Efficient Capital Encounters Implementation?
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While waiting for the next version of Flak 88, I decided to go back to vanilla and mod everything I always wanted to mod, but did not have the experience or knowledge to. This pertains mostly to flight dynamics and AI behavior.
At the moment one of the few things missing is adding random capital ship encounters. I did some looking into this but could not find a satisfactory answer. What is the most efficient (least modified files) method of implementing random capital ship encounters to every system? Preferably with entries that make sense such as Liberty Navy and Liberty Rogue capital ships in Liberty space.
For those curious, this is the current changelog.
- View distance opened up so that everything can be seen everywhere. Including trade lanes.
- Effects play at long distances as well
- NPC shields regenerate just as player shields do
- AI tweaked to be much more aggressive. They no longer hold back and fire only one or two guns. They go all out
- Bots/Bats removed. Instead of Bots/Bats, all shields now carry double capacity, and about 1.75 times the recharge rate. This creates an experience similar to Star Wars in which you must rely on your shield to be up at all times. This alone is an extremely interesting gameplay change.
- Wing trails removed, all ships (including player ships) now use only an engine trail.
- Standard top speed for fighters is now 160. Thrusters bring the speed up to 200. Cruise is 500.
- Ship handling adjusted to be much looser and “realistic.” This means that ships now slide around with weight rather than flying on rails as before
- NPC count increased dramatically. This makes for very interesting and very large battles.
- NPC targetting also has been adjusted so that they do not focus fire on the player ship.
- NPC gunnery is much improved, they are decently accurate.
- Field of view raised to 90. It lets you take in the scale of some battles.
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Nice, great idea removing the bots and bats, I always have to change my keyboard after a weekend of freelancer mp
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One point i’d like to raise which i see in your list, you mention you’ve changed the shields so that they regen like the player shields. If you look at the code for an npc shield and a player one you’ll see the big difference is this line
regeneration_rate = 1
All the npc shields have that, so the burning question is, why use npc shields at all, why not just give the npc’s normal shields to start with?
This is something i did in my mod some time back as i took out all the npc shield entries and changed the loadouts to normal shields players have, personally it’s a good idea as i prefer it if the shields regen as well, just not convinced two sets of shields are necessary, one for the npc’s and one for the players. I’m assuming that’s what you’ve done, if not then i’ll shut up lol
One other point, if this is going to be for SP then fine, no worries but if your going MP with this, be aware that the more npc’s you put in, (especially with your FX and missiles count) the more lag there will be. I’ve seen quite a few servers just grind to a halt and go pop with 20 players in one system having a furball with tonnes of missiles being used.
