A Homeworld Universe Mod - HWU v0.0.94 DL available

[adamstrange]

Thanks Chris.

The problem was that I have so many gamerules loaded that I didn't see the HW Universe game selection.

[chris80502]

HWU 0.0.1, this should be a crash free version. Vaygr, Hiigaran & Taiidan now show only correct research, Turanic shows none (I still need to add their research items). The Kadesh, Bentusi, Beast & Progenitor will probably still show the wrong research because I forgot to add their restrict items. The AI is the only real issue at the moment, no races are building shipyards in this version so the gameplay is quite limited.

http://www.mediafire.com/?hgtynmktn1j
http://www.mediafire.com/?z1ijt4jnczm

[Moleman]

hey guys a small update, i am almost done placing the new station in game and will have a video of an ingame fight in around 3 or 4 hours, as well i have settled on a story for the station, it is going to be called, Omega Station

Backstory: After reclaiming their homeworld from the taiidan empire, the Hiigaran's sent out expedition teams to map out the rest of the Homeworld Universe, one of these teams named, omega-21 ran through a nebula. Inside they found what is now called Omega Station, A rather large station that seemed to dwarf the mothership in size, Omega station contained signs of bentusi tech, combined with other unknown technolodgy. The station has the ability to build any ship of any known design, but for a rather more expensive cost. During the vaygr invasion of the Hiigaran Homeworld, this was one of the first stations Hiigara lost contact with, and it is belived to be a center point of vaygr re-enfocments.

here are several screen shot of the progress

this one a carrier has just moved through the station entrance and is passing under a sensor strut,



this one is a zoomed out veiw of the station, the small white ship is a hiigaran carrier

[Phatboygeo]

Thats a good idea. two words PLANET KILLERS. thats how they got them!!!!!!!!!!

[Moleman]

hey chris80502a, i am now testing the latest release of yours and was woundering if you could fix the credits, i am unsure if they are still set to the original UHF mod's credits or not, but either way i belive there are a few more people who need credit.

edit: as well i thought you said no races were building shipyards? well my hiigaran aponent now has Battlecrusier and 2 shipyards? please expain, as well there is a research for the taiidan destroyer that i am assuming unlocks it, well the ship is already unlocked as soon as the MS has a capital ship modual, the research is still there and appears to do nothing

[Elukka]

That looks awesome, but how about pathfinding? How do the ships fight among it, how do they move around?

[Moleman]

so far path finding is zippo, they simply fly right at it and pounce around the hull untill they get to an open area XP so its still a work in progress, as well, keep up the good work chris80502A, i just tested it and so far it is working very beutifully, infact tonight im gunna have a small multi-player test with several buddys to see how it goes(dont worry they will be using several of my computers so they cant keep the mod) i would like to see the kushan come into action soon however if this is possible, as well do you think we could get a new shipyard design? rather than the station for the taiidan?

[chris80502]

Moleman: Sorry, I thought I still had the AI a little screwed up, I thought Hiigarans should be working fully - I probably didn't give it enough time when I was testing, other teams should build upto destroyers. As for the credits, yes, I will be changing them soon, these releases are mostly for our forum users anyways. To that end I would say that anybody can keep the mod if they want, I would just prefer to make "full" releases on moddb, and keep these testers listed here, but always available to anyone who really wants to check out the progress, or lend a hand. I should probably put it into the thread title, and post the most current versions in the first thread as well. As for the research, I made it like that on purpose, when you unlock destroyer tech you unlock the research only. For UHF I was sick and tired of researching a ship design that I already did in the SP campaign, and over and over again - I don't think that's realistic, but I could see it more as just a improvement method for the ship so I left it in, it also helps keep the game balanced for ship strength as well as properly timing the AI races development.

As for adding the Kushan, I was going to wait until I had figured out the AI, but I might be able to just whip that out. I had some inspiration right after I posted this new mod version the other night and am working with those ideas on the AI right now, I know it'll work - just have to make it do what I want. I didn't note it in my last post, but as I was uploading the version I figured out something for the modified restrict.lua which now restricts the right ships and doesn't try to restrict the same ships for all the other players (which it can't do anyways). This always lead to a huge HW2.log of all the errors, though not problematic it did suck to go through to and look at why a crash happened when the HW2 log was a thousand lines long. Anyways I canceled the upload then and fixed it before the I sent it out again so if you have any issues please do post the log.

I'll be working with it more today and tomorrow and I'll post a new version asap, let me know when the station is ready and I'll put it in as well. I'll be interested to hear how the MP goes - FYI I had some hints that multiple cloak generators for the taiidan may cause a game crash or the HW1 & Cata converted backgrounds - I'm not sure about either. Would you mind taking some screens with the TO icons off, and note any larger issues so I can spend more time on working than play testing. I know a few already, and for the next release I will also add the Taiidan resourcer ships to both the Kadesh and Beast so they can be played as well. One other thing, I don't know if you've ever read the issues list from UHF 0.0.3 but you may want to check it out as there are some ships you can build but aren't of any worth, like the Taiidan Heavy Defender, doesn't have weapons along with a few of the Turanic corvettes and a few other ships, these ships aren't in classdef so the AI never builds these useless squadrons but I left them in so the user could view them if they wanted. If anyone wants to add the weapons with gun recoil to the Heavy Defender that would be helpful as well, it does need to fit both balance, style & effectiveness similar to HW1.

As for the shipyard for the Taiidan, I'm open to good ideas for a replacement, I not a modeler so I pretty much had to work with what was in Homeworld 1 & Cataclysm for ship models & other materials.

[Moleman]

well for now the shipyard should do, i was thinking of asking Talros if he might be able to do a HW1 style taiidan shipyard, as well i like what youve done with the mod so far, is it possible to get rid of that nasty little hyperspace gate that players start out with? We'll be testing it all night to see how it goes, i have designed a map that really pushes the engine to its max.

On the issue of my superstation, i have acheved the goal of keeping MOST ships from flying straight through the station, however some still do and there is little to no pathfinding still, i am now looking at the Tanis megalith's .ship file and will see if that might work, for some reason its bigger than one of my station segments but ships still avoid it XP

[Phatboygeo]

Just fiddle around with thier mothership!

[chris80502]

The gate, or some other ship has to stay, the way that the Mikails original mod works is: A mothership jumps in and a few seconds later the optioned ships jump in. The way my version works is the ms is replaced by the gate, so as to be non-team specific but it must be build capable and a ship must jump in otherwise the game will end because there are no teams that can build ships before the optioned ships jump in.

[Moleman]

:/ would it be possible to create a probe sized object instead, something small and that has a small purpose, because if you are vaygr you can use the gate as a relocateable gate, meaning rather than have it move to one position and stay there it can move again and again, which makes targeting gates like that rather difficult.

[chris80502]

We can make this starting ship whatever, I had suggested something small and probe like that can be easily destroyed. I would like to see a new model for this, The story about the ship could be like a hyperspace range expander, another leftover relic from the progenitors, it can be small but designed similar to their designs. I don't know if I ever posted a release like it but at first when I figured this out I had been using the derelict carrier as the jump ship but swtiched to the HS gate as it was a lot nicer to use a smaller ship - I'm open to any ideas.

[Moleman]

well ive done one multi player test and we found that there is a small problem, when you choose to do a one on one match on a larger map with say 4 players, the other two players that you designated to not be in the match appear in the center of the map, dunno why, as well dont know if this is a glitch but when an enemy carrier is captured you cannot use their research unlike my method, this make's building enemy ships very basic and in the case of trying to build an enemy vaygr ship you are limited to scouts and assault craft for any fighting capability what so ever, i am about to start a 4 player mathc though and will post all of the screens that we take.

[chris80502]

Once the AI is fixed captured targets will be more appealing and will be able to build most of whatever the other team could build. I figured that leaving alternate team research out was the best option, if you want to research that team, start with them. Otherwise you could build a whole Vaygr fleet which is too much of a bonus, only already researched items and build subsystems should be available. Like I said, once the AI is going better, or if you capture a mp players ship it should be a better bonus. I wouldn't mind seeing the idea of the unique ship research upon capture of enemy vessel though - as an additional bonus to capturing the ship.

[Quaetam]

I'm getting credit here for the cross-building/building from captured ships method I gave you, correct?

I am very interested to hear how disabling research from captured vessels giving you access to only the technology the opponent had at the time works however.

Also, I never got around to complimenting you on your station, Moleman. It's a great endeavor, and I wish you good luck .

[Moleman]

several of us are being credited for the entire system, but you will get your deserved credit do not worry, at the moment the access to technolodgy that they only had at the time doesnt seem to work you only get the basic that the team starts out with.

Thank you about the station, im still having some troubles with the station but it does seem to be performing alot better

[Quaetam]

I had nothing to do with capturing the technology they only had at the time, that was spawned by Chris's own ingenuity. I'm talking about the method to capture and build from captured ships using unified prefixes/buildfamilies I posted early in this thread.

I just asked because you haven't posted any credits in your OP so I wasn't sure if you had given credit yet. Thank you for recognizing my contribution .

Also, if you can't do the access to current technology only thing see the thread in the first link in my signature for a detailed tutorial on enabling cross-racial research. This would lead to you being able to build any ships of the race you captured, but keep in mind that you would still have normal unitcaps, so it won't be a complete unbalance. I've thought about creating a simple Hiigaran/Vagyr cross-racial build mod myself, and probably will do so in the near future.

If what I posted in that thread doesn't work, PM me and I will help you.

[Moleman]

actually i had already done the hiigaran/vaygr cross racial mod, its kinda what got us started on this idea path its awailable to test a few pages back.

[chris80502]

chris80502 - post 1 - of the Unified Hiigaran Fleet thread - 10-28-08

Hello again, though it is not like me to update two days in a row, after writing up the things I have been working on I was inspired to go back to my Special Teams edit of Mikails Special Fleets mod. After a little work, and a bunch of WTFs I have figured out both how to restrict ships & research, and figured out a way to add either team of the shared prefix without having to always have the primary team mothership jump in as well. Two problems remain, sending a global variable to restrict.lua so it knows which team version the player is selecting (so it knows which ships not to build per team so like: playing Kadesh, so restrict Taiidan ships or vice versa - where the Taiidan & Kadesh are coded as the same team to share the TDN_ prefix) & finding a work around for that random race position, thus it does appear that this will solve the race problem for good as it seems that you could add any number of races using this shared approach. Considering that the AI will build about anything you dump into it that it can it would appear that it will work as an AI opponent as well, too bad you can only play six at a time.

- chris80502 - 10-28-08

whisper2me - post 13, 7th Feb 09

The way to by-pass the new/old style ships dilema is easy if you ask me. At the start of the game, you have the option to build the old/new mothership which would determine which era of ships u can build. we now have the research restrictions technique which would make this possible.


Moleman2009 - post 14, 7th feb 09
yes that is an idea or another idea would be to make one single race for the entire game, and based or reasearch will determin which race you will go with so for example, you start out a vessel that has the ability to research only the origin Race so taiidan or kushan, form there the ships may build that research branche's mothership, then on research requirements are dependent on that mothership being there, if this is a little bit confusing tell me and ill try to clear it up

Moleman2009 - post 33, 9th feb 09
edit2: well so far my test mod has been working very well, i have managed to so far create one single unified build tree that branches off into its seperate races and next ill test out the research tree to see if i can manipulate that

edit3: well its been a long night and im exausted, however i am pleased to say that the idea of having a single ship allow you to choose your race is successful, the conditions are that every ship be under one single race and can be built up from there if woven right, you may choose one mothership and then the origin ship that you choose your mothership from dies almost imidiatly after the mothership you chose jumps in (still need to figure out how to auto kill a ship and how to make ships jump in >.< too tired at the moment though)

Moleman2009 - post 57, 10th Feb 09
hey guys small update but didnt want to keep my concept from people trying it out, so here it is so far only the hiigarans are working at the moment i have not devised a way to create research to work right but you should get the jist of what im doing

http://files.filefront.com/UNI+MODr...;/fileinfo.html

Quaetam - post 59, 10th Feb 09

The research is simple: Put it all in a single research tree. For example, have all of the Hiigaran Research require a "uni_hiigresearchmod". Have the Vagyr require a "uni_vagyrresearchmod". Have the Taii require a "uni_taiiresearchmod". This way the different races can only access their own trees unless they capture enemy ships. If you code the building right it should work the same way. A neat side effect is that all races can capture and build enemy races' ships from captured ships.

These are the most related posts to the topic, and I hope that this won't be a problem in the future as credit will be given to people that are due, but the way I think credit should go is.

chris80502 - Re-coding Mikails Special Fleets mod 1.21 to select which motherships jump into the game on entry to decide race. Creating the shared race prefix concept and prototype to allow 7+ chooseable races using multiple teams per actual race. Re-coding build capable ships to only build race specific families of ships & facilities. Coding scar.lua to restrict research and building per selected race - ideas drawn from Mikails scripts also.

Moleman2009 - The idea of a unified building tree and unified ship prefix for all teams. A prototype of the unified building idea. Ambition that sparked new ideas and features.

Quaetam - The idea of using the unified building tree to allow for building of ships from captured enemy ships.


Since the research portion is not finished the credit will be assigned once figured out. I would note that a combined research tree is the result of a combined build tree, not an idea for credit IMO, which is natural progression for that idea. Currently the research is restricted in restrict.lua on a per race and player basis using the script I created. I do hope that this is alright, I have tried to list all relevant posts.

Edit: One other thing, if the AI doesn't work this whole idea may have to be dumped. I still have not been able to find a way to send the right build variables to cpubuild.lua, without the ships being defined as their appropriate variable no research will happen and the demand values get all screwed up, it doesn't know what it's building because either it can't build the ships that are listed or the trials I have conducted have resulted in those lines not being read, causing a variable fault in the AI that is listed in the HW2.log. Though all these ships can be set to the Hiigaran versions and indeed are in the latest release the AI will only try to build the Hiigaran resource collectors - no matter what the ship can actually build. And though I could probably go around these variables in the AI and pull by the ships filename it would still require a variable to be passed from deathmatch.lua or restrict.lua to decide which names to use for building instead - so it's like a catch 22. It's been quite frustrating lately, I think Moleman put it best in a thread title, AIs Giving me a headache - it sure can.

[Quaetam]

Fair enough.

Again, PM me if you need help with the research.

[chris80502]

Quaetam, do you know anything about the AI?

[Quaetam]

Which aspect of AI programming are you referring to?

[chris80502]

The problem is relevant to all the files, but I'll go over it quick here:

In cpubuild.lua you define your ships ala: kCollector = HGN_RESOURCECOLLECTOR

If you leave all these values like this the game will play and it will build ships, no ships will gain any research except the ones defined as k(shipname), this also seems to be the case with building resource collectors - it will only build what is defined as k(shipname)

This effects all the races in regard to demand values and some building issues. The first variable that defines which race jumps in is listed in deathmatch.lua. What I need is a way to pass that variable back to cpubuild.lua, anytime I try to reference variables in the same manor as I did in restrict.lua results in a nil value error. Since I think deathmatch is the last script implemented I have tried adding dofilepath for both deathmatch.lua and restrict.lua with not much success to various AI files to try to reference the variables eaerlier. If a variable cannot be found to be sent back on a per race team the research will never work, so if we can figure it out it'll all be simple after this, as the passed back variable could decide which of the various subsystems of the AI get called instead of by race only.

I also tried to use a function that gives a player a unique name, but could not get that variable to pass back either (if that is an appropriate way to describe the problem).

[Quaetam]

So you're having trouble getting the AI to build from captured ships? Or is it trouble researching other races' techs.

I honestly have limited experience in AI, and can't do much besides the basic programming, so instead I'll point you to a good compilation of the tutorials that I used to learn about AI:

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...t=AI+scripting

http://www.moddb.com/games/homeworld...uild-new-ships

[chris80502]

No, it builds vessels of other races, it just can't apply research to them because they're not defined in cpubuild.lua, and that in turn throws the whole system off. What needs to be accomplished is sending a variable to cpubuild.lua to deterimine which ships are defined as k(shipname) on a per race name basis. I do know they have access to their research it just can't get applied to the right ships so it won't do it.

[Quaetam]

I'm no expert on AI scripting, but couldn't you combine all of the AI into a single AI script file, thereby unifying it as you did with the build/research scripts?

[chris80502]

That is a good idea I hadn't thought of, there doesn't seem to be a place in the AI files that actually calls deathmatch.lua I may have missed it but maybe I could incorporate all of the AI scripts into deathmatch.lua - that's an idea, thanks I'll give that a try later and let everyone know if it worked or not.

[chris80502]

I tried this combined AI script idea with no success. As I was thinking about the problem I realized a possible solution to the AI not building shipyards was the AIs inability to build resource collectors, hence it's inability to become "rich" and therefore be able to build shipyards. I gave the collectors to the other teams and now the AI seems to be fine, building Hiigaran collectors and every type of subsystem and ship type available to that team. There are still some issues in regards to balance and demand values but they should be easy to fix. The largest issue is there is still no research support for AI ships. This to me is no problem, eliminate the research items for the Hiigarans as well and concentrate more on the different fleets having different strengths. I can still remember the instructions from HW1: Taiidan ships have stronger armor on the front and top; issue move commands to .... you get my point. Just like HW2 some teams can have stronger armor and faster engines while others have stronger armor and less speed and the whole rest of the gambit of abilities that can be changed. We can always use the module system for armor strength upgrades or other such ideas.

On another front, I was taking a break earlier on the AI and decided to implement a carrier only mode, at the moment when enabled just the carrier and resource collectors jump in, I still need to restrict the shipyard building and add a second carrier to the starting fleet some how. Did HW1 just have one carrier at game start, could you get another one? Even with just one this could be a lot of fun in a MP game.

[Moleman]

AI is alway confusing to me so let me read this back to you shortyl

AI wont build from captured vessels is the first problem.
You found out why shipyards werent being built and fixed it?
wanting to impliment Teams Special Traits?
Implimentation of a carrier only mod?

Alright as for the AI if the only problem is that we cant get them to build and research from captured ship's perhaps it may be a "User" only feature? meaning its something the AI wont be able to do? This in turn would make cause for more Multiplayer-bility so that more people would play the mod and interact.

As for the "special traits" i rather like this idea, after seeing a taiidan heavy cruiser gewt owned in a 1v1 fight with a hiigaran Battlecruiser.

The carrier only settings for HW1 were 1 carrier at the start and that was it, you could not get another one, although another carrier sounds like it could be great fun.

On a side note some bugs from yesterday's Multi-player test:

• Serveral taiidan ships are either missing their engine trails, or missing parts of them.(dunno if this is a bug or just an incomplete .hod file)
• Several maps are missing LARGE chunks of the background (still probably a hod issue)
• Taiidan salvage corvettes, health was a major issue for us, even attack bombers had a hard time killing one of these, with 6000 health for 1 ship, could this be lowered possibly to 3000 or 2000? As well the Salvage corvettes mess up when salvaging a ship, instead of latching on to the hull of the ship they latch on sideways and burrow themselves into the hull makeing destroying the captured ship inpossible, this was a major problem for us resulting in extremely short matches because the taiidan player would salvage everything within the first 30 min XP.
• Several ship icon were out of place.
• Player slots that were set to close appeared in the center of the map with a mothership and a carrier.

[chris80502]

The AI will build from captured ships, to the cpu it has only received a carrier of it's own team and is only limited in what it can build by what is listed in classdef and what the families are defined as in the specific ships tuning.

Shipyards weren't being built because the AI didn't have enough RUs and couldn't build new resource collectors, I allowed the teams to build Hiigaran versions and now they progress along the AI alright.

I already implemented the carrier only option, it was as simple as not allowing the MS to jump in when the game starts, the option is listed just above where players change their race its tied to one conditional statement that when enabled blocks the MS from being added to the map of each team.

For the research, I myself am unsure if it will ever be workable. The AI works alright at the moment and I'll be working more on it soon. I'm not sure how much research you are thinking about, but atm the computer players of a MP match would be massively underpowered if only two people were playing and four cpu players were playing for example RL player has a Taiidan destroyer at 195k hp, CPU player has a Vaygr destroyer at 155k hp, and now the Taiidan player could upgrade their ship all the way to 325k hp. Of course I realize that a MP should be focused on the player and their options but if it's a blow out and your just battling one other friend it would be almost frustrating to swat those flys out of the way, I'm sure it would still be fun to battle RL players but I always find it more fun to fight the AI than close the slot. What I guess I'm saying is (and this is by no means final) research needs to be disabled completely so all the teams stay fairly balanced. I still have some faith that I can pull it off so it might still be alright. Another idea that was tossed around on the thread here was of subsystems for certain things, those the AI could and would build and could be used just like research. I think I remember seeing a mod that had a new class defined, I don't think it needs that much effort, but adding a few (6 or 8) new subsystem slots pership with a bunch of different types like resource drop effiecency upgrade, a little like complex but without the hassle (never liked having to micro-manage crew - the ships are the "people" you are playing with in Homeworld). I'm kind of going off on a tangent a little here but, I wouldn't mind seeing a little more resource management, for a long time I've had the idea of per ship RUs, which would force the creation of supply lines that would need escorts and guarded routes as well as add a little more strategy in what your going to build and the tactics you play. This could be great for a carrier vs where the carriers can only hold say 15k ea but your huge base - far away from the resources - can hold the rest. I know this all would be super hard, but it would be sweet.

Taiidan: Defense Fighter, Salvage Corvette, Resource Collector, Destroyers, Platforms and prox sensor all still need trails. The only ship that I think has any parts missing is the Heavy Corvette, less missing though than not placed right - it's also why I didn't do the icon for that ship yet. I think that's all of them and they are on my todo list.

I have the salvage corvette armor so low to begin with is because it's so cheap and fast, I think the only issue here is the ship burrowing issue, I have noticed it as well and the friendly ships cannot get past the hull mesh. In UHF 0.0.3 I had accidently left the squad size to 3 and when the corvettes when to steal the ship all three converged on the same latch point, a battlecruiser couldn't blow them up all in the one place . I will look into it though, the burrowing may have to do with the capture sequence animation stuff (specifically what determines capture height from target distance), I believe I just copied the marine frigate stuff.

Backgrounds are all in the conversion, I tried all the combos of various switches to no avail.

Ship icons we're still something I was working on there are quite a few that need to be done, many of the ones that aren't finished have visible changes that need to be made to the model/hod before I take the screen grab.

I never tried the mod in MP mode so it's good to know about this last bug, there is probably a way to script around that, should be no problem.

Of the 120 or so ships converted from HW1 & Cataclysm you'll probably find a bunch of unfinished things, I have been working steadily to reduce them and should have the bulk of work done before any formal releases as most of it is minor.

Edit: Sorry this reads like crap, I had a super long day.

Edit 2: Almost forgot, thanks much Moleman the testing and input - I'll get the Kushan and Somtaaw in tomorrow and see if I can't fix a few more of the major errors.

[Moleman]

red through it, perfect thing to wake up to, as to the crvette issue with the burrowing bug, i had this ability implimented on my beast evolution mod for the burrow drones, you need to increese the distance used for the capture beam , i cant remeber but i think its in either the .ship file or the .events file.

[chris80502]

Progress report: I have added the Kushan and Somtaaw teams to the mod and will probably put up the new work tomorrow.

Moleman, are we ready to see Omega station in the next upload? I probably won't upload until tomorrow evening, just let me know.

Whisper2me, I'm dying to see the finished 15th HQ, hows it going?

I had an idea today for these supermega structures, what if they were made to not be destroyable, so that they can be put up in parts and you won't have to worry about gaps. Then on the stations, sections can be modeled like a childrens book where one page has a house on it with a door that opens off the page and there is another picture behind it. So what I'm saying is make a subsystem of say a hangar, and underneath that subsystem, on the original model make a destroyed portion, and just do different types for stuff like the exampled hangar or whole sides being changed into battle damage. If these mega stations are reused ancient derelicts then it stands to reason that nobody has sufficient fire power or technology to destroy the station completely just a portion. The selection mesh for the destroyable bay or whatever could have it's invisible portion spread out much further onto the hull (maybe not much further), but this would have the effect of not having to hit the target in a narrow field but being able to destroy it by attacking those surrounding areas as well, like taking out a generator, power lines or converter a few decks below that can't be seen from the outside. All these subsystems would probably need to be placed in the one main hod. This could even do fine for multiple layers of subsystems for a far better effect. Another thought on the idea is to have a few sections of the same docking bay, like the top and half of the right side are one subsystem so that portion of the bay can get blown away first or second or whenever it takes enough damage again revealing the more derelict look of the station. Multiple chunks and multiple hidden looks sounds pretty cool to me. Can subsystems be on auto-rebuild or just damagable?

One last thing, does anyone have any ideas for a Taiidan superstation?

[Moleman]

the superstation is not ready yet, im still having a load of path finding problems with it, as for ideas about the taiidan superstation, look at the cinamatics from HW and HWc in the HW cinamatics there are several imperial taiidan stations and in HWc there is a republican taiidan station

[Starscream]

It would be nice if some1 could upload a pic with those. I don't have cataclysm and i can't find HW disks

[Moleman]

check the link in chris80502a's signature, it is a link to the moddb page of the UHF mod, there are many screenshots there

as well i put the megastation on pause for a couple of days because it was frustrating me.

At the moment however i am creating a shipyard add on that would enable the building of larger class ships bigger than the the hiigaran Battlecruiser, ships that are are taller rather than flat and wide, as well however the user would have to sacrifice the ability to use the engines in order to create the subsystem (sort of liek diverting power) but the station would still utilize the ability to Jump using the hyperspace modual. However in order to do this i would need to move the resource drop off points or make new ones, i was hoping to do this and make them on the bottom while giving the station 2 more slots.

What im hoping to accomplish:

*Create A large expansion Modual
*Disable Engines after building this modual
*Remove the 2 old Resource points and add 4 new ones to the bottom of the original Station.
*Make the addon Require the station's Capital Ship modual to be built.
*Create several new class's of ships(about 3) to be designed for this new modual
*Impliment Resource generation
*Create an animation for Bay doors.

[chris80502]

I had an idea about having to use the same resource collector for all teams. A new type should be created that all teams can use and the story could be that these ships are part of a trade consortium that will work for all alien races. The player plays the game the same and builds the consortium or regular collectors the AI will always build the consortium type. Anyone have any thoughts on an idea/design/model for this position?

Moleman, I like the idea you have on the model showroom that it will probably be just another ship - a factory ship or whatever.

[Moleman]

well for starters for the universal resource collector, it would have to be thin enough to go through the vaygr resource bays on the vaygr shipyard and the MS, may i also inquire as to why we need a universal collector? is ti issues with the AI?

[chris80502]

Yeah, it is the AI, unless I can figure out a better arrangement, the AI will build any other ships that are in classdef, but not collectors, they only build the ones specified in cpubuild.lua. I have a few ideas to fix that but have not had the time yet. Moleman, can you send me a nice screen of the station soon, I am putting up the moddb site and I'd like to have it on the nebula background for the banner.

A nice 3/4 angled shot, thanks.

[Quaetam]

@ Chris: If you use the unified build tree/prefix concept, simply make the universal resource collector its own buildfamily and allow ships of all races to build that buildfamily.

[chris80502]

Quaetam: I understand what your saying, but I don't understand how it could fix the problem. I might not be understanding you correctly. The issue is the AI will only build resource collectors listed as kCollector in cpubuild.lua, since I have no way to define these variables per race added (since it's over six) the AI reads just the one the original Hiigaran variables. Cpuresource.lua I believe is the culprit and will only work in it's default configuration with the variable specified in cpubuild.lua. Though there may be a way around that as well, almost any solution to tell cpuresearch what collector you have hasn't worked for me it's the same problem with intereacting with other parts of AI from the game mode.

[Siber]

Perhaps you could assign each race a specific, useless but effectively indestructible beacon, and have the script decide which set of kShip values to use by checking for those ships? I think that through proper use of classdef.lua that might be possible, but I couldn't swear it.

[chris80502]

Siber, I think you might be onto something here, I was toying with the getnumsquadrons feature a little but I had only thought of it in regards to which resource collector the computer is using. Thanks much, I'm going to give it a try now.

So far I tried a conditional statement in cpubuild.lua and added the same one to default.lua - both statements were fine and the game runs, but the answer to the question is no so no kvalues are assigned and the ships just collect resources and don't do anything else. I'm adding the same code to the only portion of the code that would seem to be read all the time, the main function of the deathmatch.lua script. We shall see how that goes, I'll post the code in a bit if I can't get it.

Okay, that didn't work either. One last thing to try, allow cpubuild.lua to assign kvariables while leaving in the other code portions to try to change the variables later, maybe the game AI has to have a them assigned but they can be changed later. I have tried getting that to work before, also with little luck.

I may have something else wrong, this time I set the if statement to have an else parameter and assigned another set of kvariables, one of these two must get assigned from this setup.

On another front the moddb site is finally awaiting authorization, sorry it took me so long. I'll post screens when it's ready to showcase the models and stuff from the mod thus far.

[Moleman]

very nice on the moddb page chris80502a, also i just took another look at your webpage with the concept arts on it, the one called a Megalithic Repair Facility is actually a sort of gantry docking clamp for the pride of hiigara, it was suppoesed to be used on the tanis structure.

edit: since i currently have access to the moddb page, would you mind me putting in some in game screen's and such as well as model concept images.

On another note, i have determined that i can not get my ships textured without utterly ruining them, so if we can find some one that is skilled at texturing that would be great, as for now i am going to put them in game with a small base coat so we can get all of the technical stuff taken care of.

Currently The factory ship is complete, except for textures and being put in game, the hiigaran prototype dreadnaught that i mentioned earlier is also being made right now so i can get that in and see how its going to work out. After words, i will start work on a Hiigaran light cruiser, the seige cruiser, and the super carrier.

[chris80502]

Moleman, post the newest version of the work and I will give one chunk a try on the outside, I can post a screen to see what you think. I can also use photoshop to give it a good look and add it to the preview icon graphic. Go ahead and put up some screens on moddb, I'll post another one or two a little later. There is quite a bit work I'd like to show off so I'm going to limit all screens to one or two shots max per subject myself and would appreciate if you would do the same. I'll post a shot of all the proposed Tobari ships in one image, another will be a shot of the race changer with some picture in picture of the formation jumping in. I also have an idea that I think will clearly show the building from caputred ships as well. One other thing about screens, since this is a fresh mod, I'd like to try to keep all the screens as you proposed without any of the UI showing - also without TO icons showing or health barss or any other of the in-game information lines unless necessary to the idea of the image.

I will post a few more relevant links today as I get them prepared and also mole, what did you think of starscreams version of the Hiigaran dreadnaught, I think it's pretty good - needs a few changes. The seige cruiser sounds cool, whats the concept on that - just a super battle ready carrier?

One last thing, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been with us on the project so far. A lot has been accomplished in such a little amount of time, so thanks again to everyone for all the comments, testing, ideas & concepts, models, textures, and all the other hard work.

[Moleman]

i have not seen his version fo the hiigaran dreadnaught, although i have seen several so i mght ahve do you ahve a screen shot/

[chris80502]

Post 720 of the model showroom, 2nd ship.

[Moleman]

i just took a look at it and that one looks great however it would ahve to be shrunk down to fit out of the Factory's launch bay, it can only be as wide as a Hiigaran battlecruiser(without the control tower on the side) and about as tall as a vaygr battlecruiser, would this work?

[chris80502]

I don't think the scale is set yet.

Starscream, would you mind sending the Hiigaran Dreadnaught model to moleman so he can check it out and mess with the scale.

I'll also post up a new concept page tonight if I have the chance with the Taiidan super station screen grabs.

[Starscream]

of course i will. But i wouldn't say that the ship "is" a hiigaran dreadnougth. I just modeled it influenced by that concept. Anyway i am sending you moleman the model.feel free to edit it as much as you want