[S&M] Can "piloting" capital ships be modded?

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Gazz
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[S&M] Can "piloting" capital ships be modded?

Post by Gazz » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 11:18

A simple question, really.

Can S&M somehow achieve that the player and all aspects of the playership - like the interior and drone dontrol interface - are moved to a different ship?

Whether the new ship has or can have a different cockpit/interior is not relevant.

TC had script instructions that allowed to "teleport" the player to other ships but in XRB you apparently also need a way to make the new ship "the" playership.
So can this be done or are such script instructions deliberately being left out to make such a task impossible?


A positive answer would alleviate a lot of capital ship angst around here. =)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

An alternative would be to allow a painless way to assign a new course to a capital ship that you are riding as a mere "passenger".
Like... you hold down a "set the course" key. The Ship around you becomes transparent. You quickly mouselook your character into any direction. Hold a mouse button, too, to drag the "roll" orientation that the ship should have on the new course.
Release the key and the new course is set. Quick and painless.

You can actually see what I mean with this TC script.
Could be more elegant without the restrictions of the SE but you can see what I'm getting at.

The player never needs to be in manual control of a capital ship. That is not what most of the pro-cap-ship crowd is asking for.
A relatively direct control, yes, but not manual control.

That would be a lot better than making a capital ship "the" playership under manual control.


Going through a menu (chat / command menu - same thing) and then plotting the course on a sector map does not fit the bill.
That is an extremely remote and impersonal way.
Last edited by Gazz on Wed, 5. Oct 11, 03:09, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Scoob » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 11:51

Hi Gazz,

I really hope you're right. I posted a similar point on another thread...it really depends I guess if the "one player ship" mechanic is an engine restriction or simply a design/content choice by Egosoft.

If Egosoft have purely concentrated on making the one ship truely special content-wise but the game engine techinically has no such restriction then that would be truely good news.

Creating unique cockpits, rooms etc. is something I think the community would excel at - assuming Egosoft simply didn't have time to add such features to more than a single ship.

I know it's a little different but I remember when the community brought back the "missing" cockpits we lost after X2 and added a whole load more - Egosoft simply hadn't created any cockpits, the game could still handle them. Now this is of course a much larger task in a new engine none of us know yet, but designing say the interior of your own favourite XR ship so it can be the playership sounds like fun!

I really hope this sort of thing is moddable, I don't mind playing the game how Egosoft intended initially, but I know I'll want to mod it eventually.

Cheers,

Scoob.

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Post by The Cuban Nightmare » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 17:54

In theory, we can't control it directly, but we can drones, so could that system be used to control the cap ship? They already have a remote control system in place, so it seems feasible that this could be accomplished.
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Post by Mightysword » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 18:28

Common Gazz, didn't you claim it will be made possible in one week and I promised you a game as a bonus.

Having second thought ? :lol:

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Re: [S&M] Can "piloting" capital ships be modded?

Post by cmdnenad » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 18:44

Gazz wrote:
An alternative would be to allow a painless way to assign a new course to a capital ship that you are riding as a mere "passenger".
Like... you hold down a "set the course" key. The Ship around you becomes transparent. You quickly mouselook your character into any direction. Hold a mouse button, too, to drag the "roll" orientation that the ship should have on the new course.
Release the key and the new course is set. Quick and painless.
This (or something similar) would solve the problem of not being able to personaly fly the ship.

Another solution would be an "observation camera", which would provide unobstructed view all around the ship, with indicated relative bearing in two axes. We could then either click somewhere to set the course, or press a key to change course to the direction I'm looking at. Or both :mrgreen:

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Post by Aydan » Mon, 3. Oct 11, 19:09

Gazz request is quite reasonable. I feel the same about the modding aspect, and no, it's not that easily moddable.

For all those people excited about the new drone feature... this feature is in the game since Reunion. Set the left upper monitor to "auto aim" in the options. Then place yourself in any ship you want to be in, regardless which one. Then target a ship owned by the player... that means you own a second ship, regardless which one. You'll notice that it will show up in the upper left monitor. Now here comes the cool drone part... you'll notice a minimize and close button on the upper right part of that monitor. In the lower rignt you will be able to click on a enlarge button icon, which looks a bit like ">>". Click on it and the monitor will have twice the size. If your ship is now still targetted, click inside that monitor and you'll get the target of your targetted ship. Targets target. Now hold down your left mousebutton while still hovering over the enlarged monitor... and tadaaaaaa, the mouse flight modus shows up for that ship. You can move it around, it'll shoot on your command, as if you were flying that ship. However, the camera position is nailed. But remotely control "Drones" was already introduced some game versions earlier, and you can steer anything from M2 to M5. Not a new feature, but a recycled one, and it's already accesible in the stock TC game without any mods. Cool VR goggles eh :shock: ?

Now, this mode is limited, and was never used in TC, although it was announced in the pre release notes as a feature that the player can instantly jump into action...

As the ship infrastructure will be almost the same as in TC, because of the similarity of the script/coding method, we will experience a TShips for that. The big question is how far the new "menu" options, i mean chtting with that X babe, will be hardcoded. If the direct inpput method to steer a ship by using the joystick/mouse is limited hardcoded to the player ship exclusively, there's nothing a modder can do about making other ships accesible, as he's bound to that extremely limited way of remote control.

As most of the more important modders have already left, the question is who's going to explore the basics at all? The XML language was not accepted by the majority of modders, and we saw only a limited number of MD usage, compared to the largely accepted Script Editor Mods. MARS, CODEA, CAGs, Mosquito Defense and others are not coded in MD files. It's not realistic to think we will see something like that without having a modder writing script a few hundred lines long. The modding tools we have are not done by ES. Look at the X3ModManager, YAGG, DBox. The documentations like MSCI, X-wiki are all fan based.

So Gazz question is quite reasonable from the technical and community side, and i'm curious if there will be n official answer.

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Post by MegaBurn » Tue, 4. Oct 11, 12:51

I think this needs a L3 forum for some serious discussion on the S&M community's major concerns. Secrecy, little scraps of info, and ambiguous language for marketing purposes is understandable for a commercial release (less so for community projects) but given the amount of work this community puts into these games there should be some dialog.

This is a good time to address other stuff too, but I'll refrain from hijacking the thread with that laundry list...
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Post by Scoob » Tue, 4. Oct 11, 13:31

Hi,

Yes, VR has always been there in TC however it was VERY clunky and when remote controlling a ship you couldn't properly target other ships. Also the player ship was dead in the water of course. We'll assume this is just like being in another ship now as Egosoft will have addressed this issue for sure as it's now a major gameplay mechanic.

In theory, based on what little we know, there's no reason why we'd not be able to remote control every ship if it works in a similar way to TC. I.e. we simply get presented the controlled crafts viewpoint via the VR display. Simple, I'd imagine.

As for modding the game to let us truely be IN another ship we own, rather than VR - well that doesn't sound quite as simple to me. Unless of course the whole being restricted to one ship is purely a content limitation rather than engine. Really we need the developers, or Bernd as the boss, to come forward and detail some of the modding aspects of XR before we can answer the question asked.

I'd certainly hope the answer is yes as the longevity of the X series has depended on the mod community. Plus, however good the game might be, people WANT to pilot other ships directly...I admit, I'd like to but equally I'd want to explore the new single ship mechanic as intended at first - maybe for the plot etc. - then get modding * :)

Scoob.

* or downloading mods done by those with less patience than me!

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Post by Kor'ah » Tue, 4. Oct 11, 16:56

We'll have to see the released game to find out if such a thing is even needed. Personally driving a capital ship may not be very fun in the new game. The fun may be in directing all the firepower these capital ships have to blow stuff up. We just have no real idea how this mechanic will work currently.

What we really need is some real context, because the only context we can apply is from the prior games. Rightfully so, nobody in their right minds would ever trust a X3 AI to be able to fly a capital ship. So that panic transfers over to the new game.

What ES needs to do is get out a short game play demo showcasing a capital ship in action and how the player can participate in it. Good time to also show off some of the UI, that will make-or-break the game.
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Post by Gazz » Wed, 5. Oct 11, 03:15

And to demonstrate how painless such a control scheme can work, even within the constraints of the somewhat clunky TC...

Set the course!
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Post by MegaBurn » Wed, 5. Oct 11, 12:43

Impressive. You actually turned an apparent problem of severely limited control over capital ships into an apparent bonus via improved remote control, a lemon into lemonade...albeit still odd compared to manual control.

Could take that another logical step though, add a way point system, maybe using "holographic" nav beacons as markers, manually flown into position and/or point-click-spawned via sector map, and free VR linking to any existing in a sector, though without giving away too much information on stuff beyond ship/station sensor range. Not all that different from follow the dinghi, except the player can spawn multiple in a sequential series that are functionally invisible to NPC's, parent ship collisions remove them, player can teleport between them at will, swaps with nav beacons when not piloted, and other normal ship features are disabled (or similar).

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Post by Gazz » Wed, 5. Oct 11, 16:28

When you have trouble solving a particular problem... change the problem. =P

The Egosoft folks see the problem that manually flying a capital ship is boring because it takes 5 minutes of pushing the controller "left" to turn around. Yep, that would be dumb.

But... I think they are stuck asking the wrong question: Do we allow manual piloting of cap ships? yes/no

The question should rather be something like:
How do we let the player control a capital ship he is flying / traveling in?
A series of menus (or worse - through an NPC you have chase down and talk to!) with orders like move to position and the likes is not very dynamic or fun.

What I suggested is a way that is very apropriate for capital ships because it lets the player change the course in the most direct way possible... without forcing him to sit there and execute the same old maneuver for the next 5 minutes.
Then the player can be the admiral on the brigde, ordering "hard a starboard!". And expressing such an order with the described system would not take longer than speaking it!
That's a must-have to keep battles dramatic and fast-paced. (for values of fast)

Technically it's not hard to do. Not. At. All.


MegaBurn wrote:Could take that another logical step though, add a way point system, maybe using "holographic" nav beacons as markers, manually flown into position
The flying bit likely won't work too well because it takes too much time.
If a realtime space battle is so boring that you have time to fly / define a complex course for minutes, then the game has worse problems then the course plotting interface.

There is also no good way to regulate "depth" on a 2D screen in first-person mode.
Complex maneuvers are still best plotted on a rotateable tactical map, like the TC sector map.

Hardcore course plotting on the sector map - that's easy enough to code because all you need is the generic move to position script and a small launcher script to call it repeatedly. Heck, you can do that in TC if you write that script.
The TC multi-sector patrol script does something like that already. Multiple waypoints.
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Post by Virtualaughing » Wed, 5. Oct 11, 17:17

hey Gazz
Im despert to fly any ships in the game and feel the danger of being killed within. Remote controll is just a childplay thing IMO

Short answer is YES :D
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Post by Mightysword » Wed, 5. Oct 11, 17:23

Gazz wrote:The Egosoft folks see the problem that manually flying a capital ship is boring because it takes 5 minutes of pushing the controller "left" to turn around. Yep, that would be dumb.

But... I think they are stuck asking the wrong question: Do we allow manual piloting of cap ships? yes/no
But again, there is only so much compromise you can make. We don't know until the game is release but it's entirely possible that the capital ship now will have some restriction that allow the design to do something else. No matter what you can come up with, accomodation HAVE to be made for a player to fly it comfortably and there is a good chance this accomodation is conflict with certain design point. Is it true or what is it? I don't know, but it's a possibility.

For example, on the off chance the capital ship in XR behave exactly like Freespace or Tachyon capital ship, I don't see any feasible mechanic to let the player control them maybe except for people who like to sit on the turret.

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