Player Owned Stations

I never know where to put these posts, or if someone is even going to respond to them, but I guess here is as good a place as any. I was browsing through the source code and I noticed the tStation.pog file has comments to the affect that POG generated stations cause the game to crash. Is this true all of the time, or only when using the Epic Station GUI with POG generated stations? After playing Torn Stars for a bit, I started missing the fact that I have no place to call home. While I know this is a space sim first, not and RPG, I've always like being able to have a place of my own in a game. I also really liked Lucrecia's Base from vanilla EoC, though there were some things I would have done differently. In any case, I wanted to see if it's at all possible to create a mod that allows the purchase of Player-owned stations, similar to Lucretia's Base. I want a place to dry-dock ships so I could keep them around and be able to read e-mail for any side-quests that may or may not be added to the game. You could even limit the number of ships you could dry dock based on the size and type of station (I always liked those half-asteroid stations with the landing pads). Of course, using the built-in base screen may not work since it probably only allows five kinds of ships to select, the command module, the tug, patcom, heavy corvette, and Storm Petrol. That's why I would use the same system of interaction as with the other stations in Torn Stars. You could dock to the station just like any other, and even enter it to change the load out. But if you want to change ships, that could be done from outside the station, similar to the way of buying ships, only you're not paying money (then again, there could be a storage fee).

Of course, this could all be for naught if you can't use POG generated stations as the code suggests. I guess one way around this is to add the stations in the very beginning but have them be purchasable as is, rather than being "built" and then placed by POG. I guess I'll have to think about this and dig through the code to see how the systems and stations are setup in the first place.

This is the right place for this kind of post. Actually, we are including player owned 'stations' in Unstable Space. They are not the usual stations though. They are asteroids that can be converted to a mining station by purchasing mining rigs to attach to it. Once that is done the player actually owns the station. Several of these mining stations can be owned by the player at any one time. The way this is achieved is similar to your final thoughts in the previous post. All the asteroids are placed in the geog, prior to the games start. They are activated and assigned to a faction (the players) when the player finishes surveying it and placing a rig on it.

These mining rigs would definitly feel like 'home' to the player after a while. However, they are currently lacking any features beyond the production of ore cargo pods.

Thanks for the replay, it's great to hear that the Epic Team has already been talking about this. I've been trying to play with adding a station in geog, but I can't seem to get it to work nor can I find a lot of documentation on this (which is not at all surprising), plus my searches of the forum haven't turned up much. It looks like the geog folder has three file types for each system, a .ini, a .lws, and a .map. As far as I can tell, the .lws file gives lighting information, the .ini file gives Sim placement information, and the .map file is a binary file I can't read. While I tried making the appropriate entries in the .ini file, that alone doesn't appear to work, which leave me wondering about the map file. it looks like that contains information of where each Sim is in the starmap, but since it's a binary file, I can't figure out how to edit it. Any ideas?

EDIT Update: Ok after a bit more digging, I found the batch scripts that convert the csv files to map files by running some geog command. The problem is I can't find the geog command anywhere, not even in the SDK folders, which leaves me wondering, what does this geog command do and where does it come from. I tried opening the map file with a Hex editor and while I see the ASCII names from the csv file, I see a lot of other data that I can't make heads or tails of since it's just binary data. Any help with finding the geog command or help in general with modding geography files would be a big help. Thanks!

Well, GrandpaTrout built a whole 'in-house' set of geog tools that he and I have been using for some time to build TS. There have been many iterations, as we have added and removed features to the game itself. Working with our most current version would probably be the best way to go, as older version are going to be incompatible with US. However it all depends what you want to do exactly. I wonder if GranpaTrout would mind releasing the tools we have been using...?
Your estimations of the files thus far is correct. It is the geog file which bilds the .map files. I forget whether the geog tools for TS were included with the install...is there a geog.exe in your mods folder somewhere?

There is a program that GrandpaTrout made, called 'geog.exe' that you need. I thought it was included in the Torn Stars release...However, for Unstable Space it has changed drastically. Are you still looking to fool around with making systems and adding stations VirtualCLD?