Some general questions regarding common problems and missing features in TC and AP.

[Korventh]

First, I would like to thank you for making this game, and especially for making it free!

Anyways, the questions!
1. Any form of salvaging gameplay? Basically, making money by scrapping or repairing damaged ships for profit?
2. What about ships with very rushed and bad designs such as Xenon LX, Cobra, Blastclaw to name a few? You know, the ships that are obviously two ship hulls merged or rotated to make a "new" design, or re-arranged pieces? Will those be re-designed?
3. Any plans to make NPCs bail out during combat with other NPCs?
4. Will there be any improvements to how abandoned ships work? I really liked the random spawns in Albion Prelude, but ultimately I could only find a few in my 200+ hour playthrough. Also I had to ask this because I saw a low frequency locator in the screenshots, got me excited for the possibilities.
5. Ship personalization? There is a very limited one in TC and AP that allows changing hue and contrast, which is a step in good direction but how about being able to paint the ship's sections differently? I mean, there's already Police and Taxi variants in AP that have this kind of thing.
6. Will the player owned equipment dock be able to actually equip ships with stuff like triplex scanner, boost extension, jumpdrive? It was a chore in vanilla TC and AP to get all of the upgrades.
7. Undocking causing some ships to explode, like the Khaak Corvette or Kyoto clipping with shipyards?
8. Are gates going to be bigger to avoid collisions with big ships?
9. Improvements to marine training system? Like, seeing how long the training will last, progress bar, ability to train fighting skill etc.
10. Repair laser making it's way onto ships / dedicated repairing vessels?

Sorry for the amount of questions, and thanks again for making this expansion! Cheers!

[CBJ]

Many of the things you're asking about would require significant changes to the core game engine, and so are well outside the scope of this project. Redesigning existing ships is also not something the team had the means to do.

The key features of the new game are listed on the Steam store page which is linked in the sticky thread at the top of the forum. There are quite a few smaller additions and changes too, but those are the bigger ones.

[MegaBurn]

Existing scripts and mods can cover this, but may need updates for new FL features...

1. Salvage gameplay: Hopefully "Salvage Commands and NPCs" will be updated. Also hope "Salvage Command Suite" is updated, but there are a few balance issues (there is a balance patch around). Also, "Ship Loot" is an old early-TC script with some unusual salvage features, ship upgrades from looted parts, and scrapping station wreckage (iirc its broken, maybe better to recreate than fix). Could also port some features from "Salvage Mod" from X3-R (e.g. scrap yards, repair kits, salvage drones, etc).

2. Ship Design: Hopefully XRM will be updated, maybe along with a full spread of combat & transport variants via X3 Customizer. Or better, I would love to join a community project to merge the big mods together, previously this would have been a political impossibility but now the developers have moved on, so maybe there's a small chance...

3. NPC Bailing: Improvements to piracy related gameplay were announced (details TBA). Hopefully "NPC Bailing (Expanded)" will be updated. XRM has a script which overhauls System Override Software behavior (hacking with hacker chips to force eject enemy pilots). "Improved Boarding" is somewhat related, with NPC ships capturing NPC ships. X3 Customizer has a transform which patches x3story.obj to preserve bailed ship equipment. It would be really nice if the JSON script library required by NPC Bailing were replaced with a SE/MD standard JSON facility written in KC, with much better performance and more flexibility.

4. Abandoned Ships: There are a few abandoned ship spawners, but this seems excessive with "NPC Bailing". What's really needed here is more spawns with stories, mission wrappers or at least log entries with clues, rare or special ships that are worthwhile vs tons of bailed NPC ships (for my setup I added advanced, prototype, and enhanced variants).

5. Ship Personalization: This is one area where mods can't do much, or rather what can be done is so clunky and difficult no one has bothered, e.g. create tons of ship variants with different textures (or skin index texture overdrives) and a script to switch between variants (fugly ship cloning). Maybe someone more knowledgeable can help with the details here. To my limited knowledge (I'm not an artist), it would help if a tool could easily batch generate ship textures from existing textures plus simple overlays, like solid colors, metallic finishes, camouflage styles, flames, etc (e.g. mechs in MechWarrior 3 & 4 are an old but good example). Next, it would really help if a FL patch or x3story.obj mod could add a SE function to change the skin index value on an individual ship instance (no variants, no cloning, ideally in any shipyard). I don't know how decal mapping works, maybe something more is possible with user supplied images.

6. Dock Wares: There are a few iterations of Dockware Manager, hopefully one will be updated for FL.

7. Safe Undocking: That's a bug, hopefully its been fixed and a script isn't needed. If not, hopefully "Safe Undocking GZ" will be updated for FL.

8. Bigger Gates: I'd guess "XChange Guild Portals" will work as-is, but there are a few other iterations of bigger gates, and gateless wormholes.

9. Marine Training: Cycrow said the menus can be modified, so sure, why not? There are a few iterations of marine training scripts, though (afaik) none offer progress bars.

10. Repair Lasers: MARS puts them on fighter drones, repair ships are common in the larger mods, XRM has a custom laser variant which uses quantum tubes for ammo. That said, "Marine Repairs and Training" is more effective.

My understanding is most of the above will work as-is in FL, but would benefit from updates for new FL features in gameplay and scripting.

[fisher 2000]

I'm wondering a lot about the diplomacy system. I know that there is now true sector claiming and I'm curious if diplomacy will give us the risk I yearn for when making an empire, a full-on invasion by the AI trying to destroy my assets.

[MegaBurn]

Yeah, should be interesting. Several scripts had aspects of this over the years, "LIFE", "Improved Races" 1 & 2, "Military Base Response Revamp", "Race Response Fleets", "Sector Takeover", and related features in XTC and LU. So there is lots of prior work to reference for ideas, but each of those also had problems, mostly relating to hardcoded game behavior, limitations, and performance.

I wonder if anything will be done to represent sector population and settled planets, e.g. militarily, economically, diplomatically, ship spawning, taxes, orbit-surface combat, occupation forces, hostages, exodus fleets, notion of the player faction having citizens which have problems needing attention, player economic zone management including NPC companies, etc. I always thought this was one of those irreconcilable problems that prevented players from capturing populated sectors by force as an officially accepted part of normal gameplay. There was a script project to represent planets, basically it was a "planet dock" (trade dock) manager to create a facade of economic activity (incoming & outgoing wares & ship traffic), I can't remember the name. LIFE might have had something like that too (been a while).

If population and planets are a factor, another possibility is city stations, which makes sense for new sectors without terraformed planets. e.g. repurpose corporate HQ stations, dock manager script mimics economic activity, etc.

[Korventh]

[quote=MegaBurn post_id=5041003 time=1618399702 user_id=192691]
Existing scripts and mods can cover this, but may need updates for new FL features...[/quote]

Oh I know that modders can do wonders with this game, but after losing a 200+ hour TC save after I had to reinstall windows, I only play vanilla. That's why I hope this game will have some features found in mods officially implemented in FL. Example would be the Detector mod which essentially just makes the in-game Detector scanner work outside the plot too.




Also, if you are curious how I "lost" my save, I didn't, I backed it up along with all the mods that I was using, but after setting everything up again on a new system, it just wouldn't load everything correctly.

[MegaBurn]

Korventh,
Sorry to hear it, you're really missing out, but yeah, that happened a lot with early TC and some heavier duty NPC behavior scripts. Now AP with XRM, or XTC-AP, or LU, are fairly solid, I feel XRM is as safe as vanilla (...after setup). And there's lots of small simple stuff that's safe, but its really important to read release threads for bug reports and take good notes. Usually the trouble starts with either, bugs in older TC scripts, or using the no feature left behind approach, or multiple global NPC behavior overhaul scripts breaking down under high load, or an install turning into a jumbled mess. Some people have posted their script/mod lists and results, problems, play time, etc.

[Cycrow]

Technically the Detector was a mod first, then added into the game in the Community made plot.

However in Farnham's Legacy, there is the LFL device instead, you can see it in action in the gameplay trailer on steam.
its used to find lots of things around the galaxy, including derelict ships and ware/upgrade crates

[Korventh]

Technically the Detector was a mod first, then added into the game in the Community made plot.

However in Farnham's Legacy, there is the LFL device instead, you can see it in action in the gameplay trailer on steam.
its used to find lots of things around the galaxy, including derelict ships and ware/upgrade crates

Hah, haven't noticed that there's a new video, just watched it and I have to say the ship browser and the LFL implementation is *exactly* what I always wanted in the game since X2. THANK YOU!

[Reimu Hakurei]

5. Ship personalization? There is a very limited one in TC and AP that allows changing hue and contrast, which is a step in good direction but how about being able to paint the ship's sections differently? I mean, there's already Police and Taxi variants in AP that have this kind of thing.

What the Police and Taxi variants have literally is just the hue and saturation thing.

Many of the things you're asking about would require significant changes to the core game engine

Why are you saying this? I feel like I'm missing something here, but your claim appears to be untrue.
- Point 1 is already in vanilla — second-hand ships can be repaired for profit, and ships can be scrapped at the player HQ as I recall. Not sure what OP wants here, maybe just the PHQ scrapping more accessible, which would very well be scripted by a mod.
- Points 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, and 10 have all been covered by existing mods, meaning that evidently no engine changes are requried.
- Point 6 looks like it will be a feature in FL, judging from previews.