Sector randomization

[Lord Dakier]

I played X-btf, X2 and X3:R but must say X2 is easily the best.

Most things in X3 are achievable or moddable in some way.

[reheat]

Originally Posted by Lord Dakier

The OOS is broken in TC and sucks in Reunion.

OOS?

Yes I have felt the disorientation from X3. The dislocated gates, as if an advanced civ would have gone to the expense to place gates behind asteroids outside the travel lanes. After all, gates are NOT for transportation....????LOL It like having your garage two blocks away from your home.

I did enjoy flying through one asteroid. once.

I'm still compiling my impressions for X3, and hope X3 TC has some better sense to it. I'm still admittedly so new, that spotting one facility over another by sight is impossible. None of the designs seem to hint as to their function. Kind of a shame in that respect. Not that I would expect that most people could discern a Xtal factory from a Laser Cannon facility, it just seems that some effort could have been expended to hint at some functionality with more than a neon sign floating around. At least in real life people can discern a tank farm from a chicken hatchery.

No cockpit? I have been trying to find the key that would bring it back....LOL. I thought it was my settings. I didn't find the external docking too onerous, as half the ships were too big anyway. At least they can dock. I do miss the internal bays for the small ships. Seems a waste to have the same dock for the fighter and large transport. I doubt that a theme such as that would work in real life. That said, an open bay dock, as opposed to those folded geometry mazes in X2, would make more sense. Even in X2, exiting the station was a simple key press, rather than re-flying the gauntlet that was needed to dock.

I thought the collision model was my fault. Didn't know there were bugs.

What is this 300ms limit? I haven't started scripting or anything as yet. I am still trying to play vanilla, but the temptation for scripts is growing. Perhaps I am approachng the game in the wrong way, to try to play default first. Many of the Mods look much better than the main story line seems to be, in many respects.

One of my old complaints about Freelancer, many years ago, was the "make work" that was injected into the game for no apparant reason, other than to make it last many more hours than it otherwise would have. It just seemed odd that a governmental agency would make pilots pay for their equipment, when most would never sell combat grade stuff to any civilian. Can you imagine an Air Force where the pilots had to buy their own aircraft, fuel and maintenance? I realize its a handy "tool" for setting game parameters, it never made any sense to me, in any socio-ecconomic context.

[Lord Dakier]

The Ai ships struggle to control ships over 300ms so as soon as I brought two Jaguar Raiders which have a speed of 586ms one was destroyed straight away and the other did not last a game day.

[AmadanLegre]

Originally Posted by Chris Gi

It's not a question of preferences - we are limited to the X2 scripting engine. And the scripting engine is not possible to register a script written in C++, VB, or any other commonly used language. The configuration tool is written in JAVA for portability reasons. X2 can run on a MAC, Windows or Linux computer!

If you had some scripting experience, I would be more than willing to burden you with stuff to code...

@Lord_Dakier:


This "Custom Starts" idea is about maps that are fully compatible with Pandora. "Fully compatible" means that these maps use all features of the Pandora system. I'm not yet sure what is needed for this. As I think of it now, such a map needs some adjustments as well as the scripts that build the universe. I have some ideas how to do this, but this is not a very urgent task at the moment.
But of course Pandora runs on every custom map - without some of the unique features. By changing those scripts, it may be possible to use the configuration system with any map.

From the discussion of your Khaak map idea in the Egosoft forum, I think you shouldn't bind this map to Pandora (or any other mod). Thus, everyone could use your map with his/her favourite mod.
From what I know of your ideas, Pandora seems to be the perfect mod though, because of the built-in race expansion scripts: the AI will colonize empty sectors.
But - as far as I understand what you want to do, this Khaak map needs some heavy scripting. This may break compatability with Pandora! The best thing to do is make a special version for Pandora. A Pandora version can be easily made once you have finished your map.

Now to your question:
You need a t-file with the following content to replace the name of Race 1:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<language id="44">
 <page id="1266" title="Racenames" descr="Strings for the races">
  <t id="15">Friendly Khaak</t>
 </page>
</language>

Save this in your t directory under the name 44XXXX.xml, with XXXX being a number not used by any other of your t-files (and don't use 1700ff, these are for Pandora ).

Next you need an init-script with the following line:

load text XXXX

with XXXX being the number you assigned to your t-file. The next time you load a save game or start a new game, Race 1 will be named "Friendly Khaak".

But this of course was the easy part. Now you need to get rid of those unfriendly Khaak! I'm not quite sure how to do this. You sure need to set Khaak aggression level to 0, but this won't eliminate the Khaak altogether.

To give you any more advice, I need to know more about your idea....

It has been almost a year since I touched anything x2-related. So gonna have to bare with em...

There's a galaxy creator in the script forum... can't recall name right now. I was messing with that to create random galaxies. I was changing the distribution of goods and adding khaak sectors. I also made them real small so they'd run fast on my system. It was real fun, but all of it was outside the x2 scripting system. Theoretically, the best you could do is have the user generate a random universe in hte program and automate all of the loading and saving. Then the user would start up x2 and make a new game... That's the easiest way I can imagine, but there's nothing out there presently that's this simple. But if you worked at it you could probably make it that simple.

Chris, good job on the random sector content! I got back just the other day. I got time on my hands too, but don't think I'll spend it in x2. Still, I think i'll look around. I still have my pse and sector administrator scripts. They work fine. I also made a menu script that has commands in it. You type things like "1.1" or "1.1.1" to access menu commands that're displayed in the message list. That's how i made some of hte pse commands - like hte one for removing sector administrator.

[Chris Gi]

Hey, nice to see you back, AmadanLegre

There's a galaxy creator in the script forum...

I guess you mean Orca's XUniverseWizard. Nice little program, that didn't get the regard it deserves .

I occasionally talked to Orca to get better support for mods. I'm looking forward to use this tool to generate maps suitable for Pandora. I will work on special Pandora versions of some files to make XUniverseWizard produce maps that use many of Pandora's features. (But this will be a future project, when Pandora is almost finished.)