[MOD] [XRM:AP] TC Plots in XRM:Albion Prelude

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Tue, 6. Jun 17, 18:24

It depends if XRMi-TCAP includes a univese map. If yes then it would depend if it's different from the XRM-TCAP universe file. If it is different, then no it would not be compatible. If no universe map or no changes to the map then it should work. I intend to review IEX compatibility but first I want to make LoCo compatible with XRM-TCAP, then address IEX as a whole.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Thu, 8. Jun 17, 04:46

So I looked into XRMi-TCAP and it does include it's own universe map, which is different from XRM-TCAP. I would not use the two together.

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Sun, 11. Jun 17, 07:35

Mythrantar, thanks for checking IE compatibility for me.

I have a bug of sorts to report.

I am a couple hours into a new game (I too have a child and not much time to play) and a Terran invasion fleet is whaling on Argons in Omicron Lyrae sector. Shooting up ships and stations. This probably shouldn't be happening as there is no war currently. Right?

There is a wrinkle in the situation though. I am running Improved Races 2 amongst other mods. IR2 is the source of the two Terran fleets. One was on it's way to Scale Plate Green to genocide Teladi and the other was heading to Xenon Sector 472. The fleets were passing through Omicron Lyrae on the way to these two locations. As far as IR2 is concerned the Terrans are friends with the Argon. Terrans are enemies with Teladi and Xenon, hence the invasion fleet.

After watching the carnage in Omicron for a little while, I did the first mission of the Terran plot. There was no Terran vs Argon combat in Circle of Labour or Heretic's End. After finishing up in Heretic's end, I followed one of the fleets, catching up to it in Black Hole Sun. Here there was no combat between Terrans and Argon either.

When I loaded up the race military network the fleet in BHS is labelled as a 'Current Terran Incursion'. Screenshot at http://imgur.com/a/lf7hS (other fleet has reached Scale Plate Green at this point).

Everything else seems to be fine at this point. I received activation messages for XRM and TCAP for XRM at gamestart. Is this something that can be tweaked in TCAP for XRM? Or problem with IR2? Or do you think it's just a ghost in the machine? Is there further info I could gather which would help? I have a save in Omicron Lyrae during the battle.

EDIT: Just to bolt onto this - Thing like the Terrans offer me 'Destroy X ships' missions in Argon sectors. Argons and Terrans placing bounties on each others ships. Is it possible to tweak these off before the war starts? It's not a dealbreaker but it breaks the immersion a bit.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Sun, 11. Jun 17, 17:44

Hmm, I am not sure what happened there. XRM-TCAP definitely disables the war until the X3TC plots are completed, and if Terran-Argon relationships were bad there would be other fighting too, not just the one you observed. I wonder if some accident happened (like Terran strike force ships colliding with Argon ships). I will take a look into TCAP the files in case something is there, but no guarantees as I am still pretty green with the MD.

For the Argon vs. Terran missions I agree it would be nice to delay them till after he war, but I definitely do not have know-how (yet) on how to do that. For now, let's just say it's spy vs spy, cold-war stuff that's happening!

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Mon, 12. Jun 17, 07:07

I may have more insight into the problem. I started a new game, enabled additional debug information and took a look at some terran and argon ships and stations.

New game before IR2 activated:

Entity type, Rep, Friend/Enemy Setting
Terran Stations, 0, -1
Terran Ships, 0, some 0, some -1 (watched a terran ship change from -1 to 0 in real time)
Argon Stations, 0, -1
Argon Ships, 0, 0
Argon Laser Towers, 0, 0 while a timer (activation?) was running, then -1

New game after IR2 activated and war settings to TC preset:

Terran Stations, 100000, -1
Terran Ships, 100000, 1
Terran IR2 Assault ships, 100000, 1
Argon Stations, 100000, -1
Argon Ships, 100000, 1
Argon Laser Towers, 100000, -1

Argon attitudes to Terrans are usually mirrored with the ATF. However I noticed after IR2 activation the Argon laser towers were (1) friends with ATF but not Terrans.

My hypothesis is that the Terran assault fleet were making their merry way through Omicron Lyrae, a laser tower opened fire and then all hell broke loose. I'd also say that IR2 was not the root cause of the problem. This just happened to be a situation where a lot of Terran ships were passing by.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Mon, 12. Jun 17, 12:23

Good to know this was all due to a trigger-happy Argon low-level employee

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Tue, 13. Jun 17, 04:52

XRM-TCAP IEX compatibility update:

I am pretty sure I have determined what needs to be updated to make the XRM-TCAP compatible with IEX (the XRMi-TCAP version mentioned previously had reportedly bugs, so I am trying to come up with a bug-free version based on XRM-TCAP). I will start working on it this week and hopefully will be done by end of the week (no promises!).

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Wed, 14. Jun 17, 04:39

Damn, Mythrantar, you're like a wish fulfilling genie. Thanks for working on all these patches! Will an IEX compatibility patch necessitate another game start do you think? Hoping not, but willing to start yet again to play...er I mean test... your changes.

Re my earlier post, I'm not familiar with X3 modding but would have assumed that changing the friend/enemy setting of two races would be a single line of code. Obviously not. I can certainly live with border tensions going hot because of itchy trigger fingers. I will advise anyone playing this collection of mods not to take certain Terran missions until war is declared. These include convoy escort, destroy convoy, defend station and patrol. Unless you're willing to become enemies of the Argon of course.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Wed, 14. Jun 17, 04:57

LOL, thanks for the words of encouragement!

Yes, to enjoy the full bells and whistles of IEX a new gamestart is required (although some stuff will be visible even without a new start).

Good advice on the missions - I would definitely stay clear of them until the war kicks in, or until you really want to make an enemy of one or the other. What I need to figure out is how to program the MD to assign standings based on mission triggers, i.e. make Commonwealth and Terrans neutral/friendly prior to the war, and enemies after.

BTW, I was going to make these mods anyway for my own game, but I figured other people might be interested as well! I have a couple more I have in mind that I want to upgrade/XRM-ify, like the Saturn complexes (anything that helps with frame rates is a "Good Thing").

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Wed, 14. Jun 17, 22:14

OK, here it is:

IEX patch for XRM-TCAP for AP3.2

Also:

IEX patch for XRM-TCAP with LoCo XRM for AP3.2

All you have to do is follow the instructions in the zip file. Let me know if you find any issues!

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Thu, 15. Jun 17, 08:58

Holy cow, great work. I've added the IEX patch (and IEX) and will let you know if I see any problems.

I noticed you are working on a couple of other integrations to help with performance. You probably know all this already but I got a huge performance boost by removing the XRM trails (sorry paulwheeler) and lowering laser fire rates with the combat performance patch https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=391855. Worth trying if you haven't already.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Fri, 16. Jun 17, 15:19

Awesome, thanks for sharing! I will definitely check it out. I was never a big fan of engine trails anyway.

SirNukes · Post by **SirNukes** » Thu, 22. Jun 17, 01:45

Thanks for your work on updating this. It has convinced me to give XRM a whirl.

However, during initial testing to tune XRM to my liking, I have noticed that the generic destroy convoy mission has a briefing bug, where the initial briefing window with mission details (targets, difficulty, reward, etc.) is largely blank. If accepted, the mission details do show up correctly in the mission log.

The "2.127 Generic Destroy Convoy.xml" file in "Updated TCAP files for X3AP3.2" seems like it might be the problem, around line 536+ or so. The version of this file in AP 3.2 04.cat has significantly different briefing related code there. Hopefully that isn't too hard to fix up, or maybe it's safe to just use the 04.cat version.

Also, what do you think of some of the other generic missions that exist in both TCAP and 04.cat: 2.180, 2.181, 2.182, 2.183? It would be nice to have the least buggy versions of those, since the TCAP generic missions have had issues with gradually bogging down a playthrough with many hours on it.

For 3.08 Sector Management.xml, I notice that your version mostly takes after the one in TCAP, which is missing a lot of the AP code for unfocused jump drive sectors. The AP code includes references to Shady Business, better sector randomization, and hidden tuning crates. I recall the code merge being pretty straightforward.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Thu, 22. Jun 17, 12:42

Thanks for the update! My primary goal was to make sure the AP 3.2 changes were incorporated into TCAP, so I only touched files that were modified by the newest patch. Adimittedly, I did not have access to older versions of TCAP to track changes between versions, so some guesswork was involved. I did notice the issue you mention once or twice, but I assumed it might be a bug since TCAP incorporates AP's generic war missions, but the war is disabled until all X3TC missions are completed. Do you see that for all Destroy Convoy missions?

I'll take a look at the other files, but again, those were left as they were by Dillpickle because the patch did not touch them. Without access to older versions, I had to rely on the "last modified" date of the files, and I assumed that all AP functionality that was compatible with TC missions was included. That, and a "if it ain't broken don't fix it" approach.

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Fri, 23. Jun 17, 13:16

When I 'fixed up' the TCAP for 3.2 for myself, I overwrote destroy convoy with the new 3.2 vanilla version. I *can* see mission details. I haven't seen bugs for that mission unless you count Terrans giving me a mission to kill Argon ships when they are supposed to be at peace. So generally speaking I'm voting for overwriting.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Fri, 23. Jun 17, 18:08

Alright, an update:

For reference, here are the files modified by AP3.2: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php ... 04#4657504

Sector Management: Unless I am blind, there is no "stock" Sector Management MD file in the AP CATs. The most recent I can find is in X3TC's 11.cat; our version is almost identical to the X3TC one, apart with some additions like the UFJD code.

2.180-2.183: None of these missions were touched by the AP patches that allegedly fixed the memory leak issues, therefore there should be no problem to keep using the TCAP versions (actually, per Dillpickle, he did make some performance optimizations to his versions of the files). "0. 83 Dual Convoy" was fixed by AP3.2 but it's not touched by TCAP so that should be fine as well.

2.127: My version of this mission is based on AP 3.2, with some additions from TCAP's version for compatibility reasons and to manage the war missions. Also, I moved some things around, so the diff doesn't always line up. However, I just run the diff again and I realized that I missed updating the text IDs for some mission briefings (the references are changed in XRM-TCAP since it it uses a custom 7360 t file). I am attaching a link below to a fixed version of the mission file as well as of the 7360 t file; let me know if that works. Just remove the EXPERIMENTAL part from the file names, and drop it in your addon/director folder for the mission and in addon/t for the t file:

(addon/director) http://www.mediafire.com/file/vjg4n2kxt ... Convoy.xml

(addon/t) http://www.mediafire.com/file/o3d77c1ky ... 0-L044.xml

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Fri, 23. Jun 17, 18:10

FriendlyFirePhoenix wrote:When I 'fixed up' the TCAP for 3.2 for myself, I overwrote destroy convoy with the new 3.2 vanilla version. I *can* see mission details. I haven't seen bugs for that mission unless you count Terrans giving me a mission to kill Argon ships when they are supposed to be at peace. So generally speaking I'm voting for overwriting.

Was this while you were using XRM-TCAP also? I am asking because I want to see if the custom 7360 t file makes a difference.

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Sat, 24. Jun 17, 11:00

Yes. Confirmed yesterday while running XRM:TCAP. I'll try your experimental files and let you know what I see.

Update: After adding your experimental file, I was offered a combat mission with no briefing information. Turned out to be a destroy convoy mission. The mission itself seemed to function okay.

Mythrantar · Post by **Mythrantar** » Sat, 24. Jun 17, 13:45

You used both experimental files and saw no difference? Bummer - back to the drawing board.

FriendlyFirePhoenix · Post by **FriendlyFirePhoenix** » Sun, 25. Jun 17, 08:03

Both files, yes. There was a difference for me because destroy convoy was displaying briefing before. I'm using destroy convoy from vanilla X3, just to be absolutely clear.