AE R&D - What is new? What can we do now?

[Sleeper Service]

That will come in handy. Maybe we can even permanently reduce system levels and therefor negate system upgrades via negative values...

[Russian Rockman]

I would like to see some events that do permanent damage. I see an Engineering option or event for Zoltans that can increase your reactor power! Maybe it will actually be able to get past 25 power this way. (Potential v2.0)

[Sleeper Service]

Looks like the little circle of beta testers has been allowed to steam some AE now, so if you want to spoil some stuff for yourself, you can do it here for example.

And apparently there was another stream here and there are probably even more already.

/Edit:
I was part of the beta myself and I guess it's OK to share some of the things I noticed, now that the news ban we had agreed to is more or less lifted.

Some of the more interesting stuff in detail:
- Events can deal damage to certain player systems and can cause fires and breaches now
- Crew can be given with preset experience lvls
- Crew variants can be controlled via RGB colorizing and different layers of crew sheets, allowing for hundreds of different crew variants, all the way down to details like different eye color
- All the new weapon properties can be modded, allowing for: weapons that stun, weapons with area targeting, weapons that alter certain stats like damage or cooldown each time they fire, and combination of all the above
- Artillery systems of any ships now have their actual weapon blueprints directly assigned to them, allowing for multiple player and enemy ships that have various artillery systems

[xlandar]

dayum, we are gonna have a lot of new toys to play with!
i'm very excited for the weapons where you can shrink they're cooldown each time they fire.

[kartoFlane]

Oh you little, sly...

Things that where hard coded before still are, so no aug manipulation or gear removal.

Gah, that's a shame. I hoped they'd include that in, especially since technically, the functionality is already there (as evidenced by the crystal unlock event), just not exposed to XML... Have the devs given any reason as to this, seeing as you had the opportunity to ask them about it?

Have you tried playing around with modding in AE? Everything SMM does is general enough that it should work just fine, not requiring any update whatsoever.

All in all, lots of good and exciting stuff in there, modding-wise... I'd ask a lot more questions, but I guess I'll just wait till tomorrow to see all of the stuff myself

[Sleeper Service]

I guess they did not outsource this for some internal reason or cause it is a one time affair. I did not ask too many questions though, might be a lost opportunity but I did not want to bother the defs too much, as the last weeks where obviously very stressing. There might still be room for a "modding wishlist" as there might be some patches dealing with stuff that was discovered too later, but official modding support is still not a thing as far as I can tell.

I indeed played around with modding a whole lot, to the extend that I have a running CE build ready Your totally right there, SMM does handle AE modding without any problems. The error checker works as well by the way, it just displays a lot of AE stuff it does not recognize as errors.


Further finds, specially concerning ship modding:

- The old cloak-image-twenty-pixel-larger rule seems no longer valid. Ship layout xmls now have a "cloak offset" value that governs how the cloak image is positioned. Ship modders will most likely have to add this tag to have their ships cloak images displayed correctly. This change, like a lot of the minor visual handling changes, seems to be I-Pad related.

- The new systems all have their own room assigned on the ship. You ship just needs to have the new system tags added in the blueprint to enable the ship to get the news systems. If your ship has no free rooms, then this might pose a problem.

- Related: Medbay and Clonebay on all the player ships have the same room assigned. This seems to make the game replace one of these systems when buying the other. I did not test this, but if this is happening dynamically then it might allow to handle any systems this way. That would, for example, enable you to make ships that only can have mind control or hacking, not both at the same time. Or a ship that loses cloaking once your buy shields. Or even a ship that can only have a single additional subsystem at the same time. Needs testing.

- Crew on enemy ships can now be type="random" (I'm pretty sure that this did not work before and pirate ships had their crews randomized automatically.) Did not test if this works for player ships as well, but it would allow for interesting possibilities concerning crew, like a ship with a random teamup. The player might be able to reset this by reselecting the ship, till getting a lineup he/she is happy with. Needs testing.

[RAD-82]

Zoltans "-Explodes on death, damaging enemy crew" I see a new kind of Zoltan boarding ship... (not by me)

Does having no fuel automatically cause enemy ships to run? I'm referring to the jump that uses your last fuel, not an encounter after you wait.

[Sleeper Service]

The encounters that you can have after waiting all have a build in enemy escape (that was there before AE already), but the jump that makes you run out of fuel can not have the enemies do that. However, AE does feature a hard-coded anti-stalemate event that might be executed in this circumstances. It is called when you and the opponent are both unable to deal damage and causes the enemy to withdraw eventually.

[Russian Rockman]

Zoltans "-Explodes on death, damaging enemy crew" I see a new kind of Zoltan boarding ship... (not by me)

Does having no fuel automatically cause enemy ships to run? I'm referring to the jump that uses your last fuel, not an encounter after you wait.

Do they really? That's kind of disappointing. I would have liked it better if they stunned the system that they're in or did ion damage when they died. That would be a more different use for them other than killing crew. It does however make it interesting when fighting them as enemies. The ion damage thing would make your units more dangerous though and you wouldn't want them to die or you'd have multiple problems.

I can see new events though where a Zoltan ship suicides itself because all of the crew join together and "self destruct."

[Kieve]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet: the "Enable AE Content" button is basically a toggle that calls in extra .XMLs to override default behavior, on certain files. In a practical sense, this means you can use it to have a "campaign" and "infinite space" mode running concurrently, expand ship options to load (potentially) as many as 56 different ships at once (Original 8, Type A/B/C, Crystal A/B, Lanius A/B || AE toggle x2). I talked briefly with Matt about that possibility during testing and he stated it might be fewer, but I have not tested this yet.

Short version, it basically doubles the amount of content we can have running concurrently.