Project Wanderers |
To celebrate the impending start of modding work, I'm making the thread now.
previous thread: http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/5120
Project Wanderers:
basic premise: this is a race that has evolved the ability to live in deep space away from planets entirely. This is planned as a racial ability.
Planned features:
There's only really one, the wanderer racial trait. There will however be a large number(200+?) of special techs that go with it.
The racial trait will give you access to the special techs. Also it will give you a boost to ship construction. However as a balancing characteristic, it will also drastically decrease the rate at which you can build facilities planetside.
Racial techs:
No special planetary installations.
Space colonies, these are ships that contain an environment suitable for people to live and work indefinately without needing access to a planetary environment.
-a- These store population and allow for the population to grow without being on a planetary surface. The growth rate would be a function of both the inherent racial growth and the tech level of the component. These will also provide empire resource storage.
-b- these would generate resources of all five types for the player. The amounts would be based on techlevels and on population on the ship.
-c- other installations: I'm currently thinking about making ship based versions of most if not all planetary installations.
Über portable shipyard, this is little more than a replacement for a planetary shipyard. It will have approximately the same construction capacity.
City ship, like a freighter these have a specific purpose. While huge, most of their space will be taken up by the installation components. These are planned as a race specific type of extra-extra-large freighter, albeit with extra abilities. They're also planned to have built-in regular storage as well(for the people to live in).
New list of questions:
1: How do you add a new ship hull to the game? I'm sure I can figure it out if I monkey with it long enough, but advice would be nice.
2: How do you do ship-based population growth? can you add an ability to the hull to generate colonists?
Re: Project Wanderers
Hi, Maybe you can use the event script to increase the POP of a ship. As for Resources, I was thing of using the event script to add the amount base on the number of ship or comps for a monster Mod I've been think of. I'm sure you could do the same. Hope some of this helps...
He ponders the dangers inherent in the advantages, and advantages inherent in the dangers. - Ts'ao Ts'ao
highlighter/User define lang for NOTEPAD++ for SEV
Crimson Concept Mod for SEV
Crimson
Re: Project Wanderers
Hmm, can you mod in an ability for the hab component to have a storage capacity for population that can then be increased through a script?
Trying to vision the starting homeworld...perhaps only one large spaceyard which with max pop and a large quantity of starting materials could begin producing a city ship unless through script you have the game spawn this race with a populated city ship?
Impulse thought...city ship (world class) limited to one engine but accompanied with a unit set that duplicates current ship sizes up to Xkt all whom can be carried aboard the world ship...but whose size also facilitates placement of hab components that allow for population storage/growth.
This is where a more developed trade script would rule since they could be traders. Similar to the entities that would pop up in Homeworld selling tech...
Re: Project Wanderers
I'm actually planning on giving them a normal homeworld. It's just that they can't really do much with it past building their starting fleet. If I can I might figure out how to do an event script for removing the homeworld and giving them a fleet to start.
Hmm... so part of this has already been done in Devnullmod? Cool. 
So event scripting is how to do pop growth? How do I set it up?
Re: Project Wanderers
Not sure what you mean...
--
Creator of Space Empires V Editor and DevnullMod
http://www.devnullsoftware.com/se5
Re: Project Wanderers
Nope, I didn't do that with any components that I know of... why would that be desirable to do?
--
Creator of Space Empires V Editor and DevnullMod
http://www.devnullsoftware.com/se5
Re: Project Wanderers
A Wanderer would make a great Gypsy race or even a monster race.
Re: Project Wanderers
I think the point he's going for witht this is that you said only 1 resource-producing component is effective on a ship. Having 2 Mineral producers is a waste, but if you had 2 seperate components that both produced minerals, would they both work?
I guess it would depend on if SEV was ignoring duplicate components or duplicate abilities.
Nick (bearclaw)
"You don't know the Power of the Dark Side. I must obey my Master"
Re: Project Wanderers
Yep.
2 days left until the project starts.
Re: Project Wanderers
The only problem I see with such a concept is that there is no way a wandering fleet can maintain an economy on the scale of a planet (or empire). Otherwise, why would anyone want to settle on something as vulnerable as a planet? A fleet with the resources (and maintenance costs) of an empire is silly once you think of it. Consider the desperation of the colonial fleet in Battlestar Galactica. It is a truly fun concept but it could wildly unbalance the game.
Re: Project Wanderers
I think the point he's going for witht this is that you said only 1 resource-producing component is effective on a ship. Having 2 Mineral producers is a waste, but if you had 2 seperate components that both produced minerals, would they both work?
I guess it would depend on if SEV was ignoring duplicate components or duplicate abilities.
Nick (bearclaw)
"You don't know the Power of the Dark Side. I must obey my Master"
I suspect the code isn't set up to keep looking for components that do stuff after it finds one.Re: Project Wanderers
Wouldn't it be much easier to set the amount that the component produce based upon the amount of that component on the ship/station? Like 100 x the amount of research stations on the ship (if each should produce 100). It would be bad if all component produces that much, but since only 1 actually does, it would end up with the correct amount.
Re: Project Wanderers
I would like to know how this is going. I'd love to have a wanderer race, and pirates too.
Re: Project Wanderers
I never actually started coding it.
Maybe later this week.
Re: Project Wanderers
Has this been figured out yet? Still watching this mod
Re: Project Wanderers
After re-thinking I realized that only production facilities needed to be crappified. That was pretty easy. Only seven items that actually needed to be cloned.
Note: always double check to make sure you spell the name of a racial trait correctly if you are using it as a requirement. That was annoying.
Woot! I've actually started finally!
Maybe a week or two from now I'll have a version worth releasing.
As a small adendum, is it possible to set the game to have certain races spawn with different facilities on HW?
Re: Project Wanderers
for the spelling of things double check everything, it doesnt try going for the closest match 
also im looking forward to the release, i wonder how the AI will handle it, as im guessing you wont be coding a decent one in just a few weeks 
_____________________
Grand Lord Exelsiar of the Azra-Dun Commonwealth, at your service
Re: Project Wanderers
Actually.... I do not anticipate AI issues to be significant. Unless you want the AI to play as a Wanderer race. Unless the AI is a wanderer, it will not be affected at all by mod changes. 
There are no main races that use the trait, so unless a minor race spawns with it as a random fluke, there will not be any races except user created races in the game with the trait.
Re: Project Wanderers
If you build it, they will come
Expect to see AI wanderers if you get a functional Wanderer trait. Someone will make them. Maybe even me. Depends. It's been awhile since I did anything regarding anything.
Re: Project Wanderers
That sounds cool.
anyways, question time!
1: how do you get a ship to look like a sphereworld? Is there a way to do it without creating a new ship model?
2: "cargo space requirements" How do I duplicate that type of restriction? Can I? I wanna give my new giant ships a requirement that the need to have a certain amount of space devoted to producing resources.
3: ship based resource production: how do I make it a function of ship-side population?
Re: Project Wanderers
I've got component-versions of most of the facilities in DevnullMod. They work...sort of. As long as the ship or base is orbiting an actual planet you own, then it will produce minerals, research points, etc. If you move out of that sector, it will no longer produce. In addition, no more than one instance of that component type per ship will function (so putting 2 research components on a ship will generate the same research as having 1).
This seems to be a hard-coded limitation of SE5 and I've tried a number of different ways of getting around this, to no avail. I've emailed Aaron about it, but there was no reply.
If you DO manage to figure out how to do this, I'd love to know...
--
Creator of Space Empires V Editor and DevnullMod
http://www.devnullsoftware.com/se5