A few more ideas

That is exactly what I intend to do Hot4Darmat.

Like I said, I am NOT someone who starts something and drops out at 50 % of the work. Furthermore if someone teaches me some new skills, I am very grateful to him/her and will certainly participate in something they are involved working at at the moment, to finish or add some new stuff if they like the idea.
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Hot4Darmat quoted

I'd MUCH rather see a mod that is currently in production, such as Epic or Star Wars MP make it to completion and get released, even with a modest amount of the originally proposed features, than see folks embarking on new projects with umpteen features
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Thats exactly why I'm still coming back here at this forum because I see dedication to a great game that keeps on living because of the dedication of a few good men.

So I will repeat it for the cheap seats, I am not ranting on anything or complaining that epic doesnt have this or that,but all I can do at the moment is come up with some ideas, that a lot of people undoubtedly had allready. It is however the modders decision to implement them or not. But IMHO its better to mention ideas twice than not to mention them at all and after everyting is finishd come up with the conclusion that you forgot to code something.
I know from experience that it is easier to code something and do it right from the beginning, then to add it later and rewrite the first code to accomodate the new goodies.

I hope I will be able to create ships soon, which I have started doing allready, but I'm still in the learning phase.

So JWtheHempMonkey asked a while back to remake the cutter, maybe that will be my next project. Furthermore Second_Chance is designing SW ships, If he needs help I will be delighted to offer him a hand if he thinks my skills are adequate.

Hope this helps a little bit in explaining what I am doing here.

Peace out

XIII


A few more questions sorry if theyve been asked before but its late and I'm allmost falling asleep on my keyboard here.

a) is it possible to have a capital ship with more than one docking port, so multiple player patcoms for ex can dock to a support frigate if the missile bays are empty ? I am talking about carriers here.

b)The implementation of illegal goods. I know the police sometimes shuts down your ship in mid flight for contraband, but I never saw any contraband.

ok,

hear you guys tommorrow night.

Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !

AKAIK, Epic will be single-player. And I have a feeling that GrampaTrout and the other Epic devs will either deliver on every feature promise or prove them impossible. And I believe the E-Mail system as of now is just in POG, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up as an .ini file in later releases.

I see no reason why a capital ship couldn’t have multiple dock ports. Doesn’t the resupply ship in instant action have multiple ports?

As for illegal goods, I don’t know if it’s possible to add a new cargo type to the game without displacing an old one. But a bit of POG could get the cops to notice that something’s fishy about that pod of “raw sewage�.

Feature request time: On a similar note, can you implement (in Epic), the ability to falsify your cargo pods’ UPC codes? You can have pods marked as waste so the pirates won’t notice the neutronium you’re hauling, etc. But don’t get a customs patrol docked to you or you’re in trouble!

Just so you know, I think the ideas being bandied about are excellent ones. I was just posting a plug for much-needed help for the ongoing mod projects. Glad you folks are so dedicated. We need more of that. Good on you.

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Hot4Darmat

Just wanted to point out that flux.ini is only for initializing the flux engine, and shouldn't be used for anything else; like mod data storage. Altering flux to cheat doesn't affect single ships or players, it causes client-side engine-wide alterations to flux that cause the MP game to crash, for everyone. That's why anti-cheating systems are so important for MP (but preventing cheating in general is also important, lol).

What you're thinking of dertien, about player belongings, ships and game progress, is saved in the save-game files, not flux. If you need to save or work with variables, it's easy to create as many new custom INIs for a mod as you want. But you shouldn't mess with flux.ini unless your mod needs to initialize the game engine in a certain way.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
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Ideas are welcome, just don't feel bad when most don't get in game. Help is twice as welcome! So practice up that modeling because I could send a ton of work your way. Everything from asteroid chunks to station modules to ships.

How is the news and e-mail system running in Epic? is it via a .txt file that loads random missions that are delivered to ur mail ?

The email system supports HTML files, if as a mission designer you wanted to have a fixed message sent. But the primary use will be POG customized generic emails. Some of these offer missions, some are mission instructions, and some are descriptions of events that have happened (caused by player, or others).

Epic is a single player game with no plan to be otherwise. EoC was never meant to be a MMORG. There is NO database. It was meant to store only a few bits of save game data. One of the largest parts of getting something like Epic to work has been building a data storage layer for everything persistant. Ships, stations, economy, missions, cargo, everything. But that's what you get when you try to bend on game into another! EoC is working really well under these conditions.

Normally, one game cannot share stored data with another. MajorTom took advantage of the fact you could write data into Flux.ini and built a cool mod that let you move cargo pods from the single player game into a multiplayer game, and back.

On a similar note, can you implement (in Epic), the ability to falsify your cargo pods’ UPC codes?

Good question. This should make for an interesting discussion.

Currently, you cannot change the cargo type. And the pirate code I designed does not look at cargo types - the pirates are not very picky - they will take anything that is poorly guarded. (there is far less raw sewage in the Epic economy).

Police do check cargo type. They try to scan for weapons or other restricted items. The police ship must be within 5km to scan.

When a player makes a purchase, they become the owner of the cargo pod. When the player steals a pod, they are not the owner. Police will go after you if you are not the pod owner.

Legal stations will not purchase pods you do not own. Illegal stations will "launder" your pods.

Smuggling typically has two parts to it. First you need to find a source for the thing you want, like weapons. Then you need to be friendly to those people to buy the weapons, which means IFF spoofing or really being friendly. Then you need to get those weapons past the customs patrols - which normally means using hidden jump routes, or distracting the patrols by shooting at them or something.

Adding a "hidden" cargo type is possible. Unfortunaly it has a wide ripple effect. It changes the guard, police and pirate AI. It changes the code to buy and sell cargo pods. It changes the save and restore code. It changes the pod creation routines. And the player needs some kind of GUI to change the pods around. And some way of detecting changed pods.

It might be easier to have a special "cargo jammer" on your ship. If you have this item, it fools the scanners into thinking you have legal (or low value) pods. And if a patrol vessel docks, it discovers the illegal jammer. A behavior which could also be used to detect illegal weapons and such. Because it handles all pods "automatically" we only change the pirate, guard, and police AI code. And add the cargo item to the standard loadout. It would take up some cargo space and power or something. And be expensive to purchase.

-Gtrout

As I noted above we can't have more than around 8-10 players per server, so a MMOG would never be posible. Like Gtrout said, Epic was never meant for MP.
The EpicOnline MP mod is only orientated on a very small part of Epic (the trading features) as an additional gag. It has nothing to do with the Epic Mod itself.

I was interested in some of the above ideas for expanding the Starwars mod at a much later date. Someday we may make a more trade orientated mod for Buda5, but thats fairly distant.

Using the flux.ini trick it would be possible to keep some of the MP data persistant like ship type, cargo, a simple skill level system, and other inventory whenever a server is down.
As shown in the EpicOnline mod, you can "garble" that data, i.e. encode and decode it and run checksums to insure that no one can change the info in flux.ini. I just don't see any point in doing the work though if a server can only handle 8-10 players.

(unless the game became really popular and we had servers all over the world running simultanously. That would theoretically provide us with a decentralized, server independent, virtually persistant multiple star system MMOG universe where each server runs as a specific star system, assuming they are online constantly. But as you see the idea is silly!).

Besides that, Hot4Darmat is right. We need to get the stuff we have started finshed first. My interest was only academic and orientated on future (way future) possibilities.




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