The Quest To Spew

Hey Mdvalley,

If you need to determine exactly where the pods are sitting, you could decrypt the megafreighter PSO file with Jasper's 'pso' extracter program, and then open the file in lightwave. That is if you have lightwave. Not sure if that would help you though...

In anycase, sounds like you have a challenge before you. Overcome it with style!

Actually, the pod location is not in the pso, the lws, or the ini. It’s in the script itself (possibly iShipCreation), and that we have yet to decode. Good news is that the megapods are simply docked to the big ship, nothing fancy there. The megatrucking code will have no problem sorting out what pods belong to what ship.

Megatrucking is in phase 1: Jotting the procedures out in notepad in excruciating detail.

Okay it’s in phase 0.5: Procrastination until I get it sorted out in my head.

Seeing as the player cannot use megafreighters (yet), megatrucking will have no purpose in TS outside of the traffic. But when the player does, how should buying a megafreighter work? Does the ship come with a set number of pods (say, 6)? Or should the player have to buy the pods separately and dock them to the ship, making it upgradeable to the full 30 megapod (240 mini-pods total) capacity? Both are an easy code.

Sending a pod to a megapod is tougher than I thought. There’s one hole, and if the pod is oriented wrong, it will bump into the side instead of going in. I made a two-waypoint system that works, but if either pod is bumped or even if the player flies too close... BONK. It’s like threading a needle. And that’s with one pod. Four or eight coming in at once will be a nightmare.

I’m considering a “close enough� system, where the pod just has to fly to the megapod’s door and it will be popped into place. If the player’s looking at it when it happens, it will be quite noticeable. But it might be my only option.

I got the spew-and-dock-one-pod-to-the-megapod code written out, in only 173 lines! I still need a parent function to sort out what pods go to what megapods and manage that part.

At least the minipod-to-spewer part is much the same as in tSpewerOps. A simple cut-n-paste, a few new variables, a check for blockage (to be handled by its future parent function), and a call to launch_minipod instead of iShip.Undock, and away we go.

A megafreighter tops out at 240 pods. When buying, the ship will get its own task, each megapod will get its own task, and each pod will get its own task, with 2 more (each) upon spewing. That’s 751 tasks total. Hope your computer is up to it.

751 tasks huh? Sounds...heavy. How does it run on your computer?

As for the function of the Megatransporter in the game...well, I doubt that the player will ever be flying them. But hiring them as a wingman..possible. Though, what kind of wingman would have a Megatransporter to hire out?? Thus we are back to having the player buy them. Not sure how or if we would go in that direction. Still, everything you are doing is useful. I am thinking Joco might be able to use some of this code for Traffic.

Actually, I’ve yet to write the scripts that decide which pod goes to which megapod, so the first live test is still a ways off. Besides, many of those tasks will spend their time sleeping, waiting for a slot to be free in the spewer. Task one starts when buy is hit, subtasks two and three are started when it spews, and all three are halted when the pod docks. And there’s only 1 task per pod when selling.