The Quest To Spew

I was thinking about how I’d implement how to determine the right time to “secure� and “unsecure� the megapods for a jump, when I realized... I don’t have to secure every time the ship is done loading/unloading, just when it’s getting ready for a jump. iSim.IsCapsuleJumping fills in nicely. It returns true right before the big flash starts, which should be soon enough to dodge the bug. I can just have a task watch the ship, wait for that function to return true, secure it, wait for it to be false, unsecure, rinse, repeat. I would have to make sure that all megafreighters with cargo have said task running on it. Perhaps it could be called when it loads pods or when a save is loaded. (I still haven’t looked at the save/load code, much less figured how my little system is going to work with it.)

Update:

The L-Point bug is no more, and the wingman commands are in, as well as the protections from saving/loading or using the wing commands while the spewer’s active.

Saving and loading, however, are completely out of whack. The TS save code sees the megapods as just another T_CargoPod, and saves it as such. When loaded, they appear as the minipods. I think I have a solution. If I can get the save code to save them out as ships, they should load as such, retaining their model. I need to make sure that they load AFTER their freighter (so they can attach to it), but BEFORE the minipods, which need to be able to recognize their in-megapod status and show up inside them. I’ve a pretty good idea how to do it. As a side-effect, the minipods may well end up in the megapods they started in.

All that will need yet more code in tMegaTrucking, which has passed the 1,000 line mark. And not breaking the save code, of which I’m still not entirely sure how it works. Keeping it compatible with pre-MegaTrucking saves would be a plus, too.

tMegaTrucking alpha 0.1 is up! It should be able to do everything advertised. But it is not tested that fully, especially with wingmen. So it’s the alpha-back-up-your-saves version. It also has no code for actually adding in megafreighters as wingmen (yet). It does come with an ini file for a player-flyable freighter (pods not included).

For those of you that don’t read the readme (you know who you are), you have to make your megapods with hsim tMegaTrucking.CreateMegaPod(). A megapod not created with this will make the code complain loudly and the pod disabled when you try to use it.

The megafreighter can only hold pods in the megapods, so if you pull up in one with no (or bad) megapods, it will be detected as zero capacity and the buy code will refuse the ship.

The accelerated sell code is not in there yet, so grab a book if you plan on unloading more than a few dozen pods.

Awesome. I have the distinction of being the very first person to download it through the website. This is an honour which I shall cherish every night. Those nights will most likely be quite lonely, however, due to aforementioned cherishment and the sequiturial lack of female company that such cherishment shall produce.

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"The art of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss." --Douglas Adams

Alpha 0.2 is up.

Some new code in tPodUtil, a minor (read: one line) update to tEpicFleet, and the best-try-so-far version of accelerated unloading. It’s faster, but still mighty slow.

It also has a save game giving the player a megafreighter with six pods and $10,000 spending money.

One thing I noticed is that on the sell screen, there is a cargo with no name listed as a denied sale. I think it has something to do with my alteration to tPodUtil, but what it was I don’t know.