!! Pioneer Question Time !! - Ask them here

[s2odan]

Quote:
How to add military engine etc. I think I can work out but I really don't know how to add more 'power' to ship?
Hi , Brianetta already told you this, but I'll repeat: The real only way to give yourself a super ship is to equip it with a large plasma accelerator as a main drive. It will use no fuel and will have a power magnitudes larger than any class 9 drive. There are two ways you can do this:1. Hack your savegame,2. Hack the source to start you in a ship with that drive.Possibly 3.. Might be able to use the lua console to equip one to the ship, although that might not work as it may be restricted by the fact that its not a hyperdrive.So your large plasma accelerator will have an equivalent power to a class 100 hyperdrive !You can fly anywhere with it! ;)This is the minimal effort way, you can edit drive powers or add in new drives like Fluffyfreak mentioned, and thats probably the best way but its quite fun using a giant weapon as the hyperdrive

[s2odan]

Oops duplicate post

[Przemyslav]

flufflyfreak wrote:
If you like I can do this when I next have access to one of my own PC's and I can create a branch that you can look at/get with all of the changes done but that won't be until um... almost midnight tonight when I get home from working in London Andy
I would very appreciate that, not because I am lazy, but mostly because I am not much into programming and compiling thing, so I can create a nasty blackhole instead of debug ship (however I could try, if I had to)s2odan, what you write is very interesting but it seems far beyond my understanding. I am not that good, unfortunately

[durandal]

pienums.lua is gone (FINALLY)

[Brianetta]

Geraldine wrote:
If I understand this correctly, LRCs and the Lynx could possibly use something like "stutter drives"
Chain drives, they were called. They were only class 1!
Quote:
There is a problem with this though. How would such a ship be able to reach a star system, if despite getting as close as it could to it in a neighbouring star system, the distance was still greater than the ships range? In effect, it could not lock on to that star system to plot a jump. A way around this problem could be to introduce the possibility to plot "intra hyperspace jumps" deep within the interstellar space between star systems. This would allow the ship to reach not only the edge of the galaxy, but go beyond the rim too.
The key here is a large crew, including a map room full of experienced navigators.
Quote:
Another thing, servicing requirements. Perhaps the larger the class of drive used, the less it needs servicing because they are larger and more sturdily built. Smaller drives would need more servicing because they must work that much harder to do jumps. Military drives should require the shortest servicing intervals because of their high performance.
Again, large crew. Surely a ship that size can carry a few engineers and spare parts? Certainly everything that a space station might have handy.

[fluffyfreak]

Przemyslav wrote:


flufflyfreak wrote:
If you like I can do this when I next have access to one of my own PC's and I can create a branch that you can look at/get with all of the changes done but that won't be until um... almost midnight tonight when I get home from working in London Andy
I would very appreciate that, not because I am lazy, but mostly because I am not much into programming and compiling thing, so I can create a nasty blackhole instead of debug ship (however I could try, if I had to)s2odan, what you write is very interesting but it seems far beyond my understanding. I am not that good, unfortunately
I'll give it a go just got home, unfortunately bumped into my old boss and had a bottle of wine.. each, so lets see when I next post

[fluffyfreak]

durandal wrote:
pienums.lua is gone (FINALLY)
Does that mean they're automatically reflected somewhere so still accessible via Lua or are they just _gone_ completely?

[robn]

fluffyfreak wrote:


durandal wrote:
pienums.lua is gone (FINALLY)
Does that mean they're automatically reflected somewhere so still accessible via Lua or are they just _gone_ completely?
From alpha 16 (and in the current nightlies) models use EquipType strings instead of raw numbers.

[Przemyslav]

fluffyfreak wrote:
I'll give it a go just got home, unfortunately bumped into my old boss and had a bottle of wine.. each, so lets see when I next post
Thank you soooooo much

[fluffyfreak]

robn wrote:
From alpha 16 (and in the current nightlies) models use EquipType strings instead of raw numbers.
Ah yes I see what you've done Ok that's easy enough to work around.I've just done the engine masses as a simple sequence expansion so they'll probably want tweaking if we ever wanted to have military drives up to Class 9 within the game proper. Prices would also need some serious attention.

[fluffyfreak]

Przemyslav wrote:


fluffyfreak wrote:
I'll give it a go just got home, unfortunately bumped into my old boss and had a bottle of wine.. each, so lets see when I next post
Thank you soooooo much
Okay my actual commit changelist is here:[url]https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/commit/01d4ea618ab94ecf900bebc184e480198e0a7f76[/url] based off the latest master I could get so you could try compiling it yourself, otherwise you'll have to wait for it to be accepted into the master branch (IF it gets accepted) and then for another nightly build to be done.This is more to the other devs: when you guys have built a specific nightly based version for people to test etc where do you upload it?Andy

[s2odan]

Code:
Lang::DRIVE_MIL9,0,+ Equip::SLOT_ENGINE, -1, {Equip::MILITARY_FUEL},+ 21400000, 285, 9, 0, 0, 0+ }
Hey, you see this: {Equip::MILITARY_FUEL} ? Thats its fuel requirement, if you want to cheat like a mother... just remove that Also you see this number : 285, 9, 285 is the mass, but 9 is the power... With fuel use removed you might as well ramp this number up to 100 or 1000...However upping power and leaving the fuel requirement intact will drastically increase its fuel use.... But doing this and removing fuel use will give you an insanely powerful drive :)Anyway I thought I would mention that as I thought you were actually looking to cheat and not just expand the available drives

[fluffyfreak]

s2odan wrote:
Anyway I thought I would mention that as I thought you were actually looking to cheat and not just expand the available drives
Hah, no cheating would be on way of doing it but have you actually put a Class 9 Mil drive into a ship it's _amazing_ it pretty much is cheating once you have one of those! I never understood why there wasn't parity between the normal drives and the Military spec' ones except that I assumed the Military forces get them secret for their own mythical warships.However I actually wanted to expand the drives available to players.In the future it might also be nice to offer tune-ups or replacement in-system drives too so that you could improve the thrust say of the standard Eagle you have inherited rather than being forced to replace it with another ship...So many ideas, so little time. I suppose my contract does end in 2 weeks, though I am hoping I'll have something else lined up by then!

[Brianetta]

The Frontier manual had it that the military had access to more advanced drives, but that they hadn't been released into the public arena; civilian attempts to produce a class 4 military drive hadn't yet produced a safe and stable drive system.I'm happy to see these drives exist, but I think that the in-game fiction should hold onto the poor availability. Perhaps only through a military mission, or a really high-end civilian mission, could such a drive come your way.Right now, of course, there are no practical limits on what's available for general sale. Before release, though, there should be a mechanism for limiting availability of goods, equipment and ships by faction, tech level, licensing, compatibility or even arbitrary per-station settings.

[Przemyslav]

I could use some advice, fluffyfreak - I have been trying with DevCpp and NMake but it is beyond my understanding and to be honest, after few hours am still where I started which means I don't know where to start...I have downloaded your source and also the newest one of clean Pioneer.I am using Windows.

[fluffyfreak]

If you're using windows then download Visual Studio Express it's free. There's already projects and solutions for 2008 and 2010.I haven't been using anything else on Windows as I figured most people would just use VS Express as I didn't think DevCpp was still under development or being supported!

[Przemyslav]

Thank you for your kind support. I am downloading now the 2010 version. We'll see what happens

[fluffyfreak]

Hmm, I'm still trying to figure out Git/Github. I'd like to just give you the link to my NewMilDrives branch of my repository but can't see an easy way of doing it.I suppose you could just go to my repo and download the zip/tar straight from that branch, unzip it too a folder and give that a go.You should be able to find within the Pioneer folder there should be this path:\pioneer\win32\vc2010\and the file: "pioneer.sln"That's the solution which visual studio uses and the ".vcxproj" files are the various projects that it contains for the modelviewer and Pioneer itself.

[fluffyfreak]

Right, things you'll probably encounter as issues and one way of solving them for now.I'm just going to type all of this out but if you need a video or pictures erm... I'll think of something! :)Building the solution:Open the vs2010 "pioneer.sln" with Visual Studio Express. At the top, in the middle, there should be two dropdown boxes. One of these will have "Debug", "PreRelease" and "Release" - choose "Release".Then in the "Solution Explorer" (left hand side) right-click on the line which says something like "Solution 'pioneer' (3 projects)" and choose to "Build Solution".It should also say next to that what the shortcut key is, probably F7 or F5, so you can just press that in future.If there are any errors, errors not warnings, shown in the output or error list windows along the bottom of the screen. Don't be put off if there are it's probably just some setup that will need tweaking.Running Pionner from VS2010:This always catches me out and I need to find a proper way of fixing it. The game _won't_ run at first.There's a couple of things you need to setup so that it tries to run from the correct place and so it can find the dll's etc.First go into "/pioneer/win32/libs/" and copy all of the dll's into the "/pioneer/" folder.This is also the folder we're going to tell Pioneer to run from now.1) go back to the "Solution Explorer" and right-click on the "pioneer" project.2) choose "Set as Startup Project" - this means it's the one we'll be debugging.3) right-click on the "pioneer" project again, this time choose "properties" - it's near the bottom.4) under the "Configuration Properties" choose the "Debugging" panel.5) You need to change the "Working Directory" to read "$(ProjectDir)..\..\"6) Apply and then Ok the changes.Assuming that everything compiled ok you should now be ready to run the Release version.Go to the "Debug" menu and choose "Start Debugging", it should launch the game, it might complain about not having symbols or some other shit but just ok that and if the stars are correctly aligned the game should run.I'm looking into building and uploading a built version for you somewhere with properly cheating engines but getting another person compiling this thing is invaluable too!

[Przemyslav]

Thank you for your in-depth tutorial :)It helped me, although I had to use VC2008 version - I forgot that I have some software that are not compatible with SP3 which is needed for 2010 to run.Building gone pretty well I will now hack this drive to use no fuel and have 1t mass and enormous power I think I will upload some screenshots later from the far side of the galaxy :DThank you again I wish all games had such support from dev's.