Not exactly a normal mod, but as I need the help of the modding community, I figured this would be the right place to ask. I'm working on a tabletop/board game conversion of FTL(non-commercial, just a fun project for me), and I'm basing it on the Captain's Edition mod. What I need is some help getting the art together. I'm trying to figure out how to extract the ship layouts for all the various ships in Captain's Edition for printing or use on a website like roll20. Ideally the ship layouts would have no system icons and the art for that can be inserted seperately to provide further ship customization(Kestrel with a 4 person teleporter where the drone bay normally is, 2 person medbay where door control is, etc), but if that isn't doable, I can do the art editing myself, if I have the images. Also to be clear, I'm looking for all the ship layouts, not just the playable ships.
I'm also looking for a coherant data dump of the weapon stats, and the weapon modifiers from the Endless Loot addon to the mod, or how to access such lists in the game files with a modding tool. The wiki is fairly incomplete in this regard, so I don't mind transcribing the data from the files by hand if necessary, I just need to know where to find this info.
I'm only passingly familiar with modding, so feel free to treat me like a moron when giving instructions. Thank you for any help, and assuming I'm not breaking any rules regarding copyright/licensing, I'd be happy to share the rules for the conversion here once complete.
FTL Board Game
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Sleeper Service
- Posts: 2275
- Joined: Sun Mar 24, 2013 8:49 pm
Re: FTL Board Game
Oh wow, looking forward to how that would turn out!
Your safest bet for viewing the layouts is opening the modded ships with the superluminal ship editor and take screenshots. Room layouts are assembled ingame and there is no real individual image file that shows them.
Player ships have floor images though, these are the greebly bits layered between the rooms and the ship image. These can be extracted.
Also CE and FTL mods are essentially .zip files, so you can extract it to view the ship art (resource pack) and weapon properties (CE main mod, in /data/blueprints.xml). And you can download the raw data for generating the EL content here, although the wiki might actually be more human-readable.
Your safest bet for viewing the layouts is opening the modded ships with the superluminal ship editor and take screenshots. Room layouts are assembled ingame and there is no real individual image file that shows them.
Player ships have floor images though, these are the greebly bits layered between the rooms and the ship image. These can be extracted.
Also CE and FTL mods are essentially .zip files, so you can extract it to view the ship art (resource pack) and weapon properties (CE main mod, in /data/blueprints.xml). And you can download the raw data for generating the EL content here, although the wiki might actually be more human-readable.
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nyito
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2016 11:31 am
Re: FTL Board Game
Awesome, this is almost exactly what I'm looking for, but plenty easy to make work.
Running into another problem perhaps already solved by the video game mechanically; how does the game parse out a 'balanced' opponent for the sector difficulty? Right now my method is basically building a ship, playtesting it, refining and repeating. It works, but it's a lot of boring rote work, and it occurs to me this may be a problem already solved in a way I can adapt to the board game.
I'm assuming the Endless Loot addon isn't factored in, so I'm okay with winging that, but I'm trying to boil down a given ship into a 'challenge rating' based on it's systems and equipment. So I can look at a ship's stats, parse it down to it's CR using a formula and a little bit of thought if the ship is optimized or not, to create balanced encounters.
Come to think of it, learning the code behind how rewards are parsed out based on sector difficulty would be helpful too, as a starting point.
Running into another problem perhaps already solved by the video game mechanically; how does the game parse out a 'balanced' opponent for the sector difficulty? Right now my method is basically building a ship, playtesting it, refining and repeating. It works, but it's a lot of boring rote work, and it occurs to me this may be a problem already solved in a way I can adapt to the board game.
I'm assuming the Endless Loot addon isn't factored in, so I'm okay with winging that, but I'm trying to boil down a given ship into a 'challenge rating' based on it's systems and equipment. So I can look at a ship's stats, parse it down to it's CR using a formula and a little bit of thought if the ship is optimized or not, to create balanced encounters.
Come to think of it, learning the code behind how rewards are parsed out based on sector difficulty would be helpful too, as a starting point.
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Leylite
- Posts: 85
- Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:21 pm
Re: FTL Board Game
You might be able to tease out a more specific answer from the developers if you ask them really nicely, but this is what's known publically so far about how the game generates opponents:
- Enemy ships get a "system bar budget" appropriate to their sector. This is then distributed among their systems, to upgrade them to their final statistics. They also have a random chance of having optional subsystems, which can then receive some of the bars from the budget. Thus, a ship that has Cloaking and Doors will *tend* to have fewer shields and engines. Usually.
- Once the number of weapons bars is determined, the enemy ship generates a set of weapons that fills up the appropriate number of power bars, making sure that the ship has at least one laser or ion weapon. Similar case applies to drones, although some ships (like the Auto-Assault) don't have any 1-power drones and so might leave a buffer bar in the drones system that's unused (e.g. 3 drones power, and only deploying a Beam I drone for 2 power).
- Some specific events specify a "weapon override" tag which takes the previously-generated ship, and replaces one of its weapons with one in a specific set; that's how you get a Slug ship with fire weapons. (Can't think of any others in the vanilla game; not sure how often this happens in Captain's Edition since I haven't played it).
- Ever since the AE update, the game tries not to let an enemy ship have two of the same drone type, although there's still a chance that can happen (source: AE changelog, near the bottom, under Bug/Misc. Fixes).
- Different ship types have different weapon lists: Flak I tends to show up on Rebel ships, Rock ships, and Lanius ships, but not Engi or Zoltan ships. Glaive Beams can only show up in certain ship classes.
That's basically it - the game makes no efforts of generating balanced ships or balanced scenarios, and the only quantification of "how tough" a ship it'll generate is the sector number. (All ships within a sector are the same "difficulty"). You can run into ships with three Leto launchers, or a ship with two Burst Laser IIs as soon as you reach sector 4. On the other hand, you could run into a ship incapable of penetrating tier 2 shields as late as Sector 7. It's all the roll of the dice.
- Enemy ships get a "system bar budget" appropriate to their sector. This is then distributed among their systems, to upgrade them to their final statistics. They also have a random chance of having optional subsystems, which can then receive some of the bars from the budget. Thus, a ship that has Cloaking and Doors will *tend* to have fewer shields and engines. Usually.
- Once the number of weapons bars is determined, the enemy ship generates a set of weapons that fills up the appropriate number of power bars, making sure that the ship has at least one laser or ion weapon. Similar case applies to drones, although some ships (like the Auto-Assault) don't have any 1-power drones and so might leave a buffer bar in the drones system that's unused (e.g. 3 drones power, and only deploying a Beam I drone for 2 power).
- Some specific events specify a "weapon override" tag which takes the previously-generated ship, and replaces one of its weapons with one in a specific set; that's how you get a Slug ship with fire weapons. (Can't think of any others in the vanilla game; not sure how often this happens in Captain's Edition since I haven't played it).
- Ever since the AE update, the game tries not to let an enemy ship have two of the same drone type, although there's still a chance that can happen (source: AE changelog, near the bottom, under Bug/Misc. Fixes).
- Different ship types have different weapon lists: Flak I tends to show up on Rebel ships, Rock ships, and Lanius ships, but not Engi or Zoltan ships. Glaive Beams can only show up in certain ship classes.
That's basically it - the game makes no efforts of generating balanced ships or balanced scenarios, and the only quantification of "how tough" a ship it'll generate is the sector number. (All ships within a sector are the same "difficulty"). You can run into ships with three Leto launchers, or a ship with two Burst Laser IIs as soon as you reach sector 4. On the other hand, you could run into a ship incapable of penetrating tier 2 shields as late as Sector 7. It's all the roll of the dice.
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nyito
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2016 11:31 am
Re: FTL Board Game
Expanding on that, is there a documented list of system bar budgets based on sector & game difficulty level anywhere? That seems like a solid starting point to begin working from, rather than my current method of just taking stabs in the dark.