Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

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

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 81

Author Topic: [0.97a] Starship Legends 2.5.2 - Extra flavor for ships, crew, and NPCs  (Read 768589 times)

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7174
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #60 on: May 09, 2019, 03:31:43 PM »

O_O That battle report is a work of art! Bravo!
Logged

Alex

  • Administrator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 23987
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #61 on: May 09, 2019, 03:57:48 PM »

This should be an improvement over notifications, particularly for large fleets:
Spoiler
[close]
Pay no mind to the wonky outcomes, I cheated quite a lot win.

Niiice! Awesome to see someone using the "large intel description" functionality :)

Just a few random layout/formatting thoughts, if you don't mind - obviously no obligation to actually do it that way, and it's all minor stuff.

Section headings: for left-aligned ones, I'd add one empty space as a prefix to the text. I think I've done that in places in vanilla, though at this point I'm fairly sure all the section headings are centered.

After a section heading, the standard padding is 10 pixels. Same between paragraphs. (In some cases, vanilla will use a padding of 5 instead; that's generally old code and I'm cleaning it up as I become aware of the various places. One example of this is the various terrain tooltips; I need to go through 'em and fix this up for consistency.)

Between list items, the standard padding is 3.

Occasionally, there's a case where a padding of 10 is too much, and 3 is too little. In that case, a padding of 5 is used. This is usually when there's a line of text describing the contents of an indented list that follows, e.g:
This list has 3 items: <followed by a padding of 5>
     Item 1 <followed by a padding of 3>
     Item 2 <followed by a padding of 3>
     Item 3 <followed by a padding of 10>

BaseIntelPlugin.BULLET and BaseIntelPlugin.INDENT are the standard indentations for list items, if those are needed.

Edit: I should say, I hope this doesn't come across as critical! Just wanted to get the info out there, in case it's helpful.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2019, 04:08:13 PM by Alex »
Logged

Nick XR

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 712
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #62 on: May 09, 2019, 10:56:43 PM »

This should be an improvement over notifications, particularly for large fleets:
Spoiler
[close]
Pay no mind to the wonky outcomes, I cheated quite a lot win.

Super impressive!  I'd never considered using the Intel screen before to display data.

stormbringer951

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 130
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #63 on: May 10, 2019, 04:55:35 AM »

This should be an improvement over notifications, particularly for large fleets:
Spoiler
[close]
Pay no mind to the wonky outcomes, I cheated quite a lot win.

Super impressive!  I'd never considered using the Intel screen before to display data.

So, feature request for Combat Analytics? :P
Logged
Weapons Group Controls mod - deselect all weapon groups, hold-down hold-fire mode, toggle alternating/linked fire
Captain's Log - throw away your notepad: custom notes, ruins and salvageable reminders
Old Hyperion - for your dose of nostalgia
Adjustable Skill Thresholds - set fleet DP and fighter bay thresholds

Sundog

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1723
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #64 on: May 10, 2019, 06:28:08 AM »

@Thaago, Nick XR: Glad you guys like it  :D

@Alex: That's a lot of very useful information. Thank you! I had a lot of questions about conventions while putting that together, but ran out of time before I could go digging for examples. I shall conform!
So, since we're on the topic, is there any way to arrange a ship list to the left of a paragraph? I've been meaning to experiment with some hackery to try placing two tool tips side by side.

Ali

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 113
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #65 on: May 10, 2019, 09:59:19 AM »

Any chance of an option to disable dynamic trait adjustment / getting mixed traits for us powergamers who wanna maximise stats / boosts please!?
Logged

Alex

  • Administrator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 23987
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #66 on: May 10, 2019, 10:01:40 AM »

@Alex: That's a lot of very useful information. Thank you! I had a lot of questions about conventions while putting that together, but ran out of time before I could go digging for examples.

Awesome!

So, since we're on the topic, is there any way to arrange a ship list to the left of a paragraph? I've been meaning to experiment with some hackery to try placing two tool tips side by side.

Yeah, that's exactly how I'd do it. In the context of that screen, "tooltip" just basically means "any UI element", so putting it together out of a ton of smaller "tooltips" is an entirely valid approach.

addUIElement() returns a PositionAPI, which you can use to arrange things how you want to. You can also create a custom panel and add it using the addComponent() method, if you want a larger independent grouping of tooltips (roughly equivalent, to, say, a JPanel). But, yeah, tooltips are the basic building block.


But, hmm. This may run into problems when using the thing with a scroller, since scrollers are per-tooltip. What you'd need to do, I think, is this:

Code: java
/* this is the scrolling container */
TooltipMakerAPI outer = panel.createUIElement(width, height, true);

CustomPanelAPI inner = panel.createCustomPanel(width, height, null);
outer.addCustom(inner, 0);

TooltipMakerAPI t1 = inner.createUIElement(width, height, false);
/* do stuff with t1 */
inner.addUIElement(t1);
/* and so on, keeping track of the total height of the stuff added */

outer.getPosition().setSize(width, totalHeight);
/* do this last, since this is where it'll wrap it with a scroller
   based on the height we just set */
panel.addUIElement(outer).inTL(0, 0);

I think that would work. The reason "outer" needs to be a TooltipMakerAPI (instead of a CustomPanelAPI) is that the addUIElement() (which takes a TooltipMakerAPI as a parameter) is currently the only way to wrap stuff in a scroller here. Hope this makes sense! Let me know if you do decide to try this and run into trouble.
Logged

xenoargh

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 5078
  • naively breaking things!
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #67 on: May 11, 2019, 04:17:09 PM »

This looks great!  I'll have to give it a whirl as I'm breaking things testing my projects :)
Logged
Please check out my SS projects :)
Xeno's Mod Pack

Sundog

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1723
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #68 on: May 11, 2019, 10:11:05 PM »

@Alex: Awesome. Thanks again for the help! Looking forward to giving that a shot  :)

Any chance of an option to disable dynamic trait adjustment / getting mixed traits for us powergamers who wanna maximise stats / boosts please!?
The options file is pretty flexible, and it should be getting better after the next update. I want this mod to be very flexible, so hopefully there will be a way to make it fit your playstyle well.

This looks great!  I'll have to give it a whirl as I'm breaking things testing my projects :)
You might want to wait a few days! There are a lot of unreleased improvements that I don't have time to finish up at the moment. I'm hoping to have an update out by next weekend.

Serenitis

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1458
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #69 on: May 12, 2019, 02:49:20 AM »

This is going to become a "required" mod. It's almost a work of art.
Some observations from using 1.0.3 for a few hours:

Combat ships which are routinely deployed get a mix of traits.
Combat frieghters which are sometimes deployed get a mix of traits.
Non-combat ships which are never deployed get mostly negative traits, and they seem to gain them at a similar rate as deployed ships.

Possibly look into having the rate of trait gaining for non-deployed ships vastly reduced.
Doesn't feel good getting a ton of negative campaign modifiers for using a class of ships as intended.
As counter balance, could possibly vastly increase the chance of traits appearing if force-deployed in a pursuit mission, or if CR-burned by hyperspace storms.

-----

Ship tech families seem to behave differently, and I'm not sure if this is intended or not.

High-tech and Midline ships, and all carriers almost always get a mix of traits with more positive than negative as they're either tanking damage on shields or avoiding it altogether.
They also get lots of loyalty boosts due to not taking damage.

Phase ships seem to be all-or-nothing. They either get a roll of mostly positive traits, or mostly negative ones.
And tbh, that actually seems about right for something technologically fickle as these things.
(I have a pirate Shade set up for EMP support and it gets constant 'bad' rolls for everything, and I can't bring myself to get rid of it because it's hillarious.)

Low-tech ships though.... Being an armour tank seems like it's quite disliked by this mod, as constantly taking damage means that traits tend to be more negative.
And crew loyalty sits firmly in the toilet because the ship is designed to take all the punches so nothing else has to. Which is not really helpful as extra CR decay is a hard no for safety override ships when you cannot easily replace them.

Possibly look into having each tech familiy respond to taking damage differently.
High-tech ships - very damage averse, taking damage has good chance to apply negative trait and badly affect crew loyalty.
Midline ships - somewhat damage averse, taking damage has moderate chance to apply negative trait and badly affect crew loyalty.
Low-tech ships - largely indifferent to damage, taking damage has small chance to apply negative trait and badly affect crew loyalty.
Phase ships - current rules

Logged

DatonKallandor

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 718
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #70 on: May 12, 2019, 08:48:05 AM »

This is incredible. It's frankly insane how good this is. If it was a thing Starsector did, I'd advocate for Legends or something similar to it to become a standard Starsector feature. It has all the benefits of the old veterancy system (a fleet that becomes better as it fights, with losses reducing that progression, a feeling of having ships be "yours") without the fiddlyness - and a whole load of extra flavor on top.
Logged

BringerofBabies

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 98
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #71 on: May 12, 2019, 12:22:30 PM »

Not knowing what improvements Sundog currently has on deck (this may already be solved!), the damage taken calculation could be based on either damage that has not been mitigated by armor, or based on damage taken vs overall hull available, so that you only get penalized for taking too much of a beating, rather than the beating you were designed to take. Both should scale well with ships that have more shields than armor as well.
Logged

Jonlissla

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #72 on: May 12, 2019, 12:26:20 PM »

Like others have already said, it's crazy how good this mod fits the game. I'm hoping Alex does something similar to the game.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #73 on: May 12, 2019, 12:34:32 PM »

I hope not. There's many enough factors when trying to get optimal performance out of a ship, I don't need a trait popping out of the blue and ruining a crucial stat. I'd much rather have it stay optional.

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7174
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile
Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #74 on: May 12, 2019, 02:31:01 PM »

I hope not. There's many enough factors when trying to get optimal performance out of a ship, I don't need a trait popping out of the blue and ruining a crucial stat. I'd much rather have it stay optional.

I'm with this - while I really like this mod and plan on playing with it, I would prefer it stay a mod. Getting good traits is going to be based on difficulty a lot it seems (which I really like), but that means its somewhat new player unfriendly. If I were struggling with combat, it wouldn't be very nice for the game to insult my barely won victory with losses in loyalty and bad traits.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 81