Flagship Randomizer 1.29 for AE, ACE and ACE Infinite

[Gidoza]

Please stop derailing my threads. I'd politely request you post your content in your own thread.

How nice of you to inform me of this after replying to me in this thread some ten times and never raising a word about it before now.

[Sleeper Service]

I find there is a difference between discussing this mods content/mechanics and publishing your own content. The later is which I find derailing. Again, I'm not really interested in feedback for your mod being discussed in threads for my mods. It's just common practice, look around the forum, no one is publishing their own ship mods in other peoples threads.

[Gidoza]

I find there is a difference between discussing this mods content/mechanics and publishing your own content. The later is which I find derailing. Again, I'm not really interested in feedback for your mod being discussed in threads for my mods. It's just common practice, look around the forum, no one is publishing their own ship mods in other peoples threads.

Which is fine - but I'm not going to have it all pinned on me when my initial post here raised some issues about the Randomizer and I offered some criticisms of how it could be re-designed - I got the encouragement to pursue this project on those very matters from YOU. I'm happy to move to another thread, but I hardly sense any point to doing so when there has been a "we" involved here all along and I've made no illusions about wanting to involve others. Raising the issue very late after the fact, detaching yourself from involvement (and giving no hint of whether you're willing to help or whether I'm worthy of help when I'm actually struggling and reaching out), and then pinning all the problems on me - is NOT okay. The conversation evolved from where it started - how on earth am I supposed to know where it moved into another topic? As far as I'm concerned, this has always been about the Flagship Randomizer, which I've always seen as a topic about Alternative Flagships than randomization itself. I'm not going to belabour the point - but to just jump out and say that I'm suddenly out-of-bounds or off-topic is presumptuous at the least when I'm not even convinced of that and I've hardly even been given a chance to think about what just happened before getting booted out! Again, I'll move - enjoy your space.

[Sleeper Service]

I'm sorry if this came across as rude. But ultimately I'm not involved in the creation of your content, I just commented on your enquiries regarding the topic of this thread. The way I see it you are making a separate mod. If you publish it here then people will discuss it here, which hasn't really much to do with the mod that the thread is about. Then again I somewhat misread your post as being an actual mod launch, instead of the enquiry that it was. Sorry, my bad. But overall you might still get more feedback from other if you post your files in the mod development section. If you still want my feedback, here you go:

(Would something like forgetting to include a console in a room cause the game to crash...?)

That particular scenario should be fine. If loading a thing causes crashes than that might be connected to the game not being able to find ids referenced in the asset. Like if the boss calls a weapon ID that doesn't exist. Maybe double check if all ids are spelled right. The crash behaviour extends to child objects, so if a weapon the boss uses references a wrong animation or projectile id that might also cause crashes.

If you can't locate the problem you could also try rebuilding the mod piece by piece, adding elements one at a time to see whether they function. Maybe start by just changing the boss weapons to verify that those work, then add in the room layout. Also remember that you can edit ship blueprints outside of superluminal, that's often fast to correct small stuff or make minor changes. If you absolutely want to make sure the mod works you could start by making minor changes to the vanilla boss blueprints, without using superluminal.

However, different problem - I have my list of weapons from Flagship Generator, and I've loaded it with Mod Management in Superluminal. However, after I've done that, I cannot find the weapons anywhere in the weapons list when trying to pick them for the Flagship. What am I doing wrong? (kind of hard to test if things work if I can't even get to stage 1)

EDIT: Actually here is the link and EMBED of the .ftl file I'm trying to use that contains all the weapons (and graphics and such) so you can see if I did something wrong.

I think you already fixed this, but in general the mod files have to mirror FTLs actual file structure. The mod you posted did not work because the game folders where inside another "data" folder. "Data", "Img" and so on should be the top most folders you zip to create mod files.

EDIT 2: Last question - the Flagship C has a weird offset in it's outer skeleton graphic. How do I know if the rooms are placed properly and why is it like this, anyways?

I'm not sure about that either and I'm not even sure the skeletal layout works correctly ingame. If I remember correctly boss gets offset wrong if you'd where to change the overall x size of the boss. If you wanna be save you'd be better of not messing with that in your layouts, meaning don't make the boss less wide than it originally was.

[Gidoza]

The way I see it you are making a separate mod. If you publish it here then people will discuss it here, which hasn't really much to do with the mod that the thread is about.

Yes I can agree with you regarding where it's heading now.

Then again I somewhat misread your post as being an actual mod launch, instead of the enquiry that it was. Sorry, my bad. But overall you might still get more feedback from other if you post your files in the mod development section.

Yeah I wasn't launching anything here - apology accepted. I'm just confused and basing myself on the resources that are present - the Flagship Randomizer stuff is intricately linked, and I don't claim to understand it all.

That particular scenario should be fine. If loading a thing causes crashes than that might be connected to the game not being able to find ids referenced in the asset. Like if the boss calls a weapon ID that doesn't exist. Maybe double check if all ids are spelled right. The crash behaviour extends to child objects, so if a weapon the boss uses references a wrong animation or projectile id that might also cause crashes.

Will double-check, but I'm fairly sure this is all OK.

If you can't locate the problem you could also try rebuilding the mod piece by piece, adding elements one at a time to see whether they function. Maybe start by just changing the boss weapons to verify that those work, then add in the room layout. Also remember that you can edit ship blueprints outside of superluminal, that's often fast to correct small stuff or make minor changes. If you absolutely want to make sure the mod works you could start by making minor changes to the vanilla boss blueprints, without using superluminal.

I did make some changes outside Superluminal, although it doesn't have the visuality of Superluminal (you can only do so much when you can't see what room it is you're really editing). However, fair point on one step at a time and starting with modding the weapons only from the start. I can work with that.


As for the rest - yes I noticed the data folder thing, and I'm not planning to change the overall size of the boss (only planning to change where rooms are) as that sounds really superfluous to me, anyways - I just want to offer variations on Bosses to provide a variety of different challenges. So I don't think that should be a problem.

Mind you - how the Flagship is named to be recognized at all is rather confusing to me. Does it need to have nine iterations to work (EASY, NORMAL, HARD, plus all the DLC..., and 1, 2, 3), or does it load like other normal ships...? I guess I'll find out slowly...


And finally...

I'm sorry if this came across as rude.

Sorry if I was, too.

[Sleeper Service]

Mind you - how the Flagship is named to be recognized at all is rather confusing to me. Does it need to have nine iterations to work (EASY, NORMAL, HARD, plus all the DLC..., and 1, 2, 3), or does it load like other normal ships...? I guess I'll find out slowly...

If I remember correctly there is no extra variant for normal, but you'll nee all the the others for it to work. If you'd where to assume the player won't deactivate AE in the Hangar then you can skip the non DLC variants. However players who'd play non-AE would not see any changes. Same with easy. I think easy and normal both use the same boss. So if you want to cut corners you could only do the _hard variants, but then only players who'd play AE on hard would see the changes. Then again making the variants is basically just coppy pasting and changing some id. As long as you have a function boss you can just use it for all the variants. And of course you could make subtle alteration for the _hard variant, if you want the hard boss to be different than the regular one. But yeah all in all... you'll need four variants for each boss phase, 12 blueprints in total. They can use the same layout data though, you'll only need 12 different actual ship blueprints with the correct ids.

And yeah, I'd assume you have this figured out already, but just for the record: The boss data is called once the boss is spawned, so you can back up a save right before the boss encounter for quick testing. Any newly patched in mods should take effect even when the save had other mods installed.

[Gidoza]

Mind you - how the Flagship is named to be recognized at all is rather confusing to me. Does it need to have nine iterations to work (EASY, NORMAL, HARD, plus all the DLC..., and 1, 2, 3), or does it load like other normal ships...? I guess I'll find out slowly...

If I remember correctly there is no extra variant for normal, but you'll nee all the the others for it to work. If you'd where to assume the player won't deactivate AE in the Hangar then you can skip the non DLC variants. However players who'd play non-AE would not see any changes. Same with easy. I think easy and normal both use the same boss. So if you want to cut corners you could only do the _hard variants, but then only players who'd play AE on hard would see the changes. Then again making the variants is basically just coppy pasting and changing some id. As long as you have a function boss you can just use it for all the variants. And of course you could make subtle alteration for the _hard variant, if you want the hard boss to be different than the regular one. But yeah all in all... you'll need four variants for each boss phase, 12 blueprints in total. They can use the same layout data though, you'll only need 12 different actual ship blueprints with the correct ids.

And yeah, I'd assume you have this figured out already, but just for the record: The boss data is called once the boss is spawned, so you can back up a save right before the boss encounter for quick testing. Any newly patched in mods should take effect even when the save had other mods installed.

OK good to know - and this is what I assumed. Still hitting lots of dead-ends with making it work, though.

EDIT: Wait - FOUR variants for each Boss phase? In DLC, I only count three (Easy, Normal, Hard), add Vanilla and you get six (another Easy, Normal, Hard). Where does Four come from - am I missing something?

Will go and create another thread now in Mod Development and continue to deal with stuff there. Will post a link to it as well as if you have time your help will still be appreciated as I try and figure out the kinks in all this. ^_^

Thread is now here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=30131

[Sleeper Service]

You'll need a _dlc variant for both the easy and hard version of the boss.

[Gidoza]

I know that. But why not Normal? Wouldn't it be - Easy, Normal, Hard, Easy DLC, Normal DLC, Hard DLC?

[meklozz]

I believe you're right, this is how vanilla does it - 3 difficulties * 3 phases * 2 DLC/non-DLC.

I think Sleeper_Service is talking about the layout files, with 4 layouts per phase each for connected weapon rooms (or modded equivalent of the Hard difficulty spike) or not connected rooms and DLC/non-DLC. You'd have non-DLC easier (not Easy, easier for Easy/Normal) loadout, non-DLC harder loadout, DLC easier, DLC harder. That's because there are only two variants for easier/harder rooms layout, but nothing is stopping you from adding more.

@edit
Wait, I re-read (ok maybe read them at all) some messages and the problem is that there is indeed a Normal layout. I can't tell for certain if the game alwaysuses it, but I believe it should, since at least for non-DLC, all the difficulties have differences (in vanilla). Easy non-DLC only has 3 shields, and hard non-DLC should still have connected rooms, so normal is necessary for the middle ground. Easy DLC and Normal DLC are the same in vanilla I'm quite sure.