawning awfully messy mod-wise (at least for me). I've spent hours and hours trying to get the right ship distribution in my more fighter-heavy mod. Even with the selection process being broken down in another forum post, things are not currently flexible enough to guarantee certain ship doctrines without accessing the jar files and editing the way the spawning system works. I've gotten very.. frustratingly close. But there are still too many weird fringe cases that break both the immersion and the balance.

I know modding is definitely secondary to the base game and procedural generation is great for that, I just want to get a basic feel for how much freedom I am going to have in the end. I had a whole lot before when it was a text file and I could just edit the exact variants that spawned and fairly easily write the code to spawn them wherever I wanted. Now I have to make the 8-12-16 unit group point system try and play nice when certain ships require others to be effective.  :-[
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Alex

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #92 on: July 26, 2016, 09:49:16 PM »

As a modder, one thing I wanted to ask in regards to the procedural generation portion of exploring and content:

How "easy" do you anticipate it to be for a modder to get their own stuff into the procedural portion of the game? Will this be supported at all?

I'm definitely keeping it in mind as I'm working on this, so I suppose the answer is "as easy as I could possibly make it".

In some cases, that's pretty easy. In other cases, it may be a bit more involved. Sorry this is kind of a non-answer.

Ok, an example: adding new planet types to the built-in procedural generator is easy. Adding new star types, on the other hand, is more difficult, because star types are columns in some of the spreadsheets involved where planets are rows - for example, a row for a planet in a specific spreadsheet will have probability multipliers for specific star types.

It's still possible to add new star types, however, because the data in the row is exposed and can be altered by code on application load. So you'd add a new star type (a row in a specific sheet) and the on load, iterate through all the planet specs - where star types are columns - and set whatever multipliers you need to with code. (If you don't, they'll all default to 1, meaning that star will be exactly average.)

(To complicate things further, planet types can *also* be columns, such as when a certain planet type has a higher chance for other planet or terrain types to be orbiting it. But that's not the case that often, where for stars, the whole point of adding a new star type is usually what kind of stuff orbits it.)

For salvage/exploration related entities, it *should* be on the easier side, but I haven't finished all the work on the data spec.


I had a whole lot before when it was a text file and I could just edit the exact variants that spawned and fairly easily write the code to spawn them wherever I wanted. Now I have to make the 8-12-16 unit group point system try and play nice when certain ships require others to be effective.  :-[

It sounds like the easier way to go for you would be to write custom fleet generation code for your faction. You don't actually *have* to use the doctrines or the FleetFactoryV2 stuff, it's just there but you're not required to use it. IIRC you can even write code using the old system - not 100% sure on that, but I don't recall taking out support for it. Of course, that's not aware of markets/stability/etc. But your custom code could be.

This is sort of the approach I'm taking, right - there's a default way of doing something, but if that doesn't work, then you can roll your own. Likewise, for procedural generation, there's nothing stopping you from not hooking into the procgen system and instead doing your own pass over the Sector once procgen is finished.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #93 on: July 26, 2016, 09:52:05 PM »

But won't it get messy if multiple mods starts fuzzing with the generation too much?
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Alex

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #94 on: July 26, 2016, 10:16:12 PM »

Probably - I mean, what else is going to happen, right? Sort of by definition of "too much" :)

It's largely up to mods to use good judgment when doing this. For example, if a mod is adding a special planet type they only want to ever show up around a specific star, then probably sticking it into procgen isn't a good idea and it's a better fit for "just add it in a post-procgen pass with code".
« Last Edit: July 26, 2016, 10:18:46 PM by Alex »
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Orikson

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #95 on: July 26, 2016, 10:20:31 PM »

Ok, we'll see what details have to be added/modified once the update drops. It'll be fun for sure once everything is in place.
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Jerry

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Re: Exploration & Salvage
« Reply #96 on: July 27, 2016, 06:40:57 AM »

Thank you!

(Pet peeve: people calling systems "sectors" :) There's only one Sector in the game! Ahem.)

I can understand that pet peeve! I just typed it without thinking. Thanks for the correction.
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