FreeOrion

I thought i'd give adding a handful of our existing species to the game a try. Even if they act the same having different names and icons in the galaxy would be more fun.

Is there anything else i need to alter besides "species.txt"?

So the first thing i did was diff the trinth and glysache parts of "species.txt" to see what i need to understand and what i can just mindlessly copy.

Fortunately most of the text looks similar.

Some questions:
Trith reads:


While the Glysache part reads


Does this difference matter? What does it do? Or is it an omission?

The Trith section also have these lines which don't appear in the glysache section:

What does this part do? Should i care?


Is there a particular reason the Glysache are set to prefer the "terran" type planets? IIRC they were originally conceived as living on a non-earthly planet (which probably doesn't correspond to any existing EP). I'd like to to give "terran" to humans, and distribute the other aliens more or less evenly around the EP ring.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

eng_stringtable.txt will need text for the names and descriptions noted in species.txt.


I think Bigjoe5 wrote most of the current content files, so he might need to comment on motivation, but it appears that Trith apparently can't use farming focus on "uninhabitable" planets. Effects can, I think, give bonuses to target population even on uninhabitable planets, so this isn't useless. I don't think it's practically of much relevance, though, and for simplicity, you probably should stick to allowing Farming focus regardless of environment rating unless there's a particular reason to be more specific.


The first appears to be setting the Trith homeworld to "Radiated". There's currently no other way to ensure a species will end up on a planet of type that it likes, so this is a reasonable thing to do only on turn 0 for planet on which the species is present.

The second is giving moderate bonuses to target health and population on the first turn on planets with hostile environment rating... I'm not sure why this is, but it might be so that the population doesn't starve before the planet type changing effect has a chance to work. I don't know whether this is necessary, but it could make sense...


Terran for humans is fine. I'd guess that this was changed since there aren't any Humans, and neither Trith nor Gyisache are supposed to like Terran planets, but the universe generation assumes that Terran are preferred and Terran being good is intuitive for the default race...

OK, i added the species in, and set the EPs properly, and checked for several types of typos....but it won't run for me.


Hopefully my binary (0.3.15) is simply too far out of date.

The text files are attached if somebody else wants to try it on a newer compile.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Your file is also broken for me on the latest SVN.

Most obvious first problem is that you've only got the "Species" declaration at the top of the file. It needs to be the first thing in each species definition, before the name = line.

You've also omitted the quotes "" around stringtable entry names, like "SP_HUMAN" edit: and the graphic filename.

edit more: the attached version works.

I think i got it fixed and committed before i saw your attachment. I found a couple additional non-fatal typos as well.

For the curious, this how species/EPs break down.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Spiffy. I think it would be possible to make the error messages more useful than "something after the first line of the file", though I don't want to spend time on it at the moment.

Yeah, that was probably just an oversight.

This is correct - the species will die before the game starts if this segment isn't included.

I don't know why, but I always thought Gyisache were Terran-dwellers.... Anyhow, I'd eventually like to have two species for each EP, if possible. Not that this makes any difference for the time being, though...

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

Heh, well I'd like to eventually have 3 major species for each EP plus many more minor species (ideally randomly generated).

Some of the EP / species pairings are a bit arbitrary. I have no illusions that this is the final word. Things will no doubt shift around when we get to the place to be able to balance species against each other. For now, with EP being the only real distinction, 9 seems like a good number.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

On that note, if you're feeling brave, you could always give some specific bonuses to each species.

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

I don't understand the syntax well enough to do that.

Geoff, would it be easy enough to get the icon used for the population meter to be defined by species.txt? I.E. the graphic /art/icons/meter/pop.png Using the species icon instead would visually work great.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

On individual planets, the population icon for the resident species is already used.

If you mean for the empire total population, I don't really see what you're trying to do... Particularly since an empire for which the population total is calculated might have multiple species. It might make sense to have a different "general" population total icon (/art/icons/meter/pop.png) than the human icon, though you don't need to edit or put anything in species.txt for that.

My mistake, you're ahead of me. That's exactly what i meant.


An empire's total population isn't displayed anywhere currently is it?
I agree that the human icon is not a great fit, but making a species-neutral population icon is conceptually pretty tricky, especially since our species aren't all humanoid. In other words, i've thought about it before, and have no clue how to do it.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

It shown in the rightmost of the icons on the bar at the top of the screen. The others are empire resource totals.

I've added some code to universe generation to set the starting planet of an empire to (one of) the species' most-preferred planet type(s). Checking if the planet was Hostile on the first turn had problems for species for which Terran planets were Poor or Adequate.

This may seem backwards to some, but shouldn't the galaxy be generated and then the starting positions chosen from all the prefered planets? Rather than changing a planet, why not choose to start on an appropriate planet? I think it could be interesting to start in the same system with someone else. The game is being designed so planets can defend themselves in the early game.

If we want equal starting positions we should place an entire star system for each player.

Having 2 or 3 species for each EP means there would be more than 20 species. I think it would be batter to just have a few to start out with - so they can be well balanced and have lots of art and background. I'm not sure it makes sense to have every kind of planet covered in EP - I think it is better if some kinds of worlds are more popular to create something (else) to fight over.

The grand campaign mentioned in the vision statement seems (to me) to imply pregenerated galaxies, so reajusting starting planets environments would not be needed.