Buildable Warp-Ins Mod - cancelled

posted on September 22nd, 2011, 9:48 pm

1 - I've been considering making a Steamrunner refit to make it into a full combat ship.  Currently, it's only useful against stations and large ships.  But there would be several problems with changing the Steamrunner's stats.  It is being considered to be moved down the technology tree by 1 or more chassis requirements.

a)  The passives for the Steamrunner's weapons would have to be reapplied line-by-line for every ODF that the Steamrunner has.
b)  Additional ODFs for refitting the Steamrunner would mean that I would have to edit thousands of ODF files to apply passives to the vessels described as a refit in progress, and for the new refitted vessel.

So anything that changes the way the Steamrunner operates is going to mean I have to edit thousands of ODF files.  I won't do it without a modding group.

2 - If you want SFC removed, just select one of the alternate technology trees as they have a wide variety of what can be selected.  So this is not an issue.

3 - Excelsior, Ambassador, and Centaur are old vessels.  It's better to refit existing ones than it is to build new ones.  That's why they aren't on any of the build menus.  Some would say to also remove the Galaxy and Nebula, but those vessels are not nearly as old as the Excelsior, Ambassador, or Centaur.

4 - A bigger rebalance is already being considered.  But the idea behind this mod is that the ships undergo minimal, if any changes to their actual stats.  As necissary, the technology requirements of individual ships will be changed to make the game more balanced.  But as demonstrated, the Galaxy is countered by both the Monsoon and the Intrepid (Intrepid is the stronger counter), but counters the Excelsior II.  It does give the Federation more variety, but right now, there is not enough data to make any changes.

posted on September 22nd, 2011, 10:32 pm

I've figured out the cause of the bug with the Nova Refit.  All I have to do now is put in 2 more specials for research at Starfleet Science.  I also fixed a couple of technology tree bugs.  Stay tuned for an update.

PS:  This update will not move any ships up or down the technology tree.  It's just going to be to fix the remaining bugs to do more accurate testing.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 12:42 am

On the steamrunner: could any of the flops devs with access to the tools used to compile flops itself assist with that prehaps ?

You give them the stats, the plug them in and compile, then send you the new files ?

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 12:59 am

I think it would be faster for me to build my own program.  But the last one I tried fell apart.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 1:34 am

I really do wish they would one day release these tools, it would make life so much easier for modders and would encourage more modders to mod FO as I know a lot of the stock modders refuse to mod FO due to the tedious odf edits they would need to do.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 2:15 am

I agree.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 4:18 am

The tools are currently being rebuilt and aren't in any shape for any sort of use at the moment.

From what I understand, a public release may be possible further down the line, but it is not as simple as "hey, I'll just plug this value in, and the script will run it" - you'd have to be taught how to use the script tools, which do not have any tutorials. Thus, there would have to be a lot of time making the tools user friendly, which is also difficult.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 4:20 am

Or the Devs could hold a voting contest once every few weeks to month on the fourm here, where promising mods get the devs to assist by pre-fabing .odf's with the tool.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 4:31 am

That would take a lot of time away from development

Somebody could always go ahead and finish up this tool 
Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - RCIX's Modding Kit

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 4:54 am

That would take a lot of time away from development

Which we all certainly don't want! 

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 5:05 am

Yeah but no reason they couldn't share an older version that isn't being tinkerd with :p

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 1:42 pm

Version 2.0.5.0 is out.  See downloads on page 1 for a list of bug fixes.

posted on September 23rd, 2011, 2:18 pm

Yeah but no reason they couldn't share an older version that isn't being tinkerd with :p

The older version is non-modular, reliant on many installed programs, and very complex - it wouldn't help anybody who wasn't interested in investing months into figuring out how it works, not to mention taking a very long time to even bundle up for upload. To my knowledge there aren't any modders here who are familiar with visual basic and delphi...

posted on September 24th, 2011, 10:30 am

trust me, you dont want to have a tool, written in a language you dont even have specs for, without any kind of documentation
If we release them one day, we will have to built up a spec and doc for it, which will take a year or two. Its probably best to focus on the development of smaller tools which do the stuff you actually require, like damage with passives and the like

posted on September 24th, 2011, 11:37 am

True, or an excel spreadsheet combined with a basic script that makes the .odfs.