Ship Systems Information

I thought I would start a thread where people can post information that they have learned about the modding of ship systems. Much like the Cool POG tricks thread.

Here are a few interesting pieces that I have picked up.

AI Behavior: When attacking another ship the AI has three behaviors it chooses from.

Tail Biting, where the AI ship will try to get to your tail position and then fire its weapons.

Sweeping Attack, where the AI ship will try to make sweeping passes.

Hold Position, where the AI will face the player ship and try to match course and velocity to keep your ship centered directly ahead.

The behaviors are picked mostly at random, slightly biased by ship size. You can still see fighter park themselved directly ahead of your ship and try to duke it out, blow for blow. (which they tend to lose.) Actually, many fighter kills happen when they give up trying to tail bite and sit still.

The hold position behavior can be really annoying when modding speed values of the player ship. Especially if the player ships are reduced to match the AI ships. Once the AI has picked this hold position behavior, the player can do nothing to change position against the AI ship. Both ships just move exactly the same.

The standard game deals with this by capping the AI speed to a lower value than the player. You can force a closure by hard accel towards the AI, at first nothing happens, then you exceed the AI allowed max speed and it cannot match your ship. Then you move close and pass.

One possible technique is to not allow the AI to choose hold position. Instead give the AI pilots specific orders of sweeping attack or tail biting. This is only possible with custom traffic scripts.

-Gtrout

Another one already.

While modding ships we had this irritating issue where large ships would always have Emission Warnings. It took forever to understand this problem, so this might be useful to others.

Each ship has range of signal strength they transmit to other sensors. And it turns out that the strength is based on the speed of the ship (which is wierd, because a ship coasting fast could have engines disabled). A ship has maximum signal strength when it has reached max hull speed. So for a Tug that is 800m/s.

Well, if your mod is designed to have lower speeds, and the Cap ship speeds are down near Freespace, then your Cap ships are going to hit max speed ALL the time. And set off these warnings.

On the other hand, if you mod the max speeds way up, to allow fighters to chase down the player, then your fighter ships will almost never give off much sensor signal.

Hopefully this will help other modders who are pushing ships to extreme values.

-Gtrout

Thinking about ship loadouts, varity of ship loadouts etc. This has a couple of questions coming to mind:
1. it seems generating dynamic ships via pog is a no-go. So we use (like PS) a range a prefab loadouts pership type. Can we automate the generation of these loadout definitions via a s/s macro or something? I assume the definitions are pretty well understoad?
2. given we have a known list of ship variations it should be possible via pog to generate player usable subsystems for pickup on destruction of these ship variants?

Interested in understanding if such an approach is viable.

Cheers,
Joco.

I would guess there is probably a more simple method (but maybe more work). A simple table with the components of each ship build would work as well. (my 2 cents)

I'm wondering how we might tell whether a weapon was "destroyed" and thus not salvagable. Hope we're not causing you stress, Grandpa. We're trying to make less work, really...

A table is what I was proposing. But you still need to have that mapping back to each prefab ship variant so you know what cargos can be spawned on the ships destruction.

The "is it destroyed" question can be dealt with as simply as just making a random chance on a component being salvagable, again based on % data held in the master table. This approach could be enhanced further by tracking the damage state of these components during combat. And using that damage level to modify the chance the component survives the ships distruction. Of course that assumes you can sensibly track such things.

Hmmm ... ideas ideas ideas. Should be doable.

The way I see salvage working is this: whenever a ship is destroyed, it produces a “debris� object. (Some larger vessels produce more.) A special salvage vessel (i.e. a tow truck) brings the debris in for analysis. The debris may either contain a subsystem from that ship, or unworkable junk. Junk may be taken to a junkyard, of course, where it is sold for scrap. A ship part can be put on your own vessel, stuffed in a warehouse for later use, or sold off somewhere. Shipyards might not want used parts from a questionable source, but little operations might find that light LDA to be just the thing they need, although it didn’t help its last owner much.

Mind you, a cruiser’s assault shield might be a tad hard to find a legitimate buyer for. You’ll need to go into a more shady area to get one of those off your hands.

Any ship can dock to debris and carry it around, but only a salvage vessel can “unlock� it to see what’s inside. If you don’t have access to one, only a junkyard will buy it. And if you just sold them a Cryo PBC for the scrap price, well, sucks for you.

Now a salvage vessel can be hired by the hour to do hauling and analysis for you, or you can buy a cheap one yourself and get the life of a scavenger. Waiting near L-Points, you watch ships blow up, then move in for the goodies. You’ll have to compete with other scavengers for the best stuff. Pirates produce debris, but they can also want to take some with them. If they bring a salvage vessel with them, it’s probably wise not to steal their debris.