Epic Middle States Status

We were able to eliminate everything but one major problem. The standard PS code has a feature that will "short cut" capsule jump a player over multiple systems. Meaning that if there are 10 systems on your jump path, under certain conditions, the autopilot will jump you straight to the end system, skipping the 9 in between. While this is a great time saver, it makes a total hash out of the trade and economy code. Not to mention reduces the danger from pirates considerably. (and makes it hard on your poor wing men left 9 systems behind).

I'm probably just barking up the wrong tree here, but just can't shake the feeling that ibacktobase.pkg has something to do with this. Have you tried disabling the ibacktobase.pkg? I get the feeling the capsule-jump shortcut stuff is somehow related to (but submerged within) this package.

By disabling it I mean building a new package with the same name which does (and instantly returns) nothing.

On the assumption that "a few more months" is an estimate rather than an impossible fantasy, I cheerfully defer to GT on this point.

Good logic Shane. I will give that a try.

PantsOnFire: I honestly do not know when Traffic will be done. Depends on feature set and who has time to work on it (as always). Hopefully we can recruite a few more helpers after Middle States.

I might be willing to volunteer for the traffic project. I've got to build my own and am looking at methods to make it more adjustable (via ini file entries). It may be that both projects could utilize the same system if our goals are similar enough.

Has anyone laid anything out in this area?

Nothing complete yet. Joco is working on pieces of traffic scripting. But we are holding off until the MS release goes out. Otherwise there is constant danger of feature creeping until nothing is finished.

I will get in touch as we pin down the traffic design. At the very least, it would be really nice to have someone with an alternate project review the design and look for weak points.

Nothing heavy laid down yet.

I have gotten some ship group creation functions done that are all driven off ini files. They allow you to define ships to factions and define groups of ships of various power or size. The net effect is you can call a single function to create a ship group for faction 'X' wth a size index of 'Y' and it will lookup all the right ini files to build up the ship group based on the ship models for that faction. You can then do all your tweaking for balance etc by playing with the inis.

It's all kind a cool and they seem to work ok at this stage.

The other stuff is all paper work at this point. But an inital skeleton Trade handler is starting to take shape.

Cheers,
Joco.