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Author Topic: Magician's mod (wip)  (Read 11950 times)

Magician

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Magician's mod (wip)
« on: November 04, 2013, 01:04:46 PM »

For now it's only 2 ships with mission and unbalanced numbers. Alot of things I don't know how to implement properly. But hey, at least its moving on its own without crashing! Well, most of the time.
Just wanted to show what I was trying last few days.
Download link.
What you will encounter in mod:

Fire Witch. It was a project trying to achieve creation of star surrogate to supply outskirt's colonies with light and energy. But research group was caught in the flames of the military conflict and ship was lost in commotion. Higher-ups just pretended that project never existed in the first place, trying to cover all the secrets and plans. No one heard anymore about Fire Witch or its crew.
But few years later ship came back. And the first outpost to detect FIre Witch was burned to ashes with a furious energy of a surrogate star. Ship stayed silent in every contact, only burning down victims and disappearing in vast space, like a ghost ship, acting randomly and without any logic, raining down solar power regardless of which faction or power it was against.
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Animated:
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Cyclop. A military frigate, or rather fleet support platform. While its specs are very low compared to any other ship of similiar class, Cyclop is regarded as a mighty tactical force in large fleet operations. Recently developed plasmoid weapon was of such scale and characteristics, that it was proven impossible to install it even on high tech capitals. So military quickly requested specially designed platform for this weapon, which sole purpose will be to bring new type of firepower to the battlefield.
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Don't be surprised with numbers, how powerless Cyclops are and how overpowered is Witch, I certainly will change it alot. It mostly just a first test for my ideas and most numbers were put with the idea of faster and easier testing. Though I intended to make Witch more of a special entity, rather than average ship.

Future of this thread:
I have few other ideas and I have some ideas about making bigger, proper mod which can be played along with other mods or vanilla. If to sum up, I want to make an easy-going mod of Epic Space Fantasy. And Fantasy here means mostly imagination. The core idea is bringing together different bright archetypes from different settings and adapting to Starsector universe. Like a port which connects multiple universes, or club of famous space captains of all times. In near future I can see it as a small series of the ships, still insufficient to be called faction or either ships not covering every specialization which is required for a full faction, based on a certain theme.  
Though it probably will be tough with my current skills. But I certainly hope that someone may be interested to participate in this mod, since it has rather wide frame for different ideas and approaches.

For now I'd like to ask if anyone knows, regarding two ships in this test mod:
1) Is there a way to make better looking plasma ball of such size(about 100x100)? I am almost content with how it looks now, except those tentacles. (if you look closely, normal plasma balls have those tentacles too, but when size increased x5, those tentacles become much more visible and don't look very nice)
2) If I set collision to friendly fire, my allies don't avoid balls. I wanted a better, realistic implementation, but if there is no way to easily fix it, I guess I will have to leave it as is. And also I wanted to make plasma balls either ignore missiles or destroy missiles without disappearing. But I didn't have any success yet.
3) Drone which represents surrogate star recalls in a weird position, on top of the ship. Is there a way to somehow force drone recall inside of the ring?
4) How to decrease flux dissipation, speed and maneuverability, and turn off shields when star-drone is activated? In shipsystems csv I wrote TRUE for noShield, but I still can use shields with drone system active.

..phew, and thanks to anyone who bothered reading to this part.
« Last Edit: November 04, 2013, 01:09:18 PM by Magician »
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haloguy1

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2013, 01:22:25 PM »

dam those sips look cool. ;D
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sirboomalot

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2013, 05:49:43 PM »

Pit the fire witch against a few omen class frigates  :P
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etherealblade

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2013, 10:57:42 PM »

You definitely  have my support from someone who's in a similar fight.
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Runoved

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2013, 08:20:42 AM »

Good idea. Fusion of fantasy and technology implemented well, always interesting. Remember at least Arcanum. From myself I propose to add a ship being covered with magical dome flying island with a castle. I think if you draw and to issue not like anime toy,but seriously and relatively realistic it will be very beautiful. But this is my personal opinion.) In any case, a good initiative.
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HELMUT

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #5 on: November 07, 2013, 02:49:34 PM »

The mission seems bugged, the enemy ships won't appear and it ends up as a victory.

I had the luck to found a Fire Witch at the Diktat station, it is indeed overpowered. But i like the sun beam thingy system even though the super-bright colors tends to burn my eyes.

For the Cyclop, i played it on dev mode. Funny little ship, difficult to say how good it is other than 1v1 fights. It would be a good idea to make it available at one station somewhere in the campaign.
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Magician

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #6 on: November 07, 2013, 03:05:37 PM »

It's strange that mission isn't working. Will try to fix everything and maybe make ships a little bit more playable in context of other mods with next update, though I never even thought that Trylobot will move such early wip to mods section. I hope next week I will have at least some updates ready.

Thanks for every minute of playtesting.
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Sabaton

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2013, 06:48:59 AM »

 When can we expect an update magician?
 The stuff you've been posting on the sprites thread is gorgeous, this mod would be prefect as a total conversion, looking forward to more lore.
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Magician

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #8 on: November 26, 2013, 07:12:33 AM »

My bad. Initially I wanted to update mod when I have few more sprites ready to make it more of a playable mod, rather than testing playground. But I am still not satisfied. Also the other, maybe even bigger reason is that I don't know how to code some things. And some things are impossible with current state of the Starsector. For example shipsystem which uses multiple different variants of drones. And drones calling other drones isn't the choice I want to use for this particular shipsystem, and also for other similiar system this will ruin whole purpose.

Overall it will take great amount of patience and time to complete a playable version of mod with my limited knowledge of modding. I can't say when I will start working on coding part, but probably soon, maybe after few more sprites. Though when I will finish mod is another question. Depends on how many adventures I will have with notepad.
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HELMUT

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #9 on: November 26, 2013, 09:02:48 AM »

For example shipsystem which uses multiple different variants of drones.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6452.45

Not a ship system but dmaiski managed to make missiles drones as weapons rather than ship system. As such you can have multiple different types of drone on a single ship, if it can help you.
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Wyvern

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #10 on: November 26, 2013, 11:31:43 AM »

Actually... we can get multiple drones, kinda, with some clever cheatery.  May be a better way of doing this, but you could use an EveryFrameCombatPlugin and track drones - say, every other one you change its sprite image on launch, adjust stats as needed, and can even "change" weapons - by doing things like adjusting the missile ammo, or setting ballistic weapon range to zero, or energy weapon range to zero.

(So, say you wanted one drone type that carried a harpoon missile and a PD laser, and a second drone type that mounted an arbalest autocannon.  You'd make a drone that carried all three weapons, and for type 1 drones, set ballistic weapon range to zero; for type 2 drones, energy weapon range to zero and remove the harpoon's ammo.)
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

xenoargh

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #11 on: November 26, 2013, 05:08:02 PM »

You can also make an invisible, un-hittable ship that is spawned when the ship is spawned, moves to the ship's position and launches a totally different type of drone.  That may cause some issues with crashes at battle end, however; there are some issues there that need to be explored, in terms of how the post-battle code is handling the changes in the CampaignFleetAPI objects' contents.
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Please check out my SS projects :)
Xeno's Mod Pack

Sproiet

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #12 on: November 26, 2013, 07:32:50 PM »

or do what Mendonca did, have a drone be released by the ship and then the drone releases smaller or similar drones.
Just like the JunkPirate Reaper class, Check it out  8)
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Vensalir

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #13 on: November 26, 2013, 11:53:58 PM »

Those sprites look really really cool, especially the Cyclops : it sort of reminds me of the Golden Heart from the movie adaptation of "Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy"  :)
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NITROtbomb

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Re: Magician's mod (wip)
« Reply #14 on: November 28, 2013, 03:00:12 AM »

that animation for the fire witch may not be so good with just a spinning fire ball, maybe a less circular movement. have it create little sparks or even perhaps flames.
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