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What things would people most like to be able to mod with Tarr Chronicles/Dark Horizon?

Hi StucukSome new ships and the ability to build your own missions would be nice. Total conversions would be good too, but I've seen in the past with other mods that it can be a legal mine field eg BSG mods

As long as what you make doesn't hurt them financially (I.E re-making a game which is currently being sold in another engine) and you don't charge for a mod then most companies won't care.

Can TC or DH even be modding Stucuk? I didn't think they could and never really see any mods come out on moddb or anything like that so I gave up looking.

Not currently, which is why i asked what people would like to be able to mod. The main thing blocking people from modding is that the LUA scripts are compiled, which is an easy issue to solve.

First things first...Full joystick support.

kev11106 wrote:
First things first...Full joystick support.
I don't have a joystick, but i think that you may be able to mod support for extra buttons/etc in the lua side. From the looks of things all keyboard/joystick events are sent to LUA.

The only thing that ever held Tarr back was the lack of full(rudder+throttle)joystick support. I'd do it myself but I don't have the skills. If it takes an open source project to make it happen, so be it. Might be a good idea, I'm crashing repeatedly now after installing the mod pack and it's never crashed on me before.

Did you compile the scripts in the mod pack? If not then it can't effect the game (Unless you overwrote the data folder with the source from the mod pack). What is the error message that you are getting?

I didn't compile the scripts. I'm kind of a noob that way. I figured they worked because the detail I'm getting now is amazing. I'll do so now. And, of course, after trying repeatedly to get that error message, it's not happening. I just keep dying(happens to be the chapter I've been stuck on for years - space trap)

There is a design fault with Tarr Chronicles and Dark Horizon's Missions. Based on how the LUA code is written for certain missions you can get crashes if you destroy something which you are meant to destroy at a later part of that mission as the scripts never check to see if the object they are trying to do something to/with actually exist before they try and do something with it. I have in the past fixed some of the missions which people reported to have such a problem but there are still proberly missions which will crash if you don't follow your objectives to the letter.So it may be one of those errors. Its less likely to be a bug with the actual engine, i crushed all of the engine bugs that i know of which crashed the game(The one which happened when a station in a cutscene blew up was the most obvious one).P.S TC/DH have got cheats btw . GodMode is nice for getting past levels you die at.

Modding capabilities have changed. 1.0.6.2 (Which should be out either at the end of Jan or early Feb) now has basic mod support. What that means is that if you put files into a mods directory the game "should" use them instead, but its impossible to tell if everything is modable without trying everything. There are currently "limitations" to the mod system such as the profiles being saved in the normal location and loaded from the normal location.Plugins are loaded from both the Games plugin directory as well as the current mod's. There is no way to enable/disable plugins currently.My Example Mod:P.S I fixed Unicode Support, so Russian can now be viewed on systems which don't use Russian ASCII. I don't speak Russian, just havn't switched back to english yet. While its not currently possible to add new languages, it will mean that in the future when you can, languages which require unicode will be viewable to all(As long as the font supports that language).

I have always liked the large sectors in Tarr Chronicles, could there be a way to just make random missions to complete in sectors or make it that you could 'jump' to other sectors. I know TC is scripted and this sort of thing would be difficult. Just a shame that TC's universe looks great and you can't always explorer it

DarkOne wrote:
I have always liked the large sectors in Tarr Chronicles, could there be a way to just make random missions to complete in sectors or make it that you could 'jump' to other sectors. I know TC is scripted and this sort of thing would be difficult. Just a shame that TC's universe looks great and you can't always explorer it
The "missions" in Tarr Chronicles are controled by LUA so you could make your own random quest system in LUA. To do a "jump" in a basic way would be easy, just need to call LoadScene() and tell it which "System" you want it to load(I havn't tried but from what i can tell that is the LUA command which loads the systems). Originally Quazar were making Enosta: Discovery Beyond which looks like it was going to be more like Freelancer/X Series type of games rather than a linear shooter. Enosta was cancelled and it was made into Tarr Chronicles. Tarr Chronicles (And Dark Horizon, though Tarr may have more legacy code) still has some Enosta code in its LUA though its never used or commented out. For example there is LUA code for docking at stations, a quest system, System Map(Very basic, was never completed), Skill System and more. I have no clue if any of the left over code still works other than the System Map. You have to modify code lua to see the system map and 99% of "missions" never register any ships with the map, so all you see is the player ship. There are also no backgrounds for the "missions" so you see a checker board texture instead.System Map:

Heard dialogue today that I've never heard before with 2 min. on the clock. Getting closer...

Thanks for that info Stucuk, I didn't even know about that original project that Quazar was working on.I definitely need more time on my hands to dive into that LUA scripting to see what I can come up with. I take it that if I downloaded that mod pack that I would have the files needed to edit TC? I think I remember you stating that I can use the un-compiled files in the game but loading may be slower but it would still work?I noticed most of the comments are non-readable to me are they all in Russian?

DarkOne wrote:
I take it that if I downloaded that mod pack that I would have the files needed to edit TC?
Yes. Though nothing to create new models (*.cm).
DarkOne wrote:
I think I remember you stating that I can use the un-compiled files in the game but loading may be slower but it would still work?
An application called Luapac.exe is included. It will compile the source directory and place the compiled files in both your data and compiled folders (It creates the compiled folder). So once you have made your changes, run luapac.exe and it will compile your scripts and put them in the correct directory. You can however just copy files from the source folder directly into your data folder and edit them without ever compiling, but that may mean slower performance.
DarkOne wrote:
I noticed most of the comments are non-readable to me are they all in Russian?
Yes. You would need to use a Text Editor (I.E Notepad++) which supports changing the encoding to view them properly. In Notepad++ you can change the encoding to Russian by going to Encoding->Character Sets->Cyrillic->Windows-1251. Google's Translate is generally decent enough to work out what the Russian text means.

Can anything be done about the a.i.?

...and Bob's your uncle.General InfoApplication : tarrVersion : 1.0.6.0ErrorText : engine_Execute error: ýëåìåíòàobj.mission3_2tau.events.onDestroyed íå ñóùåñòâóåòParams : ParamCount : 0LUA DebugDebug 2 : Source: setHook("->onEndTime->events->time_condition67421123->effects->Scene->obj->_G",destroyObj("mission3_2tau")); destroyObj("mission3_2tau"); emptyHook(); : What: main : NameWhat: : LineDefined: 0 : CurrentLine: 1 Debug 1 : Source: @data\scripts\funcs\obj_funcs.lua : What: Lua : Name: destroyObj : NameWhat: global : LineDefined: 10 : CurrentLine: 11 Debug 0 : Source: =[C] : What: C : Name: engine_Execute : NameWhat: global : LineDefined: -1 : CurrentLine: -1 Windows InfoProduct : Windows XP ProfessionalWin32MajorVersion : 5Win32MinorVersion : 1BuildNumber : 2600ServicePack : Service Pack 3ServicePackMajor : 3ServicePackMinor : 0Hardware InfoPhysical Memory : 2048MBCPU Name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.93GHzCPU Clock : 2133Mhz"Actual" CPU Speed : 2133MhzVideoCard : NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250Resolution : 1840x1036

The error means that the object passed to engine_execute does not exist(Well that there is no object by that name). By the looks of it mission3_2tau is one of 3 allies which if they die causes you to fail the mission. I can't however see anything in the LUA code which would cause an error. Could you upload your profile somewhere and give me a link to it? (When put in a rar they go down from like 37MB to 1.2MB)All the code i can see that relates to mission3_2tau:
Code:
loc.tau={"mission3_1tau","mission3_2tau","mission3_3tau"}----------------------------------------------------------------------------loc.TauOnDestroy=function()----------------------------------------------------------------------------loc.tauKillCounter=loc.tauKillCounter+1; if loc.tauKillCounter==1 then loc.timer(5,'ingame.MissionFailed()') endend----------------------------------------------------------------------------loc.tau_move=function()----------------------------------------------------------------------------for i=1,3 do loc.timer(i,'loc.tau_Create('..i..')'); end loc.tau_Create=function(i)CreateObj({class=loc.tau,id=loc.tau,fraction="ally_tau_m3",location="mission3_2part",-- parent_ship_name="mission3_2dht_bender",-- helper_name="hangar_m1",max_name="pre_gen:"..loc.tau,-- max_name="null",events={onCreated='defOnCreated(tmp[1],tmp[2]) loc.moveToObj({"'..loc.tau..'"},"'..loc.dht_big[2]..'",7000)', onDestroyed='defOnDestroyed(tmp[1]) loc.TauOnDestroy()',},})end -- loc.timer(7,'loc.CutScene_4_1() enableAutoFormation("'..loc.omega[1]..'")')loc.timer(5,[[addEffect("adv_range_condition",{obj="Scene",objs1={{obj="]]..loc.dht_big[2]..[[",radius=9000},},objs2={{obj="]]..loc.tau[1]..[["},},func_all_in='loc.en_4bigCreate()',})]])loc.timer(10,'playReplicPattern("m3_r26")')end

kev11106 wrote:
Can anything be done about the a.i.?
Everything should be in the LUA files.