Megadroid's Mission Mod Preview

posted on July 30th, 2009, 3:50 pm

should all work with FleetOps, as the called functions are still the same

posted on July 30th, 2009, 5:00 pm

Yes, as long as I stick to function calls it should just appear as normal activity to FO. I think.

Just a micro update - Just got a Starbase to build a class D planet. Completely encased the starbase - nothing could shoot it, it couldnt shoot out. However ships it built could escape. Interersting.

posted on July 30th, 2009, 5:12 pm

Wow cool 

Didn't you get the AI to do some other weird things with the map? (I can't remember the specifics)

Glad that it works with FO... this could be quite a bright new dawn

posted on July 30th, 2009, 5:17 pm

I did make it so you could set an AI to share a player team, but still need to reimplement that.

In the test mission there is an Akira that runs away from the Enterprise (until it reaches a certain distance away, then it stops). If you chase it to the edge of the map it goes back to the centre and you get a reward (random amount of each resource). When it goes back to the middle you can chase it again.

Once I've finished buildings I plan to try making my own test AI, see if I can improve it from stock.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 9:12 am

nice work. glad somebody takes on the singleplayer campaign stuff. the lua implementation is a much better idea from what i had in mind
the focus of our development is still multiplayer, a campaign is planned for a (much) later phase. the singleplayer mission display is also disabled in the current version of fleet operations, but should be no problem to integrate a switch for that if someone is interested to do a campaign mod then.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 2:18 pm

That switch would be nice DOCa, as I can then test against Fleet Ops and find any compatibility issues.

Right now I'm putting my custom AI in a 4 way battle again 3 standard AIs. Not going so well as I have yet to link the command to tell a ship to build a station into Lua. I'm going to try and develop my AI so that it doesn't cheat, and actually has to explore.

Might be too ambitious, but we'll see how it goes...

posted on July 31st, 2009, 5:09 pm

as far as i know the ai only considers what it has explored already anyway. still, the ai know exactly where resources can be found in the map, but thats not a real kind of cheat

posted on July 31st, 2009, 5:28 pm

Doesn't it have infinite resources though?

posted on July 31st, 2009, 5:31 pm

yep, the AI already has to explore that can lead to problems on very large maps where the AI cant find you to attack

Nope, the ai has the same resource management as a player, we just set it in Fleet Operations to have infinite resources, in order to give a challange, as an AI player is not wanted to follow a certain strategy, but should feature all vessels a race can provide, in order to be interessting (but thats neither strategic, nor efficient, so the AI would always lose)
We are working on more advanced AIs, that follow certain, but random or map-wise selected strategies, we will turn inifite resources off then again

posted on July 31st, 2009, 5:33 pm

There are several 'resource cheats' in RTS games, and the AI could use any, even several combined.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 5:35 pm

Thats interesting about the AI. I'll keep on making mine anyway, as its a good way to make sure all everything that's needed is in the mod.

posted on August 1st, 2009, 12:39 am

nice work. glad somebody takes on the singleplayer campaign stuff. the lua implementation is a much better idea from what i had in mind
the focus of our development is still multiplayer, a campaign is planned for a (much) later phase. the singleplayer mission display is also disabled in the current version of fleet operations, but should be no problem to integrate a switch for that if someone is interested to do a campaign mod then.

Hi Doca,

I'm semi helping megadroid with his work, mainly using his code to make better maps for him to test stuff with, however most of my modding experience is with flops so if you could post a mini patch to allow us to switch single player back on (i can add the mission folder myself) it would be great as then i could test his code agaisnt flops and A2 at the same time and also test the pathing, plus certian commands that tell a ship to impulse to a location and others that tell it to warp.

posted on August 1st, 2009, 12:44 am

so will there be a release were we can create/edit missions like in the map editor (window opens and asks if u wanna create a mission or edit a mission) or aleat will we be able to create new missions so for example instead of just having borg, fed and roms we can add missions for the other races aswell.

and how near is the editor before your ready to release it

posted on August 1st, 2009, 1:33 am

so will there be a release were we can create/edit missions like in the map editor (window opens and asks if u wanna create a mission or edit a mission) or aleat will we be able to create new missions so for example instead of just having borg, fed and roms we can add missions for the other races aswell.

and how near is the editor before your ready to release it

i cant answer on the tools part as megadroid would have to create those, and right now unless doca releases a switch you cant use any in flops (no menu for sp missions), you can make them for flops though....

in terms of making missions, if you look at the mmm.lua you will find everything you need in there to make a mini mission, you can make mission (though basic) right now, just have to do all the scripting in notepad ++ or any word program really....

posted on August 1st, 2009, 2:28 am

Some things I've discovered just now could mean that a tool for editing the campaign selection screen (the campaigns that are displayed, and the missions they contain) is not too far off. By not far off, I mean something like a week, provided nothing gets in the way. For example sleeping all day after spending a night unmangling mangled C++ function names