Topic: Custom dynaverse missions: EAW, OP, SFC3 (Read 65731 times)

FireSoul · « **Reply #120 on:** March 01, 2003, 04:05:56 pm »

That's the idea.

Carrie · « **Reply #121 on:** March 01, 2003, 04:59:28 pm »

Not to bug or anyhting, and I'm not sure if this is a bug or what, but I just got the better Planetary Assault with the Battle Stations, attacking the northwest neutral hex from the UFP border, up by Mirak space. And I noticed... it had the battle stations, def platforms, and shipyards... but no defending ships? Is that just something that'll happen in neutral space sometimes, or is it an error?

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #122 on:** March 02, 2003, 04:52:03 pm »

Interesting ... it may be that it's failing to find an appropriately sized defender (based on your ship strength and the race you're fighting). That probably means I've made the selection range too narrow. I'll do a bit of twiddling with it and see what I can come up with.

thanks,
dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #123 on:** March 02, 2003, 10:07:21 pm »

Here's another one:
Scout mission. I have a Z-BCV.

No enemies were generated. Dunno why by looking at the code.
-- Luc

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #124 on:** March 02, 2003, 10:45:10 pm »

Well, in both missions mentioned the scripts were using a more restricted set of ships than usual (usual is Frigate through Battleship). In one it specified HeavyCruiser or up, in the other it specified BCH or lower. I'm guessing that, in the BPV ranges available and based on whatever difficulty settings were being used it just didn't come up with suitable opponents. I'm working my way through all the scripts correcting a few other settings and adding the EAW/OP detection, so I'll check and correct those as well and we'll see if that takes care of the problem.

dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #125 on:** March 02, 2003, 11:49:48 pm »

Surprise Reverse, ED version:
Year: 2284.3 (Late)
PlayerShip: Z-BCV.

Enemies Generated:
K-B10 (yeeouch)
K-B10 (yeeouch x2)
K-XDG (in late era??)
K-D6DB
K-BTK (OP+ Shiplist, BattleTug is a BCH.)

.. why would it generate an X-Ship? .. in my shiplist, that's like .. uhm.. 20 years ahead of its time.
.. also, why would it generate such powerful ships?

-- Luc

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #126 on:** March 03, 2003, 01:09:47 am »

Hmmm - it's using the built-in mCreateFleet to generate the opposition, so that's a tough one to answer. Will do some exploring.

dave

Carrie · « **Reply #127 on:** March 03, 2003, 02:21:09 am »

I've gotten several of those. And a few shipyard assaults against various empires, where the defenders never showed up.

Admittedly, I'm playing a modded ship so boosted that its stupid (SCS at 450BPV, no shield boosts), but in the NW missions, finding multiple Klingon battleships is still... quite daunting. When it pulls enemies. It should NOT be pulling Q-SHIPS, of ANY size, to attack or defend against it, though. Is that number pushing the scripts out of whack by itself? It should be playable with whatever modding you have in place.

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #128 on:** March 03, 2003, 10:55:16 am »

All the AI drafting is based on ratios of the player ships' BPVs ... for instance "draft an enemy between 0.65 and 1.15 times the size of ship 1 of the drafting player". If it can't find anything in that range in the enemy's shiplist then it generates nothing, so yes, using a heavily boosted ship will definitely skew things.

Unfortunately, lowering the bottom end of that range (e.g. making it 0.35 or something) doesn't work either, because then when you're in a smaller ship you find yourself drafting freighters and low-end police ships. To make things worse, in EAW it simply grabs the smallest valid enemy in the specified range, whereas in OP it more or less randomly chooses anything in the range as far as I can tell --- making balancing the ranges to work for both games even trickier.

The balancing is currently aimed to work best for player ships that are each in the 75-200 BPV range - the further outside that you get (on either end) the more likely you are to encounter some bum drafts. Note that's on a per-ship basis, so flying a pair of 180 BPV ships will result in more balanced enemy fleet composition than flying a single 360 BPV ship.

And for the out-of-era problems between late and advanced era in OP .... well, not much I can do there since the API methods do the actual ship selection for the fleets.

Ugly huh?
dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #129 on:** March 03, 2003, 12:09:58 pm »

How about adding a check to see if enemy team exists and add fail-safe ship creation code there? (With a timer)..

-- Luc

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #130 on:** March 03, 2003, 01:12:26 pm »

Heh - yes, it's a good plan ... just have to muster up the enthusiasm

I'm about halfway through the current rebuild to get them into a common code base, so I'll finish this off and do some testing of it. Next week I'll see about adding timers and backup ship generation to each of them. (Maybe ... spending an entire Monday doing the same thing to 60ish scripts is the mental equivalent of whacking your skull vigourously with a ballpeen hammer

)

dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #131 on:** March 03, 2003, 01:24:59 pm »

I understand.
I'm not asking for now-now-now..

.. I was just suggesting a possible fix for the problem. I doubt that all missions need it. Maybe start with the ones we know have this problem?
-- Luc

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #132 on:** March 03, 2003, 02:02:06 pm »

Definitely. Hopefully the hull class corrections will take care of some of it, then we'll see which missions still have problems finding opponents when flying the bigger hulls.

dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #133 on:** March 03, 2003, 02:20:11 pm »

Ok.. why don't you keep this idea kicking around?
.. do the current release and we'll test from there on.

Carrie · « **Reply #134 on:** March 04, 2003, 09:25:53 am »

That's interesting to hear, NW. There's no way to put the API to see a bigger number, and split it into multiple ships, then?

FireSoul · « **Reply #135 on:** March 04, 2003, 09:37:08 am »

That's an interesting failsafe method..
.. maybe a "mCreateFleet" call?

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #136 on:** March 04, 2003, 11:07:03 am »

Quote:

That's interesting to hear, NW. There's no way to put the API to see a bigger number, and split it into multiple ships, then?

Yes and no.

If it's a slot where drafting is involved, then no - you simply get the one kick at the specifying the size range and live with the results.

For teams that are purely AI npc's (like the fleet you attack in surprise reversed, or the convoys etc) you can break it down with a little extra work.

In fact, the surprise reversed does that a little already - I increase the number of ships in the enemy fleet as the BPV increases, to try and prevent it from just generating a small number of huge ships.

From the looks of things that's not quite enough though, so splitting it into two create-fleet calls beyond a certain BPV range sounds like a good idea.

dave

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #137 on:** March 05, 2003, 06:23:45 pm »

OK, the latest update (v. 3.2) for the EAW mission pack is available at
http://www.sfcx.org/downloads/mirrors/NuclearWessels/EAWMissions.zip

Lots of little fixes (text, ship strengths, and fixes for a couple of missions that showed incorrect results in some battles).

I'm still testing the OP version of the pack, hopefully will have that out on Monday.

dave

FireSoul · « **Reply #138 on:** March 05, 2003, 07:18:37 pm »

ok..
.. awaiting your OP version..

-- Luc

Carrie · « **Reply #139 on:** March 06, 2003, 01:11:22 am »

Woohoo, good to hear

Is the stuff I asked about in this version, so it can better deal with mods thrown at it?

News:

Topic: Custom dynaverse missions: EAW, OP, SFC3 (Read 65731 times) var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true};

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Topic: Custom dynaverse missions: EAW, OP, SFC3 (Read 65731 times)