A bunch of questions from a beginner

[Rogor]

Hi everyone,

I have just discovered FO, and I got some questions/feedback from a total beginner. The only manual/beginner's guide I saw is the Quick play guide from the wiki, but if I may have missed something.

So for my questions :

- What are the prerequisites to build a ship from an asteroid hull ? I researched the technology (Asteroid Hulls), built an outpost on an asteroid belt, built a Basic Spaceyard on it, then an Orbital Drydock and an Asteroid Processor. Then I went to the design menu, and the hulls 'Heavy Asteroid Hull' and 'Small Asteroid Hull' appeared under the 'Available' tab. I selected a bunch of ship parts and saved my design. Then in the production menu, the ship appears under the 'unavailable' tag. The tooltip however says that every condition is 'PASSED'. Am I missing something ?

- I also declared war to an AI thinking (foolishly ...) that he had no fleet. But then my fleet started to take some serious damage when I was in orbit of its planet, and then some of my planets were attacked. But in every case, I did not see a single ship, not did I damaged a single of its ships. I assumed it was because all its ships were cloaked, so I built some ships with a basic detector (an Optical scanner), and the same thing happened to this fleet. So I was wondering if its ships were really well cloaked, or if something else was happening ...

- Is there any information about how the combat works ?

- I have never worked on a C++ project of this scale, but I'd like to help with the programming (I have some experience with C++ though). Is there any documentation or explanation of the overall structure except for Programming page on the wiki ?

And some bug/missing features :

- When using a keyboard layout different from a QWERTY, all the keys are mapped to a QWERTY. I'm using an AZERTY keyboard, so typing (especially special characters) can be tedious.

- Several ship designs can have the same name (each click to the save design will create a new one). This could lead to some confusion.

- In windowed mode, if I alt-tab to another window and come back, my key presses are not taken into account anymore (sometimes they are, but I could not find a pattern).

- It could be useful to add the the Quick Play guide that there is actually a technology needed to build outpost. It took me some time to figure that out. What is the procedure if I want to modify the wiki ? It seems that I cannot create an account by myself to avoid spam.

- Some building cannot be built even if the tooltip indicate that every condition is met. It seems that at least the technological conditions are not taken into account here. Any reason not to include them ?

- In the wiki FAQ, there is an old link to the v0.3 Quick play guide. This should probably be updated.

[Geoff the Medio]

Several of your comments, suggestions, and issues have already been implemented or dealt with in the latest testing builds (Windows or OSX).

Combat mechanics are discussed a bit here but that's slightly out of date with some of the details.

The general code structure is discussed in this old post which is slightly more detailed than what's on the programming wiki page.

Edit: Or are you already using the latest SVN version you build yourself (based on your recent posts?). As above, some of the issues you note should already be implemented / fixed...

[Rogor]

No, I was using the pre-built package for windows. I started playing before being able to compile the whole project, so I had to use this one at first. I will build the latest SVN version and retry there.

[eleazar]

Note that the 'Pedia has a "Game Concepts" section that explains some things that are different from the quick play guide.