Warp Drive Concept |
Go ahead and shoot holes in this idea for Star Trek style warp drives in SE5 if you think it won't work, but I think it's pretty nifty... 
The basic premise is, you make the outermost 2 or so rings of hexes in each system the "warp zone" and mark them with special storms in each sector so the player knows where they are. Any ship which ends its turn in a "warp storm" sector will then be checked by a script which goes something like this:
Does ship have warp engine ability? (use an AI tag for that) If not, teleport the ship back to the edge the regular non-warp system area.
Does ship have enough supplies to do a warp? If not, teleport the ship back.
Find "nearest" system (if any) in some sort of wedge extending along the axis from the center of the current system to the ship. This wedge should have a radius equal to the total AI tag value for the ship's warp engines (so a ship with 12 warp ability could warp up to 12 light years at a time, assuming no intervening systems). As for the width of the wedge, it could start narrow and gradually expand until a system is found or a predefined angle (say, 90 degrees, or perhaps something defined by the ship's maneuverability, which could be another AI tag perhaps?) is reached.
Was a system found? If not, teleport the ship back. If so, teleport the ship to the edge of the system found, just inside the warp zone, and reduce supplies by the desired amount! 
Thoughts?
Re: Warp Drive Concept
It's an interesting idea, but you'd need extremely dedicated players who are willing to put up with its quirks.
* SE5's built-in pathfinder would not know about the "warp zone", so you'd lose most or all of your automated movement functions. Waypoints and orders such as "resupply at nearest" would fail to work correctly because SE5 wouldn't know how to use the warp drives.
* In many cases it would be difficult to determine where you should move your ship in order to warp to a particular system. For example, if there's another system very close to your intended destination then you could easily wind up in the wrong place if you didn't judge the angles correctly. The perfectionists would be forced to manually calculate the angles so they don't end up in the wrong place.
Multiply those two annoyances by several dozen ships per turn.
Re: Warp Drive Concept
I had this idea too but i was thinking of teleporting ships the a limbo system or the center of your star for x turns. And as both have typed before it could turn into a pain. But for the perfectionists thats what a scout ship was designed for. Also you can have a range to see if the ship has the supplies to last that long in the warp (lol 40k bleed) or if the warp drive can handle that much energy usage.
say have AI tag 01 be the warp drive component.
ability 1 be the multiplier
ability 2 be the max range.
then have the supply cost be 1 times 2 plus x... That way you can have 2 different drives designed for different ranges. I.E. one designed for short range and have a low multiplier and one for long range with a larger multiplier. lol you need to decide in the design if its doing large jumps or small ones.
if you do this system can you give me a shout i think i wanna try it to...
Re: Warp Drive Concept
Yeah Roger's right. You could simulate this (sort of) though. 
Warp points don't need to have a hex size of 1. Thus having the warp near the edge of the system would simulate having a "warp zone". ships would exit at the center of the other end but that's not really a problem.
Re: Warp Drive Concept
Would it be possible to increase the size of the system, giving more hexes to play in before reaching those "warp zones", and have engines that are sensitive to distance from the centre of the system. Say, impulse engines that only provide 1 movement once you're 10 hexes from the centre and warp engines that don't drop off once you're out of the system. That might be a way to simulate interstellar space and, coupled with the oversized warp points suggested my marhawkman, might be a pretty dandy way to create a kind of warp drive.
I'm not sure how possible something like that is though...
Re: Warp Drive Concept
yes in my mod i have system twice as large/small... anyway you change the hex sizes from 20 to 10 and double the max system size. then you have to go in and change all the xfiles and make all planets,stars etc to half size and presto... its the only way to fit it all in. I'm just hopping this goes through as i know almost everything about modding but i couldn't script myself out of a paper bag. lol
However the slower moving, as far as i can tell, no. through scripts yes but there not executed in turns, only in turn prossesing...
Re: Warp Drive Concept
In case you're wondering what happened to this idea, I ran into a bit of a snag - there doesn't seem to be any way via script to get the abilities of a ship! 
Sure, I could check for the warp drive component on the ship's design, and figure out if the warp drive is damaged beyond use by checking its HP vs max HP, and comparing that to the value out of Settings.txt determining when components are disabled... but that doesn't quite seem all that worthwhile to me...
~~~
The floating Eee zaps you with an anti-proton beam! You are paralyzed! --more--
Seriously that's what we need, a Space Empires themed roguelike!
Re: Warp Drive Concept
would that not be a case of designing the component via the script. If you can check for the name of a component then you can put the values into the script itself. For levels have it check for your tech level in "warp drive". Then you can just name the variants.
The scripts in GG mod ran into the same problem... however he named the factories and the script ran fine after hand. Anyway im going to go back to playing that roguelike...
Re: Warp Drive Concept
You could make only one giant "system" like in GalCiv. And if the stars/planets can't be accurately placed, you could make each "planet" to simulate a star system, a bit like in SotS.
Re: Warp Drive Concept
I had fun with that in seiv using cluster systems how ever the problem lies in the zooming and paning. if every thing was on the one map it might become a pain to move about.
Re: Warp Drive Concept
No kidding... And people with nebula issues? displaying several solarsystems at once will make it lag like crazy...
Re: Warp Drive Concept
ahh come on, it wouldnt be a problem in a sequential game since u dont have to switch systems.
Or better yet, how about 4 very very big "Quadrants" with 2 wp, one to the quadrant either up or down, and to the right or left.
_____ _____ _____
|__2__|-----|__1__|
***|***********|
***|***Map*****|
*__|__*_____*__|__
|__3__|-----|__4__|
Re: Warp Drive Concept
check out http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/5888 for an ongoing discussion on a possible Star Trek mod.
Re: Warp Drive Concept
I wish tehre was a Star Trek mod. I would love to make one but i hate working alone. If anyone is interested, let me know.