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

[5thHorseman]

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

Not to give any spoilers, but... well let's just say I've tried it and it's quite fun.

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.

No, that's normal. And if you stalemate the ship in a fuel event long enough, they give up and give you fuel. I don't know the exact RPness of it but a tie counts as a minor win in that case

[Russian Rockman]

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.

If you wanted to keep the AE content for both though? Wouldn't there have to be a separate mod that directly implements the AE stuff into vanilla.

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

Not to give any spoilers, but... well let's just say I've tried it and it's quite fun.

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.

No, that's normal. And if you stalemate the ship in a fuel event long enough, they give up and give you fuel. I don't know the exact RPness of it but a tie counts as a minor win in that case

Are there any other species special abilities? I know slugs are immune to mind control and humans now have a skill increase.

[5thHorseman]

Are there any other species special abilities? I know slugs are immune to mind control and humans now have a skill increase.

Other than Lanius (which isn't really a new ability so much as a new species) I don't think so. Oh, Mantis' battle damage is now reported correctly to be 150% instead of 200%.

[RAD-82]

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.

I knew that, but that has apparently changed. It looks like they may have hard-coded enemies to run when you have no fuel. This link shows a pre-AE event (that isn't a no fuel event) where the enemy is running from the very start. There is no event text that states that the enemy would be running.

http://youtu.be/VTiXakTBtU4?t=43m

I should've linked this in my previous post.

Northernlion - He's not good at FTL and he knows it. I, myself, would prefer to avoid his channel, for language reasons.

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.

This certainly doesn't fall into that circumstance.

[Kieve]

If you wanted to keep the AE content for both though? Wouldn't there have to be a separate mod that directly implements the AE stuff into vanilla.

Yes, but as near as I can tell that should be a simple matter of moving blueprints from their _DLC overrides into the main .XML. And let's also keep in mind that in most intances where using AE-toggle as a mod mode-switch, AE content is already going to be present in the mod.

[RAD-82]

I think some things are hard-coded to the AE-enabled button; such as stun. You can see the stun disappear from weapons (in the hanger) when turning AE off, but there are no extra blueprints to override the weapons.

From the little testing I have done:

I think artillery systems that don't have a weapon assigned cause the game to crash. These don't seem to default to ARTILLERY_FED. (Test: Tried loading my ship, Bahamut, game crashes when trying to select it.)

Reactors above the normal limit crash the game when entering ion storms. (Test: My OP Testrel has extra power, and it couldn't enter an ion storm. Game auto-saves now, so progress isn't lost. Sorry, Potential. It seems your days might be numbered.)

Medbay and Clone Bay are hard-coded together. Assigning them to different rooms doesn't allow you to have both. When you change systems, it seems to retain the system level from the other system. You can assign two systems to the same room (I don't think that is new), but I never saw what happens when that room takes damage.

Unassigned systems still show up in stores.

Level 10 shields still work. I didn't try any graphic changes, and the 5th level overlaps the 1st level on the shield indicator at the top.

Slugs don't detect red dots anymore. You can see what race is in the dark rooms now.

Glows have changed. I don't know much about this yet.

Door and Sensor stations default to slot 0, direction UP.

Anti-Bio Beam has a color tag for changing the beam color.

Graphics for 2 weapon slots and 4 drone slots. None of the new ships use these. Will they work?

AE has a system repair bomb. Bug fixed? Hope so... I wanted to include system repair on my purple Crystal Harmony Bomb.

I may have forgotten some things...

[Russian Rockman]

The Advanced Battle Systems mod and the Advanced Systems module of the sMPK increase the power of some of the vanilla systems. Most of them work, but some of them behave strangely. Engines for example will reduce evasion to zero past level 8 and subsystems will revert to level 1 past level 3.

I have tested this with the new Advanced Edition systems and here is what I've found. Feel free to test this out yourself though.

WORKING-ISH
Clone Bay Level 4+ = Instant cloning and full health regen upon jumping, (interesting, but it's like teleporter level 4 it's description is weird, it says health regen 100000+)
Backup Battery = will work for many additional levels! Increased by 2 each level. Could actually be really useful, but it will screw up the UI past level 5, obviously.

DO NOT WORK
Mind Control = This one I Couldn't even get to show additional levels, which is strange. It must be really hardcoded or else I missed something... Disappointing I really thought that this one would work.
Hacking = Does not work at all. (EDIT: On level 4) Effects systems for 0 seconds only.

Anyway, so that's that...

EDIT:
Hacking level 5 actually provides 4 minutes of disruption. Pretty damn OP...

[kartoFlane]

Bad news. 0x0 are broken in AE, crashing the game every time a ship containing them is loaded

edit
On the other hand, ion beams appear to finally be pretty tame, correctly applying their ion damage. They seem to be still pretty damn OP against shields, though.

[Russian Rockman]

Bad news. 0x0 are broken in AE, crashing the game every time a ship containing them is loaded

edit
On the other hand, ion beams appear to finally be pretty tame, correctly applying their ion damage. They seem to be still pretty damn OP against shields, though.

Please elaborate... What do you mean about the ion beams? From my experience with vanilla they would nuke all shields and then ion systems. I found though that when they were given a VERY FAST speed they could be made to not take out all shields, but then they would only ion half of the rooms they passed through.

Also, it is possible to have more than 8 systems on a ship if the ship starts out with more than 8 systems. I should be possible to also have a Medbay and clone bay in this case, but I haven't actually tried that out yet. (of course this messes with the UI)

Has anyone tested if the replacing systems thing works dynamically?
Also, I read glows have changed? What does that mean exactly?

[kartoFlane]

Please elaborate... What do you mean about the ion beams? From my experience with vanilla they would nuke all shields and then ion systems. I found though that when they were given a VERY FAST speed they could be made to not take out all shields, but then they would only ion half of the rooms they passed through.

I only briefly tested this out of sheer curiosity. I basically gave the mini beam 1 ion damage instead of normal damage, and then fought some enemies with it. What I noticed:

• When shields are hit by ion beam, 1 bar of shield system gets ionised. I have no idea whether this increases with more shield layers / more ion damage.
• Not exactly sure about this, but it seems like the first room that was targeted by the beam is not ioned if the beam had to take a shield layer down first (ie. trying to ion 3 rooms starting at oxygen > weapons > medbay, but oxygen doesn't get ioned).
• More likely than the above, ion damage is applied in half- or one-second ticks, once per room. Which would coincide with my other observations when I fought a zoltan ship: shields weren't down instantly, but instead took 2 and then 3 damage, roughly in that interval (0.5 - 1 second)

As I said, I only briefly tried his, because that's not what I was really interested in testing at the time. Figured it'd be enough for someone else would investigate it further.

Also, it is possible to have more than 8 systems on a ship if the ship starts out with more than 8 systems. I should be possible to also have a Medbay and clone bay in this case, but I haven't actually tried that out yet. (of course this messes with the UI)

No idea, but it seems quite likely. It might also crash the game outright *shrug*

Has anyone tested if the replacing systems thing works dynamically?

Haven't heard anything about that :o Where are the xml tags for that?

Also, I read glows have changed? What does that mean exactly?

There are no more glows like, engines_3_glow1.png, engines_3_glow2.png ... etc. Instead, all rooms use common glow images (glow1.png, glow2.png, glow3.png). Each interior image has an entry in rooms.xml which specifies glow coordinates and direction, so that it is located directly on top of the console in the associated image. It is possible to have rooms use custom glow images in rooms.xml:

Code: Select all

<roomLayout name="pilot">
	<computerGlow name="glow_pilot" x="19" y="9" dir="RIGHT"/>
</roomLayout>

The above tag makes the room_pilot.png use glow_pilot#.png glows.
For whatever reason, cloaking still uses the old glow system.
That's all I've figured for now.

Another thing, interior images are no longer stretched/squished to match room dimensions. So it might be possible to come up with some cool stuff with proper layering...