sM Polish Kit: Insurrection v1.6 [CE Support + Modules]

[katz]

Makes sense, yes. Too bad I use endless loot.

[slowriderxcorps]

I can see the appeal of it, it's just a shame that it's as crazy big as it is that it would take me days upon days to go through it. The Augmented Weapons sub module in this kit was an experiment ran in parallel alongside the Endless Loot concept as another perspective in how the game would behave when countless variants are added, and can be thought of as a super condensed version of Endless Loot. As far as memory is serving me (or more specifically the feedback I've received, which is none), there are currently no issues with running the CE patch with its AWM.

EDIT: Updated again, fixing a critical gibs glitch on all the Stealth Cruisers, a gib change to the Lanius Cruisers to make their explosion not look over dramatic compared to the others, and more event fixes to the new events in Insurrection. I told you I wasn't very good at that.

[slowriderxcorps]

Alright, time for an update of sorts. I've been struggling more than usual to find time to work on the mod, but some minor alterations here and there have taken place, and a key change or two to Insurrection as it continues trundling down the infinitely long road from near-completion to actual completion.

On the core side of the mod, some minor alterations to a couple of events happened, one particular one concerning the reward from one of the Refueling Outpost Defense events being actual fuel (the auto-scout variant was a Standard reward, but the manned Rebel ship variant was fuel). About the only major change though was the Swarm missiles, which I've decided to alter them entirely so that they no longer carry any accuracy penalty. Oh, and a couple of events were altered to generate hostile ASBs in accordance with the nature of where they took place (the Mantis War Camp and Numa V, the Rock princess event).

The main bulk of the work, as ever, went into Insurrection. Aside from a severe number of corrections to the existing new events and one additional ASB event, the Player Ships Vortex and the starting event were altered so that the ship could generate its intended crew while retaining Auto-Drone Mode through use of a different dummy augment to trigger the crew additions. Most importantly, the layouts for most of the player cruisers were altered, with three ships having one additional room added for the cause. The secondary reasoning for this was to try and shift the location of Drone Control on most ships into a location where System Repair drones will have a much easier time traveling to repair damaged core systems. As Insurrection isn't bound to the design standards as tightly as the core polish kit, I'm okay with experimenting with this.

The main reason however should have been rather obvious the moment extra rooms were mentioned. I've gone against what I originally thought about in the past and debunked because of the known issues with game saves, and taken a personal attempt at the Racial Artillery systems that have become all the rage in recent times. Each class of cruiser has its own unique Artillery weapon that can be equipped at a store for an experimentally reasonable price, carrying the same unwieldy loading times as the Federation Cruiser artillery weapons but packing more than enough punch to make it worth not only the investment costs, but the super-valuable system slot that could be used for something like Cloaking or Defense Drones. None of these weapons sadly have any graphics to them and are launched from the nose of each cruiser (primarily because these weapons vanish entirely when the host ship is destroyed, and I still wish to avoid having graphical oddities where possible). I've also not had the chance to see just how effective any of them are in comparison to the Federation Artillery, but from an initial analysis, I think (or at least hope) that I've hit the nail on the head.

Unfortunately the Error Checker program that I've used to detect whether something has gone wrong or not has started malfunctioning, never actually managing to finish parsing the game files and just hanging on the last step. I'm relatively sure nothing's been broken, but I can't guarantee it.

[Mr. Mister]

On the version prior to this latest update: In the first sector, I found a Zoltan Interceptor with an unusable lv1 Shields system. It had a Zoltan shield, and I know some ships have Zoltan Shield and no Shields system, but a lv1 Shields System is just pointless, just like lv1 doors. Core version of sM + CE.

BTW, I noticed your sM + CE patch overrides CE's integrated Crew Portraits. I remember you mentioning you have been correcting some small disalignements in the crew sprites here and there over time, and since each species' sprites are all in one single image file, I assume that's why you still have those there. I'm rather fond of those new portraits, so if you could add that one sprite to the main sM+CE file, or as an optional module, I'd be happy.

Oh, and are you sure sM+CE doesn't override any changes made by CE's New Sectors' New Music add-on? I remember it initially did, but I see you haven't been mantaining a compatibility patch with it.


THank you for your work, as always.

[slowriderxcorps]

Ah, it's good to see this voice again. Time to try and reply to this one part at a time, recalling from memory.

After Advanced Edition came out, I didn't want to mess around as aggressively with CE as before the patch, in rememberance of a bunch of issues that happened in the past with some ships having issues, and mostly from that one time I found out that I had given Rock sectors far too many stores because that glitch was present in CE at the time of the patch's creation. As it stands currently, the only thing the patch does to enemy ships is rename them, and even so, I've not been as good with my memory to fall back and update that part. So the Shields thing with the Zoltan Interceptor is present in core CE as well.

I guess I should figure out something with the portraits as well. Personally, I really dislike them since they don't really gel with the FTL art style at all, which is why they are MIA in the patch. If you wish them in though, I'm about 90% sure that Russian Rockman already created something for that purpose in the Shiny! HUD mod.

I haven't really been keeping up to date with the whole CE Music thing, but if my rustic memory serves correctly, that was eventually planted into CE as a non-optional addition.

And thank you. I'm trying my best to keep this machine going despite the circumstances still in play.

[Mr. Mister]

Nope, the CE Additional Music is still an optional add-on, and at version 1.248 (description and link on CE's OP).


Almost forgot about Shiny!, yeah. You folks have done a lot while I was on FTL hiatus.

[slowriderxcorps]

Nope, the CE Additional Music is still an optional add-on, and at version 1.248 (description and link on CE's OP).


Almost forgot about Shiny!, yeah. You folks have done a lot while I was on FTL hiatus.

Aha, I see. Well going off of memory, I don't think there'll be any immediate issues, though I'll have to check to see whether the AWM CE edition has the weapon adding lines written in Slipstreams amazing code or not, though I'm relatively sure it is.

We've made some pretty grand strides in the past bunch of months, haven't we all?

EDIT: Alright, I've managed to knock the CE patch around and get it into working order for the current build. Sadly though, if you wish to look at the honestly amazing greebles that were implemented thanks to the efforts of two crazy artists, you'll have to find and download the separate patch for that on the Development side of the forums as I have disabled them. Not because they look bad, because they honestly look really cool! But because the realignment of several player ship room layouts clashes extremely horribly with it, and I'm not good enough on the artistic side to be able to fix it.

[slowriderxcorps]

Got a decent enough days work worth put into the mod again, albeit purely onto the aesthetic side and of the initial efforts of other talented people. The crew and room realignments that were made in the current build of the Shiny! mod were successfully integrated into the kit, and even tweaked about a bit as the cockpit glows were initially out of alignment. However now I think of it, the crew realignments were not added to the CE patch just yet. I'll make a note to get onto that at the next opportunity.

More critically however, is the Greebles that were spoken of earlier. Through a good deal of head scratching, I think I've managed to successfully tweak the placements of all the borders and details and such to where they now work as intended within all aspects of the kit. For each variant (base/CE/Insurrection), there is now an individual graphical module to add the new graphics to the game with hopefully military precision. And before I forget, full credit for the greebles go to the original authors, Sleeper and Trilobyte.

[DestinyGodMCO]

how do u install this? i am using a torrented version of FTL on 1.5.4

[slowriderxcorps]

Well for starters, you're two updates behind schedule. Game's been at 1.5.13 for several months now. And secondly, look up the Slipstream Mod Manager, you'll need that in order to do anything with mods.