[MOD][WIP] FTL: Overdrive

[John Luke Pack Hard]

After a brief discussion about animations with DryEagle, I have concluded that the current animation scripting format is unintuitive and hard to learn or use, with many quirks to be aware of.

DryEagle's thoughts on this are recorded for your convenience in the notes document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JLL ... 0c5Qo/edit

I'm not sure where all of you stand, so I will post this as my personal opinion on this matter:

• Current animation scripting is too quirky for new modders to quickly learn and use
• We should reduce the animation documentation to rough documentation and plot a new animation scripting format come Roundtable time

In addition, this was discussed:
Backwards compatibility and a "legacy" format to support old mods may take too much work, when FTL+GMM already exist.

[UltraMantis]

animations are utterly evil

[John Luke Pack Hard]

The question which will decide whether or not we will do further animations documentation is:

Should FTL:Overdrive include support for legacy scripts and mods?

If yes, I and whoever volunteers will continue nitpicking how the vanilla game processes animations

If no, then documentation is finished and (with a confirmation from KuroSaru), we will proceed to the roundtable planning discussion.

The vote has been posted in the #ftlgame IRC chatroom, login and cast your opinion.

http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=ftlgame

[kartoFlane]

Well, as you said, legacy mods would still be useable by FTL+GMM, so it's kind of redundant to make Overdrive backwards compatible. Besides, you can always start working on Overdrive, and include the compatibility later, when most of the base coding is done... though frankly, I've no idea how hard that would be.

Also, I've one question that's been bothering me for some time; how do you plan to structurize Overdrive? Completely rewrite entire FTL but with a crapload of modifiable fields, or create a hard-coded engine and then recreate everything else in external scritps, using eg. lua or xml?

[DryEagle]

+1, legacy support is not required as they will work with the stock game. If someone wants to use overdrive functionality they can adapt their mod since they'll be putting in a lot more work with all the extra features anyway.

[John Luke Pack Hard]

Unless someone checked the vote and saw +5 people voted the "yes" option on the last day, the question is settled.

I'll try to get in contact with KuroSaru and begin planning the roundtable discussion.

[brothershogo]

Can I make a suggestion? Animated ship sprites. So you can have moving parts on a ship like thruster effects, flickering lights/glow, or mechanical animations(rotating turbines or rotating radar dish etc....

[John Luke Pack Hard]

Can I make a suggestion? Animated ship sprites. So you can have moving parts on a ship like thruster effects, flickering lights/glow, or mechanical animations(rotating turbines or rotating radar dish etc....

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JLL ... edit?pli=1

List of suggestions. You're free to add to it.

[KuroSaru]

There is two possible methods to the engine in overdrive.

1: Intermediate Language Support, basically its a engine that runs the scripts and all the pretty things and rest is up to you.

2: Fully configurable hard-coded engine with support for additional functions created as plugins. which could be configured in this type of way. but a 100% will be done this way just a example.

Code: Select all

<!-- example of event not using plugin in script -->
<event id="0">
   <type="internal">EVENT_TYPE_NAME</type>
   <dialogs>
      <dialog id="0">
         <text>Do You Want Free Things????</text>
         <option id="0" trigger="success" caption="Hell Yes!">
         <option id="1" trigger="fail" caption="Hell No!">
         <option id="2" trigger="goto(1)" caption="Maybe?">
      </dialog>
      <dialog id="1">
         <text>Are you Sure?</text>
         <option id="0" trigger="success" caption="Hell Yes!">
         <option id="1" trigger="fail" caption="Hell No!">
      </dialog>
   </dialogs>
   <start-dialog="0">
   <success-action type="reward/activate-event/activate-trigger/heal" name="INTERNAL_NAME">
   <failed-action type="remove/activate-event/activate-trigger/damage" name="INTERNAL_NAME">
</event>

<!-- Example of plugin event in script -->
<event id="1">
   <type="external">PLUGIN_NAME</type>
   <!-- EVERYTHING HANDLED IN PLUGIN -->
</event>


Either way the FTL:Overdrive engine will be created to be as customizable as possible and will be created to work upon OSX/Linux/Windows/Android (yes Android will be supported, designed for tablets not phones. )

[speedoflight]

Really looking forward to this, already wrote a couple of sugesstions in the notes document i really hope u have the best of luck.