FreeOrion

Edit: Here is a link to the most recent content updates. /edit

I have finished revising both the construction tree and the production tree.

There was some doubt about whether the construction tree was any longer necessary, particularly since Geoff made the construction meter's usefulness limited to supply range. Fear not: There are 10 construction apps, 8 of them functional, and none of them increase max construction. Not a one. 0.

In my opinion, these two are the best trees I've done yet: I'm probably going to revise the Growth and Learning trees later to conform to this format. It's actually a tree format this time. One main (trunk) theory leads to a trunk theory of the next level and two secondary (branch) theories each lead to an application (or they will; there's still room in the construction tree for a few more techs). At least that's what it's supposed to look like. Unfortunately, the UI seems insistent on not making it look like a tree. It's supposed to be a tree, though. Topologically, it's a tree. If you look at the first two levels of the production tree, you'll get a feeling of the elegance I had planned for these trees. There's also a little bush next to each tree, sprouting from a single (root) theory which is dependent on a high level theory in some other category. I'd also like to reiterate that the current research costs are for organizational purposes only. They're not even pretending to be balanced at this point.

I know I said I wouldn't make any more refinements that unlock buildings, but for the sake of symmetry, I made autofactories the same as autolabs. They can be changed at the same time, if need be. There are also two buildings that don't do anything, Space Elevator because of the limitations of the effects groups (can't just suddenly make ships cost less at one location) and Megalith because it's now an app of Transcendental Architecture and there wasn't anything sufficiently amazing I could do with it.

Also, even though I have planetary starlane drive set to destroy the planet on a 50% chance if there's no interstellar lighthouse in range, it will never do it. Not even if I set the probability to .99. I believe this is a problem with Random or Destroy, although they work fine if I try to destroy ships on a 50% chance. Also, it works (well, it crashes, but I take that to mean that the Destroy effect became active) if I remove the Random condition.

But anyway, a lot of things work so here it is: The latest version of the tech tree. Again, anybody who hasn't yet, please download the ship parts file and the planet specials file from the Growth tree revision.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Also, since the ships tree is next, the implementation of different sized slots will be exceedingly useful for the creation of new hulls and making strategic differences between hull size/shape. Of course if that task is not trivial, I can always leave hull design and making parts fit different sized slots for later.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I pre_unlocked the drive and beacon, and built the drive on the homeworld and the beacon in an adjacent system. The result was a turn or two later, I had no homeworld and my beacon was gone.

If you're still using v0.3.13, try a different effect, such as changing the planet type or adding a special. I'm suspect the problem is with WithinDistance and the And or Or conditions.

Edit: I also researched and built a lighthouse and then built a beacon and nearby drive, and the result was a successfully moved planet and uncrashed game. /Edit


There are no plans for different sized slots.

There are External and Internal slots, and there could perhaps be a HullType name = "NAME" condition that would match ships with the indicated hull, or a ContainsPart name = "NAME" that works the same for ships that contain the indicated part. ContainsPart could perhaps also take parameters to indicate the number of such parts in the ship, although I'm not sure how useful that'd be.

Edit2: In your buildings.txt, you've got several bits of script along the lines of:

Is there a reason not to have both effects in a single effectsgroup?

Also, for the whole transformer web, is there anything it does that couldn't be accomplished by a single building with appropriate focus-dependent effects? The transform-via-destroy is a nice test case, but is of doubtful use in game... /Edit

Just by replacing Destroy with SetPlanetType type = Ocean, I am able to see results.

I'll take that to mean that the problem is fixed in the latest build of FO and design accordingly.

The only thread I was able to find on the subject was this one, and it was hardly conclusive.
Has this idea been dismissed? I would find slot sizes extremely useful for balancing different hulls and parts, but if that's not possible there are still ways to give strategic differences to different hull sizes/shapes.

Since CreateBuilding doesn't work on v0.3.13 (at the moment, circumstances prevent getting a subversion client; I should be able to soon), I couldn't be sure that specifying Source as the scope for the CreateBuilding effect would create the building on the object containing the source object. If that is the case, those two effects groups could be merged easily.

The point of the transformer isn't to simply have the effects of multiple buildings - on the contrary, it's meant specifically not to have those effects, but rather to pretend to. If the name BLD_T_REPLICATORS appears on the building list as Replicators, and the description it uses is the Replicators description, there's no way for an enemy to distinguish them from the real thing when he mouses over the buildings list for a planet. As such, the enemy will mistake the planet housing that object for a strategic target, potentially drawing his forces away from the real targets. Also, this might cause the enemy to get a false impression of the empire's current state, since he will suppose that minerals are being replicated, and thus infer that the owner's empire is low on minerals, possibly giving him another false target.

Or, take Imperial Palace, for example. Supposing Imperial Palace doesn't have its telltale construction bonus (which is of dubious value now anyway), and further suppose that the name of an empire's capitol which appears on the galaxy map isn't distinguishable from that of a regular colony. Now, if an empire's stockpile is to be kept at his Imperial Palace, that makes it a perfect target for blockades. Most likely, the enemy will divert significant attention to a planet on which he thinks is the empire's capitol. A blockade lasting many turns ensues, the enemy thinking he has frozen the other empire's production, leaving him free to take his time building up his own forces. The enemy comes in with his fleet of warships, thinking he has obtained an easy victory with his clever blockading tactics... only to come face to face with a massive death fleet which destroys his own fleet and subsequently sweeps through his empire, capturing and/or destroying all of his colonies.

This is the purpose of the Transformer: not versatility, but subversion and deception.

Edit: Also, allowing ship hulls to have a certain base stealth value would be very useful, and I believe that is something for which there are plans?

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Maybe... Could you send a save where all I need to do it his turn once or thrice that would cause a crash for you?



It's a possible future addition, but for v0.4 we'll just stick to external and internal slots.


You're essentially relying on a UI limitation to hide information from players. This is a bad idea. By examining their save file, it would be possible to know what sort of building it realy is, even if the names in the UI are the same. Alternatively, they could edit the stringtable file to give the two buildings different names, and be able to tell them apart within the UI. AIs will also be able to tell the difference easily.


I don't remember if there was a specific decision to not have stealth on hulls, and can't think of any design reasons, but there's a minor technical limitation (the parser that reads hulls from the txt file can have at most 12 immediate sub-parsers before having to make sub-sub-parsers) that makes adding anything to hulls a bit difficult right now. I recently added general effects group parsing (back) to parts, but not hulls, since the latter's parser couldn't fit the extra sub-parser easily.

I'm not sure why, but I'm being told by the forums that "The extension sav is not allowed."


Understood.

We have no other way than the UI to hide information from the player. Cloaked ships on the galaxy map, hidden planets in a star system, the contents of all unexplored systems - these are things that we don't allow the player to see, but they are there, in the save files, are they not? The AI could have access to all of this knowledge if we wanted it to, could it not? I could go into the text files and delete the effects groups for all the buildings, and that would be the equivalent of altering the stringtable entry for the transformer, but we're not designing the game based on the assumption that the player is going to do that. At some point, we have to just say "This is what we want the player to see, this is what we want the AI to see, and if the player goes into the save files to examine details of the galaxy which he is unable to detect in-game, that player is cheating."

Hulls having base stealth values isn't necessary at the moment, but it would be nice later, possibly before the release of v.4.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Zip it. Save files are huge, and leaving .sav as a not-accepted file upload format prevents uploading without strongly-encouraged and highly-effective compression.


The server has a big list of objects that exist in the universe. When it sends a player a turn update, included in the update is a list of objects that that player knows about. The list sent to players is (in general) a subset of the list the server keeps; the players' lists are filtered according to visibility limits. If a player can't see an object, then that object isn't included in the update that's sent to that player. If a player can see an object but dosn't have sufficient visibility of the object to know details about its contents or statistics or name, then the player only gets sent basic information such as location and type (eg. it's a system) of the object.


No: the AI, like any player, is only sent information of and about objects it can see according to the rules of the game.


If a player has access to a save file, he or she could look into it and see everything, yes, but that's a much bigger undertaking than just editing a stringtable entry. Consider multiplayer games, where unlike a single-player game, issues of fair play are more important, and in which the save file could be stored on a server, and players wouldn't have access to it; they'd only be able to connect to the server and play with the updates they're sent, and would have no way to learn anything more about the gamestate than they're supposed to know.

Here - 1 more turn and the game crashes for me:


First of all, I need to know how a few things work. In multiplayer, is it possible for a person to go into the text files and modify things without anyone else's being affected? And if so, could not that player then simply cut the build cost and time of his own buildings and ships and no one else's? If that were the case, there are bigger fair play problems to worry about than changing the stringtable entries on some building. We need to make a fundamental decision about whether or not to trust the player when designing content.

If that's not the case however, there might be a valid case to be made for removing the transformer. I'd rather not though; I think it's quite a novel idea.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

On a different subject, I have no idea what the format is for writing fighters as ship parts. All the other parts already had examples in the ship parts file (except PD, but that was pretty easy to figure out), but there were no fighters, nor could I find the format on the wiki. An example of or link to the format for fighter ship parts would be very useful.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

That crashes my server when I try to load the game. I suspect this is because it was saved using various content files like buildings.txt that are different from the ones I'm using. I'm not sure which of your various threads are up to date, so could you post here, or make a separate thread for your own content modifications in which you post all the latest ones?


A player can modify their local versions of content definition files, and this will have no effect on the (remote) server or the other players, but this won't let the player do anything they shouldn't be able to. If a player modifies content files to make something cheaper, have different effects or be unlocked when it shouldn't, that would make the thing appear cheaper or different in their GUI, but wouldn't affect the content files that the server uses to determine how long it takes to produce the the thing.

The game is built around the server deciding what exists in the universe and what happens, and players telling the server what to do with their empire by issuing orders... More or less, all a player is doing when playing a turn is issuing orders to the server. The server actually implements the orders, and if a player issues an illegal or invalid order, it is or should be rejected and/or something crashes, depending how crash-prone a particular game system is right now.

When designing content, the server doesn't tell players anything they're not supposed to know. If your building has several different buildings it can morph into, players effectively will know about that from their turn updates, and your building isn't going to work. Content that gives players an advantage to edit their local stringtable or do other hack-like modifications to get an advantage aren't acceptable.

We might later add some functionality to make objects appear as other objects to players that don't control / own them, perhaps tied into the visibility, stealth and detection systems, but this isn't going to happen soon.




type can be Interceptor or Bomber. I'm not sure why there are both anti-ship and anti-fighter damage, regardless of type. I think the rest is self-explanitory.

Note that an effectsgroups line between location and graphic will also be accepted in the SVN version, but not v0.3.13.

I see. For now, I'll modify that building to serve a versatile role rather than a deceptive role. A similar building can be added if/when that functionality is added.


Here are the files I'm using right now (split into two posts, due to 3 attachment limit). Although many of them have/may have been modified since the time I made that save file, I checked to make sure I can still run and crash the game in 1 turn.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Here are the rest of the files. The stringtable was taking forever to upload, and I figured it probably wouldn't do you much good anyway.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

It would probably have been easier to zip all the files together into one not-so-big compressed file.

I appear to also need your specials.txt

You're probably right.

Here:

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I loaded Destroy_Crash.sav, hit turn a few times, but got no crashes.