FTL Captain's Edition 1.308/Inf 1.301b/EL 1.308

[Russian Rockman]

I love the Space Whale! It looks soooo cute!
However, I'm not sure I like the idea of an entire sector dedicated to the whales. Having them in the game as a sort of easter egg type deal is fine though.

The space whale sector was an interesting idea for how to create a "new race" though. An idea I had for a potential new sector could was a sort of ancient sector which holds the only remains from an advanced civilization older than even the Zoltans and Crystals. It could have opportunities to use the new science lab, perhaps some lanius hanging around destroying the little bit of history they couldn't get before, it could be either populated as a tourist attraction or home to some ancient AI defense ships. It would be very fun to potentially obtain some special advanced weaponry or augment from this sector. Alternatively, I think this could make an interesting lengthy questline like the curator quest.

Also, I was hoping that you would one day add some flavor texts that talk about other "minor" races. I like the mention of the bartender with "tentacles" for example. Justin and Matthew said that they originally thought about having many different races, but wanted the races to each be unique so they only had a few major races and subtley referred to other aliens in text only. However, the only "alien" I remember being mentioned in vanilla FTL was the six-legged horse animals, which may or may not be intelligent. If you could scatter some text around about stuff like "This planet is home to a race of lizard like people" or "A colony of sentient "plants" asks you to transport these seeds," (but obviously more creative than that ) than I would be very happy.

You could try adding some new hazards always too, although we have plenty. I thought of a hazard that randomly stuns your crew, which could make a boarding event extremely stressful. And did you ever get radiation events to work again???? I'm sure you could add them back in, "in some form or another." I miss those.

Lastly, one of my better ideas. For a long time I have wanted to make a "Randomized" Flagship mod. After rannl helped you create Endless Loot I realized this could be possible with his help! The basics of my idea were:
-Create either several custom versions of the flagship or procedurally generated versions
-A program could randomly choose one of these versions and create a .ftl file
-This .ftl file can be included in slipstream just like any other mod
-Whenever you want to create a new flagship/randomize the flagship again, just run the program again and it will overwrite the previous .ftl file using a different version of the flagship
-Potentially every time you start a new game you could do this and get a slightly different boss in every game
This would greatly add to the replay ability of the game and add an additional element of strategy I think.

Some things I know would be possible with this would be the following:
(Not so crazy possibilities)
-At the start of the game you could ACTUALLY HAVE A GLIMPSE AT YOUR (partially decoded) SECRET DATA!!! And it will give you a vagueish hint as to what tactics, weaponry, etc... The flagship will be using so you can try to equip yourself accordingly throughout your run
-The boss(es) could receive new artillery weapons including flak weapons, stun weapons, bombs, effectors, etc...
-The boss(es) could use different types of drones
-The boss(es) could receive different amounts, (maybe even types???), of crew
-The boss(es) could receive different augments
(Kind of crazy possibilities)
-The boss(es) could have different amounts of power in their systems or use different systems on different stages
-Events could completely change during the Last Stand e.g...
-You could face different hazards
-You could have friendly ships come and help you
-You could have one of you crew men turn on you at the very end
-Everything that would be possible if the last encounter were truly random like the rest of the game
(Clearly Insane possibilities)
-Some of the boss(es) could have completely different layouts
-Some of the boss(es) could have completely different hulls
-Some of the bosses could be space whales

Really the possibilities are endless, but I believe this could be done in the way that I described, especially with the help of rannl. Previously the only, "randomization" you could achieve was through events and even that was very limited. But if you replace all of the files related to the flagship and Last Stand each time you play, then you can achieve the same level of randomization as other encounters in the game make it unique each time you play. You could even have a drastically different story each time you reach the Last Stand.

So what do you think? This is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I really can't achieve much on my own.

[jman514]

I was wondering if there was any possible way to make the anti-crew drone shots affected by zoltan shields, or if that is a glitch. I just lost a Zoltan A run to the goddamn rebel bounty hunter in sector 2 thanks to those goddamn drones.

[Estel]

Looking good so far, I'd be happy to use that. I can share you my titles screen wip file, but you don't have to bother with the contributors and music texts. I'd actually prefer to just get a pure background file, cause I'd like to keep the names as a separate text layer that I can change whenever new people have to be added. I'd also prefer to add the title myself so that I can give it an amount of glow coherent with the other texts I'd add.
(...)
- Overall I think this will be a well worthy title screen for CE. Thanks for you help.

Thanks a lot for both appreciation and constructive critique. It's really awesome, that you find it good enough to consider adding into CE. If you prefer text-less version, that's even better - I absolutely suxx at adding those texts and creating proper glow, so it boils down (again) to pixel-by-pixel editing, which actually took longer than improving stations...

Just to clarify - you mean pure background file without ANY text (including "FTL", "Captain's edition", and copyright parts), or just without contributors and music authors?

Some more detailed feedback:
(...)
- Stations already look way better. Shrink and sharpen has its limits, the pixel by pixel approach definitely improved the look. If you rotate the stations other than 90degree they might get blurry again. Looking forward to see the final ships/station distribution.

Thanks, I thought that they look better too, but wasn't certain if I'm not affected by self-proud placebo, thus I've added them as "template" there, to show how they look and compose with rest of background. I planned to place few auto satellites under different angles (just like in current main screen), but I'm not sure how it will turn out. For a while, I considered going totally rogue and placing everything - including fleet ships - under different angles, as it was a little too tidy to be realistic - but, it destroyed the specific "feel" of title screen, so I abandoned the idea.

- Background composition is quite nice. I imagine this being some main Rebel planet that the Federation stole the secret data from.

Whoa, nice idea! I actually haven't thought of that, but it sounds great

Small nitpick: The smalles moon touches the text but does not really overlap. In my book of image composition that turns out a little odd. I'd say it should either be overlapped by about a third or not be overlap at all. Maybe consider moving it to the lover left for about a planet length?

You're absolutely right - as I've written, the "FTL Captain's Edition" text isn't even placed properly (currently, it would not fit above menu items as it should), it was also adfded there as "placeholder". Interesting fact - in actual menu file found in CE Resource pack, the "white" letters (in all texts) aren't exactly white - they're shifted, a little, to red. I always had this impression and it bugged me a little (not enough to actually check it, before I've started to work on menu background), but now I've confirmed it checking colour with pipette. I'm not sure if you've did it on purpose, but I wasn't able to found any reason, so I've changed it back to pure white.

Anyway, the further away moon is placed the way that it will get overlapped circa about 1/3 by properly placed FTL text. I've thought where to place it, and decided to avoid lower left, due to it being ideal place for many fleet ships/stations. I thought that it might create strange perspective problems with ships overlapping moon/being around it. The idea of the place where it is now - and it's lighting - was to make impressions, that it's *further* away, almost on the opposite side of the planet as compared to "tech" moon (think almost 1/3 of orbit), not necessary smaller one per se. It is also most blurred thing (although I used blur very conservatively here), with tech moon being on first plane and "in focus", planet on 2nd plane (although, dominating view), and moon somewhere in 3th plane. Not sure if I achieved it

- As you might have realized I kept the upper left and the lower right part of the image free from ships to avoid odd overlaps with the texts that are generated there. Might be something to consider in your ship distribution.

Yes, I've considered it (although, thank you for reminding anyway). Thats why I've placed nebulas (galaxies) the way that it leaves place for menus. As for ship distribution, first, I must actually unpack my FTL .dat files for the first time, to actually get fleet images Newbie in range... (although, to be completely honest, the FTL unpacking is a piece of cake, compared to structure of data in some games, that I've worked on modding, so everyone interested in doing something for CE and reading it - consider it rather my laziness in the past, than any black magic required.)

R&D
In case you are wondering where CE is going from now: I'm wondering myself.

The wingmen idea for Fed Cruiser... I'm still eagerly waiting for this completely different play style! If it's still considered doable and feasible from technical side. Really, as we discussed it before, autonomous ANS augment is nothing compared to lore-awesomeness possible in wingmen events.

I also briefly thought about an automated sector now. Basically a unique hostile zone where the Rebels produce all their automated scouts. The style would be about machine dominance, with no sentient machines involved as apposed to the AI sector. The game play gimmick would be that the player fights auto ships and stations exclusively, probably with a separate kind of automated production ships as a secondary faction. This faction could have separate lists with ships classes that focus on repair and defence and also could get some custom ship hulls that would make them look more like construction bots than infiltrators.

That's pretty good idea. But, the "pirate homeworlds"...

The pirate homeworlds is also still on the table.

...is still something that might turn out much better than you expect You know, local conflicts between pirate overlords, corporate spies, rebels trying to hire mercenaries, etc...

Beside those few things, I also feel that CE is pretty complete (to the point that I actually considered menu screen a thing worth fixing - guess how complete other things must be). Apart from bugfixing (rule 1 of galaxy - there never can be enough bug fixing), I think that you won't have much things to do, unless you or someone else get new awesome idea... And doable one, too. There is only so much you can mod into FTL (which is already AWESOME, considering tat modding was never an official thing).

/Estel

[Sleeper Service]

AP shots can't be blocked by Zoltan shields due to some changes with AE. You'll have to watch out for your crew when encountering them.

For a long time I have wanted to make a "Randomized" Flagship mod. After rannl helped you create Endless Loot I realized this could be possible with his help! The basics of my idea were:
-Create either several custom versions of the flagship or procedurally generated versions
-A program could randomly choose one of these versions and create a .ftl file
-This .ftl file can be included in slipstream just like any other mod
-Whenever you want to create a new flagship/randomize the flagship again, just run the program again and it will overwrite the previous .ftl file using a different version of the flagship
-Potentially every time you start a new game you could do this and get a slightly different boss in every game
This would greatly add to the replay ability of the game and add an additional element of strategy I think.

Yeah, technically this would be possible in the form of a small program that the player has to execute to generate a randomized flagship mod, pretty much exactly as you described it. I'll ask Rann what he thinks about that, maybe hes posting directly here anyway.

Also, I was hoping that you would one day add some flavor texts that talk about other "minor" races. I like the mention of the bartender with "tentacles" for example. Justin and Matthew said that they originally thought about having many different races, but wanted the races to each be unique so they only had a few major races and subtley referred to other aliens in text only. However, the only "alien" I remember being mentioned in vanilla FTL was the six-legged horse animals, which may or may not be intelligent. If you could scatter some text around about stuff like "This planet is home to a race of lizard like people" or "A colony of sentient "plants" asks you to transport these seeds," (but obviously more creative than that ) than I would be very happy.

I planned to do that for the blue humanoids and alike at some point. This would be way more interesting if the game could be forced to spawn a certain crew variant on ships or as crew though...

Alright, time to chip-in with some input of my own, courtesy of a single pass-through with the Error checker.

Good catches there, I'll work these in.

Thanks a lot for both appreciation and constructive critique. It's really awesome, that you find it good enough to consider adding into CE. If you prefer text-less version, that's even better - I absolutely suxx at adding those texts and creating proper glow, so it boils down (again) to pixel-by-pixel editing, which actually took longer than improving stations...

Just to clarify - you mean pure background file without ANY text (including "FTL", "Captain's edition", and copyright parts), or just without contributors and music authors?

Without any text at all would be sufficient. I can pull title and copyright off my WIP file easily and create even glows. If you need to create glows in the future: gimps filters/light and shadow/drop shadow can be used to create even glows very effectively. Select what you want to glow or make it a separate layer and then drop a shadow with offsets set to zero. Indistinguishable from how glows look ingame.

...is still something that might turn out much better than you expect You know, local conflicts between pirate overlords, corporate spies, rebels trying to hire mercenaries, etc...

Creating interesting lore is not that much of the problem as much as defining a distinct visual style for the sector and giving it a distinct game-play gimmick. Pirate Homeworlds might lack in that area, they might really just end up as a homeworld in the traditional FTL sense, a sector that has a very similar profile to the "... controlled variant". Well, lets see how it turns out. I still find the whole idea of an auto construction sector more interesting right now:

Auto Construction Platform early alpha

[ahmedoo]

1. Missing second option. I thought that I have enough scrap to buy sme upgrades but there aren't any of them:

http://zapodaj.net/b5c8639242d41.bmp.html

2. I don't know if it is a visual bug but it is beginning of the fight and while cloaking the enemy still shows his hacking drone:

http://zapodaj.net/87f0efe9f6d9d.bmp.html

3. Second and third option's places should be changed (if we want to follow the same pattern as the rest of quests):

http://zapodaj.net/807d3f19de8ad.bmp.html

4. This drone ignored my shield made by shield drone and still hit my rooms (in the picture - engine room):

http://zapodaj.net/d4f1deacd7a06.bmp.html

What would be the function of this auto construction drone? Do you want to introduce blueprints and connect them to this type of drone? I think that would be good idea for those who use endless loot addon.

[KittenOverLord]

I installed the resource pack, the CE, and the infinite space addon and patched them to slip stream one at a time in the order of resource pack CE bacic then infinite addon. But when I make to the first exit beacon it shows me the map you would normally see. Do I have to run the game for each time I patch the game or could it be my pc's problem. I also tried to patch Infinite loot addon but it just froze not a big deal even if randomized loot sounds cool.

[Sleeper Service]

1. Missing second option. I thought that I have enough scrap to buy sme upgrades but there aren't any of them:
http://zapodaj.net/b5c8639242d41.bmp.html

Yep, cause you don't have a sensor system to upgrade.

2. I don't know if it is a visual bug but it is beginning of the fight and while cloaking the enemy still shows his hacking drone:
http://zapodaj.net/87f0efe9f6d9d.bmp.html

Cloaked ships showing attached hacking drones is a vanilla thing, I don't think that can be changed.

4. This drone ignored my shield made by shield drone and still hit my rooms (in the picture - engine room):
http://zapodaj.net/d4f1deacd7a06.bmp.html

Yeah, that is an antipersonnel drone that deals no hull damage. It will pass through Zoltan shields.

What would be the function of this auto construction drone? Do you want to introduce blueprints and connect them to this type of drone? I think that would be good idea for those who use endless loot addon.

The construction drone will will belong to a secondary faction of Rebel auto ships only found in their construction sectors. They are automated construction ships that process resources and construct more ships for the Rebel fleet. Game play wise they will focus on repair, defense, drones and industrial beam weapons. While the weapon crafting idea surely has its charm I don't believe that it is totally suitable for CE (as I outlined in that def talk I posted).

I installed the resource pack, the CE, and the infinite space addon and patched them to slip stream one at a time in the order of resource pack CE bacic then infinite addon. But when I make to the first exit beacon it shows me the map you would normally see. Do I have to run the game for each time I patch the game or could it be my pc's problem. I also tried to patch Infinite loot addon but it just froze not a big deal even if randomized loot sounds cool.

You always have to patch all mods together, otherwise this won't work. The mod manager restores your original game before patching in any mods.

[KittenOverLord]

I'm sorry am I missing something because I tied tried that after I read the response and finished a sector to test it out and it seems the same could you post a picture of what it supposed to look like. If so thanks.

[RAD-82]

Estel's image: http://s16.postimg.org/mxjh4zfk5/engi_for_life.jpg
That's not a bug. That is the enemy AI on Hard mode. They man the engines instead of shields when they don't have enough crew for both. The Engi being trapped is just part of the ship's layout lacking doors to those rooms.

Hm makes sense. This will happen on vanilla as well then? Do you know if that ship gets a different layout on hard?

Layouts don't change based on difficulty, besides the final boss. Technically, this ship here stopped being vanilla when AE came out, because non-federation pirate ships received new layouts. You'll only see this layout in vanilla with actual Slug ships, so only Slugs will be trapped in the engines.

I haven't watched any CE videos since AE came out, so I don't know if you even used any of the new pirate layouts or if you just replaced them with your old pre-AE data so that they never show up.

[Sleeper Service]

I'm sorry am I missing something because I tied tried that after I read the response and finished a sector to test it out and it seems the same could you post a picture of what it supposed to look like. If so thanks.

Select all the mods you want to use and then hit the patch button. Should look like this.

Layouts don't change based on difficulty, besides the final boss. Technically, this ship here stopped being vanilla when AE came out, because non-federation pirate ships received new layouts. You'll only see this layout in vanilla with actual Slug ships, so only Slugs will be trapped in the engines.

Well I guess that is good enough. I used the new pirate layouts but mixed them with the original ones for greater pirate variety.