FQM 5.00 Beta 2

Judging from your description... this mod is completely compatible with any other mod which focusses on AI, tech tree, etc?

That is, if .txt files are merged with other mods

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

Yes, that is generally how FQM worked in SE:IV or at least the standard version.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

One thing I'd love to see is a much greater variety in warp travel. The warp points allow for an interesting range of abilties, and there is something about inter penetration(two ships exploding if your using similtanious transit?) and transit time between ships if your not and your entering combat on the other side, so more interesting warp points that aren't 100% reliable might make the game a lot more variable.

Fyron, which lines of Settings.txt did you change compared to stock?
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Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

He only disabled music - line 16 set to FALSE.
PS
To use this FQM with Ballance mod you need to copy its files except Settings.txt from Data directory to BM mod data directory.

No, I'm spotting other lines were changed too, e.g. "number of systems in a Small Galaxy" and "Weapon Range Short means 30". Well, I usually always go through the whole thing and edit bits anyway (e.g. More Crits!)

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

It may not be possible to add warp point travel, but adding "small" warp points that only allow less than 300 kt ships through or other limitations would make for some nifty map layouts. Which would probably confuse the AI, but darnit, they'd be fun!

There must be a lot of vestigial code and data in the modding text files then. When you view info on warp points in game, they mention a tonnage limit, and text files mention varying tonnage limits as well.

What about the "weird" warp points from SEIV? Are those gone as well?

Drat, I was hoping it could be limited. And I haven't noticed any unusual warp points in SE5 yet. So I am looking forward to FQM making them more prevalent.

Can I and if so how do I install this mod to work with Balance Mod? Or will it screw it up?

Thanks,

Javaslinger

Looking forward to testing it Fyron.

You'd want to copy the following 4 files from FQM's data folder to the Balance Mod's data folder:

SystemTypes.txt
StellarObjectTypes.txt
StellarAbilityTypes.txt
QuadrantTypes.txt

You'd then copy the FQM's Effects folder into the Balance Mod's Pictures folder so that the electro-storm animation will appear.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Fyron, while you are modding this, maybe you could take a look at the asteroids... I noticed serious slow down whenever they are present (stock code), but other animations don't have such drain...

I never was too fond of how FQM (for SEIV) handled asteroids. It looked purdy and all, but when one started using planet generator components, it got a little unbalanced and cluttered. It was more of a workaround for how SE represents asteroid fields (as taking up a single sector) than anything else.

Two things, a quick question and a suggestion:

The question is, can two stellar object occupy the same sector? One player was saying how he used storms to hide planets in SEIV, which I thought was very clever. It might be nice to go back to having moons (in the same sector) and cut down on planets by just a little bit.

The suggestion is that I would like to see some storms have have system side consequences. Perhaps as a means to make a more "dynamic" battlefield. Many of the abilities have a description that does not specify that it only applies to that sector, ("renders all shields useless"), and may very well make for some more interesting gameplay if their effects were system wide.

The last time i got the problem it was on a system that had one star, several planets and lots of asteroids fields. A ship crossing that system would do it at crawl speed...

Might be related, i found that i could increase the size of each sectors and the whole system in Setting.txt. Systems don't look as cluttered when sectors are bigger. But it has the drawback it's more difficult to see the whole system without zooming out...

How do you know that is more realistic placement? Just cause that's the way our solar system is setup doesn't mean others will be like that. Who knows what kind of strange layouts we might find in the universe. We know very lil of planets orbiting other stars. We can detect some of the bigger ones because of their gravitational effects but as for seeing what they are made of we can't be as sure . Also if your going for realism I'm not sure how common trinary star systems are. But I know Bynarray systems are very common but are unlikely to have planets from what we know of them. So you'd end up with a game with few systems that had planets which wouldn't be as interesting for a game hehe.

On which point vaguely remember reading an article about the discovery of super massive gas giants in other star systems in venues or closer orbits. I also understand that super massive gas giants have been found in binary systems but they seem to be part of a trinary system with the stars rather than orbiting either or both stars. The thing is we don’t know how representative the one solar system we are familiar with is and any extrapolation based on a sample of one is basically an educated guess.

However its an interesting concept for a mod not withstanding

PyroMancer wrote:

How do you know that is more realistic placement? Just cause that's the way our solar system is setup doesn't mean others will be like that. Who knows what kind of strange layouts we might find in the universe. We know very lil of planets orbiting other stars. We can detect some of the bigger ones because of their gravitational effects but as for seeing what they are made of we can't be as sure . Also if your going for realism I'm not sure how common trinary star systems are. But I know Bynarray systems are very common but are unlikely to have planets from what we know of them. So you'd end up with a game with few systems that had planets which wouldn't be as interesting for a game hehe.

A sniplet taken from wikipedia :

Systems consisting of more than two components, known as multiple stars, are also not uncommon and are generally classified under the same name. The components of binary star systems can exchange mass, bringing their evolution to stages that single stars cannot attain. Examples of binaries are Algol (an eclipsing binary), Sirius, and Cygnus X-1 (of which one member is probably a black hole).

As for planets and their composition, we do know what the discovered planets are made of. Most are gas giants, some much larger than jupiter. Smaller planets are difficult to spot with current technology...

The storm effect is very cool.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Do the rest of the files go into the normal folders? ie non-BM folders?

Thanks,

Javaslinger

You'd install FQM as you do any other mod. You're just overwriting a few files in the Balance Mod's data folder with FQM ones to get the new system types etc.

Alternatively, you could also copy your Balance Mod folder (if you want to preserve an unaltered copy of the Balance Mod) and call it something like "Balance Mod FQM" and copy the needed files as described previously. It would probably be helpful to edit that folder's modinfo.txt with a different name as well.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Just some information:
I tried to combine the Inter related mod and FQM, I used the same method as the one described for balance mod above, but found out that an additional change was needed, the IRM formulas.txt file is missing the "Formula Planet Temperature"
when this is added FQM seems to work fine.

This is because i had attempted to fix planet temperature a while ago. I also tryied to do something similar to FQM, but in a more primitive way. Let's see what Fyron can come up with in his following version, i'm sure he will do much better than i did.

For some weird reason playing FQM is causing a very accelerated memory leak on my computer. I can play max of 10-15 turns before I have to save, exit and reload. I still get a memory leak playing stock but it takes much much longer to start occuring and when it does start it takes a long time to reach the point where I have to exit and reload. I did make a few changes to the settings.txt - I enabled music, changed the max systems, changed the amount of computer players per low,medium,high and thats about it. I made sure I used a systems names file that can incorporate the max systems settings. Could it be that changing the amount of systems has caused the memory leak to be worse?

I think the problem is more likely to be the new animations FQM5 beta 2 introduced.

I have 1 large nebulae system that I've scaned so far, I could send you my saved game but I dont think it would load properly because of the modifications I made. One thing to note is that my frames per second drop to around 32-33 while viewing the nebulae system. All the other systems stay at around 90-100. I'll try FQM beta 2 and just keep default settings and I'll report back. By the way I do like the mod very much, everything is running fine except for the memory leak which is probably my fault lol. Thanks
for a great mod! I've enjoyed FQM for SEIV as well.

Are seriously annoying. Lost a few ships already to them. They do a lot of damage to early ships, even i my mod. One of the worst part of it is when both entry and exit are booby traped. And obviously, the AI can't do anything about this, it will keep sending ships to their death, often with no other choices since it's the only way toward expension...

Hey guys reporting back on another game I played. This time with FQM Beta 2 with no changes. Everything is running fine, I've played all the way to turn 93 without even seeing any evidence of any kind of memory leak. Some strange things happened though. I had a very bad game start, it placed the Xichung 1 system away from me lol. War breaks out, I made the mistake of not finding their homeworld right away. I didnt fully survey the system next to mine. The other mistake was using Depleted uranium cannons on my ships. They have higher ship defenses than other races, so none of my shots ever hit a Xichung ship. Their ships could never hit one of mine either lol. Eventually I switched to missiles, assembled a fleet of 8 destroyers and took out their homeworld without effort. I decided that I wanted to wipe them out completely so I built another kind of ship with DUC cannons to destroy their satellites. I sent my new ship to destroy their satellites, my ship is armed with 5 level 5 DUC cannons. This was very strange while attacking I noticed that no damage was being dealt to the satellites. Is this a bug? It only had 50 armor and 70 internal structure, my ship should have one shoted it. I thought satellites didnt have any defense? Anybody else notice this?

Hum... I might be wrong, but i believe chance should be % (ie 1-100), but many of your entries have it over 100... Of course, i never truly fiddled with this, i'm not sure...

The chance amounts are in tenths of a percent. So 100 = 10%.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

That explain everything...

About the question of how representative our star system is to others :

Isn't the Centauri system a trinary? A binary system with a "distant" third star?

Can't remember where I'd heard that ...

Yes, it's a trinary system.