Effects?

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Dart00_Tech
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Re: Effects?

#16 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Bigjoe5 wrote:Imperial Palace, Megalith, Concentration Camps, Industrial Farms, Black Hole Power Generator, Tectonic Instability, High Axial Tilt, Very Slow Rotation and Tidally Locked Rotation all have newly introduced spelling or grammatical errors, or are worded much more awkwardly than before. There are also a few other descriptions that have retained grammatical errors or missing words, but those aren't really your fault...

Genome bank contains a sentence in the fluff which explains vaguely what the building does, and seems out of place now that its effect is fully described above.

I don't know if this is due to your edit or eleazar's, but many of the descriptions don't flow as well if the order of the meat and the fluff is simply reversed; for instance, starting the Space Elevator description with "The supply meter of the planet which contains this building is tripled" doesn't sound very good - much better is something like "Triples Supply on the planet on which it is built." Gaia Transformation is another building with this problem, probably among others, and in the case of Solar Orbital Generator, the description barely makes sense anymore. (Also, you didn't capitalize "supply" in this description - was that deliberate? There are also many other cases of this.)

Collective Thought Network says:

"Increases... research on Planets with the Research focus by one and a half."

And lastly, the sole purpose of Construction in the game at the moment is to increase resource supply length. This is why all the things that affect construction say (or rather, said) "Increases/decreases max resource supply range by X."
Alight thanks, Im not done with the string-table yet but will address those concerns, thank you for bringing them to my attention.

Also as a personal note, try to say at least "1" thing that's positive so I don't feel like I spent 5 hours just making things worse and feel like crap...I mean im all for constructive criticism but come'on man, least say "something" positive about it.... :(

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Re: Effects?

#17 Post by Dart00_Tech »

What does "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK" do exactly? The meat talks about a "stealth-focus" but I dont think we have one? And Buildings.txt doesn't list any effects for it?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Effects?

#18 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dart00_Tech wrote:What does "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK" do exactly? The meat talks about a "stealth-focus" but I dont think we have one?
Some species have a stealth focus available on planets that have that building:

Code: Select all

        Focus
            name = "FOCUS_STEALTH"
            description = "FOCUS_STEALTH_DESC"
            location = Or [
                Contains Building "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK"
                And [
                    Contains Building "BLD_TRANSFORMER"
                    OwnerHasTech "SHP_PLANET_CLOAK"
                ]
            ]
            graphic = "icons/focus/stealth.png"

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Re: Effects?

#19 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Dart00_Tech wrote:What does "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK" do exactly? The meat talks about a "stealth-focus" but I dont think we have one?
Some species have a stealth focus available on planets that have that building....
But it doesn't do anything in Buildings.txt?

Code: Select all

BuildingType
    name = "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK"
    description = "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK_DESC"
    buildcost = 1500
    buildtime = 8
    location = OwnedBy TheEmpire Source.Owner
    graphic = ""
So your saying it only applies to certain species?

How about letting everyone research the techs and the building and be allowed to build it? Then it would unlock the "Stealth Focus" for the planet that has that building so all species can utilize that amazing technology? Im human and would love the idea to "hide" a planet...right now the best i can do is get my planet stealth meters to 5...iv researched EVERYTHING and they wont go higher then 5...

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Effects?

#20 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Dart00_Tech wrote:Im human and would love the idea to "hide" a planet...right now the best i can do is get my planet stealth meters to 5...iv researched EVERYTHING and they wont go higher then 5...
Bigjoe5 wrote:
Dart00_Tech wrote:2. I researched "Dimensional Cloak" which says it unlocks a ship part and "increases the stealth of all planets, systems and buildings by 55, however, all my planets are still at 15 stealth?
It looks like the values of the stealth bonuses given by EM Damper, Absorption Field, Dimensional Cloak, and Phasing Cloak were changed to 5, 10, 15 and 5 respectively, without the stringtable being altered.

As I mentioned before, you can turn on auto-generated effects descriptions in the options menu under UI to check the actual effects of a tech.
The fact that Phasing Cloak gives a lower bonus than the previous stealth tech is presumably an error, and something anyone is welcome to fix.
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

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eleazar
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Re: Effects?

#21 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:I don't know if this is due to your edit or eleazar's, but many of the descriptions don't flow as well if the order of the meat and the fluff is simply reversed; for instance, starting the Space Elevator description with "The supply meter of the planet which contains this building is tripled" doesn't sound very good - much better is something like "Triples Supply on the planet on which it is built." Gaia Transformation is another building with this problem, probably among others, and in the case of Solar Orbital Generator, the description barely makes sense anymore. (Also, you didn't capitalize "supply" in this description - was that deliberate? There are also many other cases of this.)
No doubt much/all of that is my fault. In my edits to techs/buildings i've been going after basic function, but haven't taken the time to refine and polish. You'll notice many tech descriptions sorta say the same thing twice. Those are the result of my removal of redundant theories. Instead of picking and choosing, i added in the theory description to the application, leaving it to be sorted out later.

Dart00_Tech wrote:....so I don't feel like I spent 5 hours just making things worse ...
It's not all or nothing. I generally use diff to combine large text changes. It highlights every single difference, and i can choose individually which changes to commit. This allows me to keep changes other have made to the stringtable (for instance) since you downloaded your copy. So even if there are problems with some of your edits, that doesn't prevent the other parts from being used.

Dart00_Tech wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Dart00_Tech wrote:What does "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK" do exactly? The meat talks about a "stealth-focus" but I dont think we have one?
Some species have a stealth focus available on planets that have that building....
But it doesn't do anything in Buildings.txt?

Code: Select all

BuildingType
    name = "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK"
    description = "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK_DESC"
    buildcost = 1500
    buildtime = 8
    location = OwnedBy TheEmpire Source.Owner
    graphic = ""
So your saying it only applies to certain species?

How about letting everyone research the techs and the building and be allowed to build it? Then it would unlock the "Stealth Focus" for the planet that has that building so all species can utilize that amazing technology? Im human and would love the idea to "hide" a planet...right now the best i can do is get my planet stealth meters to 5...iv researched EVERYTHING and they wont go higher then 5...
Focus stuff is controlled in "species.txt". Any species can research and build the building. Once the building is built any species with the proper scripting (which should be, and probably is all of them) can then set a planet's focus to stealth --which adds +20.

Depending on how it is supposed to work the "meat" of an effect sometimes appears in different .txt files.

A good way to track this stuff down is use a tool that can search all the txt files at once. I use textwrangler (free) for mac. Since the building file didn't have an effect for "BLD_PLANET_CLOAK" you can search for that and see where else it shows up.

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eleazar
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Re: Effects?

#22 Post by eleazar »

Dart00_Tech wrote:...and simplified some of the descriptions. (specifcying "Target Health" insted of just "Health" seems to be extra words that are implied I think).
I understand why you would remove "max" and "target" from the front of mentions of various meters, but i'm not sure if in the long run that might cause more confusion.


revision 4656.
"adding Dart00_tech updates to tech descriptions and many spelling fixes."

The above include basically all your changes except the removal of "target" and "max", which i'm uncertain about.
I did a thorough spell-check too, and there were a ton of errors, including many i caused. (Check spelling as you type is now turned on for my FO text editor.)

We are standardizing on American spelling, vs British, right? There were a lot of those too. I don't care which one, personally, but i changed things to American, since that's what i remember we're doing.

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Re: Effects?

#23 Post by Dart00_Tech »

eleazar wrote:....Depending on how it is supposed to work the "meat" of an effect sometimes appears in different .txt files....
This is a really BAD design implementation....It makes it very hard for a person like me whose just getting familyer at how FO makes this all work to have to shuffle back and fourth to get the right info. Its also very time consuming. A good practice would be to keep them all together either in the Buildings.txt, Specials.txt...etc or in another file called Effects.txt and have all the files reference that.

I went though and made another set of sweeping edits to the Buildings and Specials string-entries to fix Bigjoe5's slue of complaints and I think I got them all. I also did a bit more of meat moving and pulled a few more quick descriptions out. I also removed all the double spaces to match MLA format.

Its confusing when we have "target health" and "max health" and "health" all over the place. I was trying to standardize them all to just "Health" but if you think its confusing maybe "Maximum Health" on the stats may be better? "Maximum" seems to describe it better then "Target" for new players. I also think we should capitalize anything that is a meter and maybe put it in bold.

This updated string-table is based off my last submission.
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Adrian
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Re: Effects?

#24 Post by Adrian »

Dart00_Tech wrote:"Maximum" seems to describe it better then "Target" for new players. I also think we should capitalize anything that is a meter and maybe put it in bold.
Certainly. Unless Target behaves in a way that justifies its use over Maximum, we should go with the latter imo.

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Re: Effects?

#25 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Adrian wrote:Unless Target behaves in a way that justifies its use over Maximum, we should go with the latter imo.
There are both target meter and maximum meters, and they have one major difference, which is that maximum meters are a maximum allowed value for the associated current meter, whereas target meter are the value towards which the associated current meter moves, but is not a limit on what values the current meter can have. One or the other are used in different situations (eg. population has a target value, but ship structure has a max value).

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Re: Effects?

#26 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Adrian wrote:Unless Target behaves in a way that justifies its use over Maximum, we should go with the latter imo.
There are both target meter and maximum meters, and they have one major difference, which is that maximum meters are a maximum allowed value for the associated current meter, whereas target meter are the value towards which the associated current meter moves, but is not a limit on what values the current meter can have. One or the other are used in different situations (eg. population has a target value, but ship structure has a max value).
Then why don't we just call them "Current" and "Maximum"?

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Re: Effects?

#27 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dart00_Tech wrote:Then why don't we just call them "Current" and "Maximum"?
Call what that? I don't understand your question, but I think that's because your question is based on you not understanding what I wrote.
Dart00_Tech wrote:
eleazar wrote:....Depending on how it is supposed to work the "meat" of an effect sometimes appears in different .txt files....
This is a really BAD design implementation
There's no simple way around this. If everything that every building does is in the buildings file, and there's some interactions between species and buildings, then that would mean that not all the things that a species does can be in the species file.

As it works now, all the focii that a species can have are part of the species definition. If you want to move "Add a Focus" to buildings, then you or someone else would later complain that not all the focii that a species can have are in one place and that it's hard to track down where all the possible focii are coming from.

There are also some internal implementation issues that make it preferable to define what focii are available in the species definition, so that's where they are.

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Re: Effects?

#28 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Dart00_Tech wrote:Then why don't we just call them "Current" and "Maximum"?
Call what that? I don't understand your question, but I think that's because your question is based on you not understanding what I wrote.
Dart00_Tech wrote:
eleazar wrote:....Depending on how it is supposed to work the "meat" of an effect sometimes appears in different .txt files....
This is a really BAD design implementation
There's no simple way around this. If everything that every building does is in the buildings file, and there's some interactions between species and buildings, then that would mean that not all the things that a species does can be in the species file.

As it works now, all the focii that a species can have are part of the species definition. If you want to move "Add a Focus" to buildings, then you or someone else would later complain that not all the focii that a species can have are in one place and that it's hard to track down where all the possible focii are coming from.

There are also some internal implementation issues that make it preferable to define what focii are available in the species definition, so that's where they are.
Ah ok...I figured it was that way for a reason....

I meant instead of calling them "Target" meters (Target Health, Target Industry) why dont we call them "Current" meters (Current Health, Current Industry).

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Re: Effects?

#29 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Could you just quote the part of a post you're replying to, rather than the whole thing?
Dart00_Tech wrote:I meant instead of calling them "Target" meters (Target Health, Target Industry) why dont we call them "Current" meters (Current Health, Current Industry).
Because "current" doesn't describe the function of a "target" meter, and there are already "current" meters which are what actually track the state of things in game (eg. how much shields a ship has at the moment) and which are limited or which move towards the target or max value (eg. the maximum shields a ship can have).

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Re: Effects?

#30 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Could you just quote the part of a post you're replying to, rather than the whole thing?

Because "current" doesn't describe the function of a "target" meter, and there are already "current" meters which are what actually track the state of things in game (eg. how much shields a ship has at the moment) and which are limited or which move towards the target or max value (eg. the maximum shields a ship can have).
Oh sorry...ok, I think I get it. :) Confusing at first but makes a lil more sense.

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