Topic: Custom dynaverse missions: EAW, OP, SFC3 (Read 66528 times)

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #380 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 #381 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 #382 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 #383 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 #384 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 #385 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 #386 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 #387 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 #388 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 #389 on:** March 04, 2003, 09:37:08 am »

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

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #390 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 #391 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 #392 on:** March 05, 2003, 07:18:37 pm »

ok..
.. awaiting your OP version..

-- Luc

Carrie · « **Reply #393 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?

NuclearWessels · « **Reply #394 on:** March 06, 2003, 08:19:59 am »

I think it addresses most of the things we've been talking about (but it's 6am, so a little bleary on all that right now

) For the non-drafting slots it should handle mods better. I haven't adjusted the OP-only ones yet (like Suprise Reversed), but hopefully will get to those soon.

dave

Carrie · « **Reply #395 on:** March 06, 2003, 12:03:06 pm »

On the OP side of things, I'd suggest /not/ touching Overwhelming, just so you know. It works very well already

I took that 450 BPV ship,, and wound up facing several battleships. eep!

My ship was, well, hurting, after. Though admittedly, that SCS mod hasn't proven quite as effective as a battleship, as the other one. even with a high number of batts, recharging the mauler quickly leaves it pretty vulnerable to whatever its facing.

:Love the OP versions of the EAW stuff, gang. Thanks!

RogueJedi_XC · « **Reply #396 on:** March 06, 2003, 12:57:26 pm »

You realize, of course, that with Dave's evil nature being, well, Evil, you just challenged him to tweak that mission...

BTW, fantastic work, NW!

Carrie · « **Reply #397 on:** March 11, 2003, 12:48:29 am »

Y'know, I just thought of a possible random challenge for Firesoul and/or NW. I was just playing Operation Tyr again, and realized what was so cool about it, that was missing from so many other missions. Fleet control for all allied ships! In that and Dropping the Hammer, you can use the communications console to specify a ship as a fleet target. Any chance that the coding for that can be stripped apart, and glued into any other missions with multiple ships?

Darkwalker · « **Reply #398 on:** March 11, 2003, 01:56:35 am »

::engaging erratic maneuvers to dodge the EAW/OP mission discussion::

Dave, I downloaded the SFC3 missions and started running a new campaign incorporating them. I changed the political tensions to allow a war between the Klingons and Feds (I'm playing Klingon) and to keep the Roms and Borg as enemies. In the course of playing the campaign today, I've found a couple issues which may or may not be bugs. If you could give me some feedback about them, I'd appreciate it. Here are the issues:

1) Being forced to accept or forfeit your custom missions, as opposed to just choosing to accept or ignore the stock missions (i.e., I can accept or ignore a standard "Scan" mission, but have to either accept or forfeit a "Planetary Survey" mission). Was the accept/forfeit choice intentional, or does that need to be changed? Side note--I've started encountering "Scan" missions which do not have the forfeit option associated with them, but which I must now accept before I can leave the hex; do you think that's somehow tied to using your missions for the campaign?

2) When running the "Patrol" missions, I've yet to encounter any enemies. I've seen other ships which are supposed to be my allies, but those ships have been Klingon, Fed, or Rom and I'm supposed to be at war with the Feds and the Roms. The map indicates that there's a Fed-Kling-Rom war going, and yet I'm finding Fed or Rom allies and no enemies. What gives?

Aside from these issues, the SFC3 missions seem to work just fine. I really like the new maps for the various missions, too. Gives everything just a bit more variety. I know everyone's excited about the EAW/OP missions, but please don't forget us SFC3 players.

Looking forward to your feedback...and some more SFC3 missions from you...

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Topic: Custom dynaverse missions: EAW, OP, SFC3 (Read 66528 times)