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Home » news » forums » Support & Feedback » Scenarios & Mods » SE:V MODs

FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Wed, 2007-02-28 01:22. SE:V MODs

Announcing the posting of FQM 5.00 Beta 5, for SE5.

download link (878 kb)

Note that the mod now contains Credits and License files.

Beta 5 version history:
1. Added - New StarGlow.bmp texture with solar flare effects, courtesy of Captain Kwok.
2. Added - New PlanetGlow.bmp texture for better atmospheric effects on planets, courtesy of Captain Kwok.
3. Added - Green stars. Texture coloring courtesy of Captain Kwok.
4. Changed - Reduced the size of atmosphere glow for large and huge planets.
5. Added - Large Ringed planets have a Tiny atmosphere glow. Huge Ringed planets have a Small atmosphere glow.
6. Note - The solar system named planets (eg: Mercury, Earth) do not have glows. They do not appear to be used in-game (no references exist in StellarObjectTypes.txt).

Please note that this is a work in progress. There are bound to be quirks, which you should report. All suggestions for improvement are welcome!

It seems that SE5 still indexes data by file position, rather than name. As such, this version will tend to break savegames created with beta 4.

‹ sys_get_component_name_count Minimum practical range in ground combat ›
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Mod Designer

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Wed, 2007-02-28 21:57.

Working on some fancy quadrant types...


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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fallen Haven on Thu, 2007-03-01 07:28.

Fyron wrote:
Working on some fancy quadrant types...


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Here we have.... A stargate.

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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by evilginger on Thu, 2007-03-01 12:00.

Help its the "ring" we are all going to die!!!

apart from looking a bit wyrd I rather like the idea of quadrents which look engineered

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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Sotho Tal Ker on Thu, 2007-03-01 19:39.

Just imagine an uberpowerful race that had the ability to form any kind of galaxy look Laughing out loud

~~~~
http://wiki.spaceempires.net - Visit the SpaceEmpires Wiki and help improving it. Smiling

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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by zelos on Fri, 2007-03-02 02:10.

Fyron add a blackhole in the center and maybe so that every third or forth inner system is connected to it

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Mod Designer

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Fri, 2007-03-02 20:10.

The nebula are a performance concern on some systems. One way to help might be to make the individual clouds bigger, and reduce the number of them. Compare the original to the new version, and tell me what you think:

40 small clouds per storm

20 large clouds per storm

I'm leaning towards even bigger:

20 huge clouds per storm, with larger distances between them


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Mod Designer

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Fri, 2007-03-02 22:26.

After various optimizations, they are looking more like these:

a view at a normal angle

a top down view


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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by evilginger on Fri, 2007-03-02 23:17.

very prety but I suspect that some of the nebulae cloud effects might become quite irritating to a player who cant find his own ships in them.

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Psieye's picture

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Psieye on Fri, 2007-03-02 23:18.

This certainly looks better yes. Would a single "Huge Cloud" affect multiple sectors with its abilities (e.g. "no shields in this storm") or would the Nebula system itself have some special "all sectors in this system have this problem" ability? Is it also confirmed that it's the number of stellar objects that's causing problems which gets solved by having fewer but larger-to-draw objects?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

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Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by evilginger on Fri, 2007-03-02 23:52.

just had a look at v5 as I started a quick game of BM 1.04 and wanted to give a bit of feed back like the swirl warp points look very nice when implemented. Planetary glows looked odd to me though I did get what they where trying to do perhaps make them smaller and a lot more translucent.

I prefer the earlier appearance of stars as the current ones look wrong too bright with the glow far too prominent for my eyes to the point where I would want to remove the effect before playing for any length of time.

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Mod Designer

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Sat, 2007-03-03 01:09.

Psieye wrote:
Would a single "Huge Cloud" affect multiple sectors with its abilities (e.g. "no shields in this storm")...
That is actually entirely possible. Note how stars actually take up a circle of radius 2, preventing movement, rather than just being drawn larger than a sector; the same can be done for any other object in terms of its actual "location." With the nebula clouds, I've simple made the animations take up more area, but left the actual "object" occupying only a single sector.

In StellarObjectTypes.txt, there is this line:
Hex Size := 1

If you make it 2, you get the object to be located in a circle of hexes around its center, for a total of 7 hexes. This doesn't affect the animations of the object, just how SE5 classifies its location. To make the animation bigger, you have to modify the XFileClasses_Stellar.txt file. Note that stars have a Hex Size of 2.

Quote:
...or would the Nebula system itself have some special "all sectors in this system have this problem" ability?
The nebula systems themselves do have an ability, but it's just cloaking. The storm objects have the more interesting abilities.

Quote:
Is it also confirmed that it's the number of stellar objects that's causing problems which gets solved by having fewer but larger-to-draw objects?
Fewer objects leads to higher framerates... I'm not going to hazard guesses about memory leaks.


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Psieye's picture

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Psieye on Sat, 2007-03-03 04:19.

Fyron wrote:
Psieye wrote:
Would a single "Huge Cloud" affect multiple sectors with its abilities (e.g. "no shields in this storm")...
That is actually entirely possible. Note how stars actually take up a circle of radius 2, preventing movement, rather than just being drawn larger than a sector; the same can be done for any other object in terms of its actual "location." With the nebula clouds, I've simple made the animations take up more area, but left the actual "object" occupying only a single sector.

In StellarObjectTypes.txt, there is this line:
Hex Size := 1

If you make it 2, you get the object to be located in a circle of hexes around its center, for a total of 7 hexes. This doesn't affect the animations of the object, just how SE5 classifies its location. To make the animation bigger, you have to modify the XFileClasses_Stellar.txt file. Note that stars have a Hex Size of 2.


That is interesting... where do we modify how many of these objects spawn in a Nebula system? Looking briefly at previous versions of FQM, seems Nebulae systems have 'code' to control where they spawn too - would these need working on too?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

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Mod Designer

Re: FQM Beta 5 Posted

Submitted by Fyron on Sat, 2007-03-03 13:11.

In Beta 5, I added a "_scripts_readme.txt" file to explain the .py files.

SE5 only parses the text data files. The python scripts (.py files) are used (by me) to generate some of the more pattern-centric files, like SystemTypes.txt and QuadrantTypes.txt.

The most systematic way is to open up the _solar_systems.py script, edit line 1357:

num_storms = 70

Change this to the number of storms you want per nebula, then run the script. Naturally, you need to have Python 2.5 (10 MB) installed to be able to run the script.

Failing that, you would want to open SystemTypes.txt and find all of the Nebulae ## systems. Each of the 10 Nebulae will have a line like:

Number of System Objs := 70

You can reduce the number here to reduce the amount of storms in the system.

If you are going below 30, you should probably also alter the Protostar systems. They exist just below Nebulae in both methods.


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