comms anyone?

[luckyluca]

Hello,

Congratulations for your games, a ray of sun in the dark sky of non innovative commercial videogames.

I'm considering purchasing renegades, I'm playing the demo now and I've got a couple of questions about it:

1) Are comms implemented (such as dock request, trade request, broadcast to ships etc)?

2) I was shooting at friendly ships near a spacestation (the one from which you start from in the demo) and no police nobody interfered. Is there a police of some sort or is it pure anarchy?

3) Is it possible to mod the spacesim blue energy barrier textures and spacestation textures in general? I wish ideally to either remove the barrier object altogether or at least reduce its opacity and reduce the spacestation blue saturation a bit.

4)
This might head back to point 1, is it possible to ask other ships to surrender, ask for help, ask to trade?

Thanks a lot for having a look at my thread
Luca

[Edited on 4-27-2008 by luckyluca]

[Edited on 4-27-2008 by luckyluca]

[Vice]

Hello and welcome. Answers below.

1 - No, Evochron is a lightly colonized quadrant with loose flight restrictions. The game currently credits you as a lone wolf mercenary for being smart enough to manage docking without babysitting.

2 - There are no police, merely factions who police themselves and protect themselves. Pick a fight with the wrong group and you'll soon find yourself being 'policed' by that ship's allies. You are responsible for your own survival and the decisions you make, including bad ones, determine how you will be treated by the various factions in the various systems you travel to. Online this can change, if players want to setup a policing structure of some kind, generally clans are independent and are concerned with their own interests, so they could have their own dedicated police force and simply take their 'serve and protect' roles into their own hands.

3 - Yup. For station textures, \\ships\\ship1_0.jpg is the base texture, \\ships\\lights.jpg is the light texture. The hangar force field wasn't included in the mod options, so I will add this for the next update. Use \\ships\\atmoshield.jpg See the customizing kit for further details on other mod options.

4 - Yes for most, surrender is voluntary though, they will offer you a bribe if they decide to surrender. No for asking for help, although this can obviously apply in multiplayer and in an extent through contract offers/requests (both single player and multiplayer). Yes, they ask to trade and will accept trade requests from you (if your reputation is good enough). See the instructions for details.

[Edited on 4-28-2008 by Vice]

[luckyluca]

Hello,

Thanks for the quick reply.
Regarding the ship's textures, I downloaded the mod's kit but there are no textures in the ships folder, just .x files.

Also as a personal suggestion I believe it would be good to see a comms menu as it would add a new level of immersion to single players ( frontier elite 2 is a good example for this ).
Trade requests bribing could then be settled using comms

Thank you for your time
Luca

Originally posted by Vice
Hello and welcome. Answers below.

1 - No, Evochron is a lightly colonized quadrant with loose flight restrictions. The game currently credits you as a lone wolf mercenary for being smart enough to manage docking without babysitting.

2 - There are no police, merely factions who police themselves and protect themselves. Pick a fight with the wrong group and you'll soon find yourself being 'policed' by that ship's allies. You are responsible for your own survival and the decisions you make, including bad ones, determine how you will be treated by the various factions in the various systems you travel to. Online this can change, if players want to setup a policing structure of some kind, generally clans are independent and are concerned with their own interests, so they could have their own dedicated police force and simply take their 'service and protection' roles into their own hands.

3 - Yup. For station textures, \\ships\\ship1_0.jpg is the base texture, \\ships\\lights.jpg is the light texture. The hangar force field wasn't including in the mod options, so I will add this for the next update. Use \\ships\\atmoshield.jpg See the customizing kit for further details on other mod options.

4 - Yes for most, surrender is voluntary though, they will offer you a bribe if they decide to surrender. No for asking for help, although this can obviously apply in multiplayer and in an extent through contract offers/requests (both single player and multiplayer). Yes, they ask to trade and will accept trade requests from you (if your reputation is good enough). See the instructions for details.

[Vice]

Regarding the ship's textures, I downloaded the mod's kit but there are no textures in the ships folder, just .x files.

Correct, like I said, some of it hasn't been added yet, but it will be for the next update. The others don't have template textures, you just import whatever you want to use using those filenames. This is what will be added to the next update:

To replace the capital ship, solar cell, station, and city textures, use the \\ships folder and the following filenames:

ship1_0.jpg = hull for stations and buildings
ship2_0.jpg = capital ship
ship2_0low.jpg = low resolution texture for capital ships used for target display
lights.jpg = lights
lights2.jpg = red lights
citybase.jpg = city support structure
atmoshield.jpg = hangar atmosphere shield
solar.jpg = solar cell

Trade requests bribing could then be settled using comms

AI ships already communicate using a comm system, they just talk with it, it doesn't require manual control. The trade console is used to initiate and manage trade negotiations (there's a lot more to it than just talking), you'll hear the radio chatter over the comms when they decide to talk, all of the talking content is automated.

[Tempered]

Vice,

Is there a way to use a lighting texture for cockpits? Would really like to have a few of my buttons stay lit instead of going pitch black when shaded.

[Vice]

You can apply them as lighted buttons on the HUD/display textures, then draw the cockpit structures around them. You'll need to line up the spacing a bit to make sure the buttons line up with the structure, even when you move around. The HUD displays are actually significantly smaller than the full texture size so you can do things like add lighted buttons around the edges. Otherwise, there may need to be a luminosity layer that would need to be applied to the cockpit mode itself and I don't think it's currently supported in the system at this point. It's possible I could apply a second copy of the model structure as a luminosity layer, would take some testing and sample meshes to work with though. I would try the HUD/display method first since it's designed to do that and is known to work.

[Edited on 4-28-2008 by Vice]

[luckyluca]

Thanks for the quick feedback. Unfortunately I've been very busy at work and unable to reply in the evenings.
At work we use linux and for some reasons I was unable to get to the forums:when I click the "accept" line it brings me back to the homepage.

Anyway, back to ER:
It's really cool knowing that you would add texture templates in the mod zip, as it would help understanding the UVs layouts for wannabe texture modders

Also everything you mentioned about the trading menus and options does make sense.

However, for the little time spent on the demo, I didn't have a "rewarding" ship to ship and ship to spacestation human like interactions, they acted a little too much as robots.
That's why a simple set of comunication choices I believe would give that extra level of realism

that's all, I won't insist anymore


Take care
Luca

Originally posted by Vice

Regarding the ship's textures, I downloaded the mod's kit but there are no textures in the ships folder, just .x files.

Correct, like I said, some of it hasn't been added yet, but it will be for the next update. The others don't have template textures, you just import whatever you want to use using those filenames. This is what will be added to the next update:

To replace the capital ship, solar cell, station, and city textures, use the \\ships folder and the following filenames:

ship1_0.jpg = hull for stations and buildings
ship2_0.jpg = capital ship
ship2_0low.jpg = low resolution texture for capital ships used for target display
lights.jpg = lights
lights2.jpg = red lights
citybase.jpg = city support structure
atmoshield.jpg = hangar atmosphere shield
solar.jpg = solar cell

Trade requests bribing could then be settled using comms

AI ships already communicate using a comm system, they just talk with it, it doesn't require manual control. The trade console is used to initiate and manage trade negotiations (there's a lot more to it than just talking), you'll hear the radio chatter over the comms when they decide to talk, all of the talking content is automated.

[Vice]

However, for the little time spent on the demo, I didn't have a "rewarding" ship to ship and ship to spacestation human like interactions, they acted a little too much as robots.
That's why a simple set of comunication choices I believe would give that extra level of realism

That's a fair point, I understand many gamers like to have more character interaction in the games they play. That's just not what this game is about, at least in single player. This is more of a technically oriented space combat and trade simulation, not one that is designed to simulate acting and characters. Interacting with NPC's can often feel like, well, interacting with NPC's Also, as you get further into the game, you'll find more character interaction, such as outgoing bribe offers (not incoming), threats, and multiple item ship-to-ship trade negotiations. Sapphire can be a pretty quiet place because there just isn't a lot going on to inspire a lot of chatter.

The best way to get involved with more realistic character interaction is to get online and join with real people, communicating with other players for your gameplay decisions, trade offers, challenges, cooperative objectives, etc, etc. Doesn't get much more 'interaction' realistic than that.

[Edited on 4-30-2008 by Vice]

[luckyluca]

1)
Thanks for your time and the modkit support, if only I could reduce the opacity of the blue shield of the space stations, plus reduce the blue halo of the space stations to a more neutral gray I would be happy
In order to do so It would be good to get hold of the highres templates used in the game so that I could just have fun doing minor photoshop adjustment.

2)
Honestly, vice, I think if you had the ability to add more variety in the mix (ships stations etc. etc.) you would have possibly the best spacesim around by a mile (or should I say au?).


3)
I can't help it I'm quite intrigued by the demo, I've been playing on and off for about 40 mins, and despite a few minor things, it seems much more involving than X2 or X3 and since I bumped into your website I didn't touch any game but ER demo


4)
About the forum it's really weird I can access it using firefox on windowsxp but I'm unable to do so using firefox on linux redhat 3.


Regards
Luca

Originally posted by Vice

However, for the little time spent on the demo, I didn't have a "rewarding" ship to ship and ship to spacestation human like interactions, they acted a little too much as robots.
That's why a simple set of comunication choices I believe would give that extra level of realism

That's a fair point, I understand many gamers like to have more character interaction in the games they play. That's just not what this game is about, at least in single player. This is more of a technically oriented space combat and trade simulation, not one that is designed to simulate acting and characters. Interacting with NPC's can often feel like, well, interacting with NPC's Also, as you get further into the game, you'll find more character interaction, such as outgoing bribe offers (not incoming), threats, and multiple item ship-to-ship trade negotiations. Sapphire can be a pretty quiet place because there just isn't a lot going on to inspire a lot of chatter.

The best way to get involved with more realistic character interaction is to get online and join with real people, communicating with other players for your gameplay decisions, trade offers, challenges, cooperative objectives, etc, etc. Doesn't get much more 'interaction' realistic than that.

[Edited on 4-30-2008 by Vice]

[Edited on 4-30-2008 by luckyluca]

[Edited on 4-30-2008 by luckyluca]

[Edited on 4-30-2008 by luckyluca]

[BraveHart]

Hi LuckyLuca,

You will like the online play and interactions of the Human pilots, innertrade with the human pilot's and the co-op contracts are a great way to earn money, fly and learn combat tactics and perhaps join a clan when you feel ready. The communication chatter gives the feeling of really participating in space, that is one Cool part of Evochron Renegades. Looking forward to seeing you online....

Good Flying

[Vice]

1 - That would risk having the game's assets ripped off (happened far too often in the past) and some of it is licensed material. However, for the atmoshield, I can send that to you, just send me a quick e-mail at the contact link at the starwraith.com link in my signature.

2 - How far did you travel? Rather than 20 or 30 static ships as in some games, ER has ten main frame classes, but with hundreds/thousands of possible configurations for those frames. So the uniqueness is in the designs rather than static ships. Plus, if you're still in Sapphire, you'll only see about 3 or 4 ship types, many others are in other solar systems, including an entirely different race with their own ships.

3 - Glad you're having fun After about that much time, hopefully your finding some of the new things to do, places to explore in the local area, tried a few trade runs, mined, cleaned some solar arrays, found some lost items, and have purchased some equipment and component upgrades.

4 - In the e-mail you send me, let me know what IP address you are trying to connect from, it may be an unrelated issue.

[___H]

ive had problems accessing the forums from school (lol i know but i had free time!). returns me to the homepage. i think its the filteration of websites at work in my school or in your case at work.

[luckyluca]

First of all let me just say I've purchased ER!

@BraveHart,
Thanks I'm not sure how much time I'll have available but it's good to know there's a welcoming strong community out there.

@___H
Vice did something and I can finally read the forums from work

Thanks
Luca

[BraveHart]

Welcome aboard Luca and Enjoy

[luckyluca]

Thanks

Also I was wondering If an updated version is released, can I just run the installer WITHOUT uninstalling the current version?
And would it overwrite the configuration files (keyboard mapping, savegames, options)?

Thanks
Luca

[Edited on 5-2-2008 by luckyluca]

[tha_rami]

Originally posted by luckyluca
Thanks

Also I was wondering If an updated version is released, can I just run the installer WITHOUT uninstalling the current version?
And would it overwrite the configuration files (keyboard mapping, savegames, options)?

Thanks
Luca

[Edited on 5-2-2008 by luckyluca]

Updates are usually built so that no data is lost, however, SW3D games usually recommends to make a backup every now and then by backing up the pilotx.sw file, where x is the slot number.

[Skiiwa]

I simply install each new build over the old. I backup most of the time:) I do believe this is the best Space game On the market. Hope U enjoy the game luckyluca.

[warsign]

You bougth very very good game and believe me, you'll play very long period of time. I guaranty you...
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