Subset Games Forum

content removed by moderator. - Please stick to the topic.

Note: I was defending the modder.

Well thanks to the admin that cleared those, guessing some people aren't put off...

Working on Luna now, not sure when she'll be released so keep a lookout! ^^

If you're planning to make so many ships it may become difficult/impossible to pack them all into one mod. For example if you have to disable the Tele for one ship, all others will need to start with it or else the player will not be able to buy them in stores. Events may cause similar problems.

For now it probably doesn't matter, but eventually you may have to split ships into modpacks, because they will not be compatible with themselves.

...
you are going to have a pretty hard time packing all of those ships in one mod. Make sure not to overlap the id's on the ships and you should be good.

edited by moderator

Ora_unit_SR388 wrote:you are going to have a pretty hard time packing all of those ships in one mod. Make sure not to overlap the id's on the ships and you should be good.

It's not ship IDs that will cause problems, it's the way ship system/subsytem modding works that will cause incompatibilites. System mods are global and affect all ships equaly, which places limits on what can be done. For example i cannot have one ship have 5 shields, and keep the rest on 4. Or set cloaking rarity to 0 for only one ship.

It *may* be possible to force certain changes via ship-specific events, but even that has limits.

UltraMantis wrote:

Ora_unit_SR388 wrote:you are going to have a pretty hard time packing all of those ships in one mod. Make sure not to overlap the id's on the ships and you should be good.

It's not ship IDs that will cause problems, it's the way ship system/subsytem modding works that will cause incompatibilites. System mods are global and affect all ships equaly, which places limits on what can be done. For example i cannot have one ship have 5 shields, and keep the rest on 4. Or set cloaking rarity to 0 for only one ship.

It *may* be possible to force certain changes via ship-specific events, but even that has limits.

I'm running into this issue myself. I'd prefer to have a clearly defined Naval System, where smaller ships (Frigates, Destroyers) can't mount more than 2 & 3 shields layers/drones/weapons systems respectively, whereas Cruisers and BattleCruisers have all the systems you can shake your fist at (and a kitchen sink too), and can go up to 4 & 5 layers of shields.

EDIT: In fact, I'm wondering if it's possible to change a single ship or set of ship's sound effects; The Concordiat, Khadarin, and Zoltans should all have different cloaking sounds, for example, as their custom ships will have different cloaking images.

Sadly no, you can't have individual sounds for each ship. I was wishing for more myself recently. The game has 1 sound effect for cloaking or teleporting and while you can certainly mod the sound, all ships in the game will use that 1 effect. Similarly, repainting teleporter pads makes them appear on every ship.

Weapons are the only fertile soil for sound modding because you can:
a) create new weapons for the game
b) control which ship uses which weapon

This means you could have a set of different sounding burst lasers or missiles for each race if you wanted to. But unfortunatly you can't add new systems or races.

Even the devs ran into this problem. You can see it in the way the cost of 1st or in some cases 2nd system upgrades were decided. Mantis A has a special price for the 2nd lvl weapons upgrade, which fits it's theme nicely. The price is the same for all other ships, but they all start with at least lvl2 in weapons so the player never notices this. 2nd lvl shield upgrade also has a special price that only affects Zoltan B (iirc). Normally buying shields for cruisers that start without one, you get to lvl2 right away, so again the player doesn't notice this.

Despite of all the funky stuff modders can do, much of the game is hardcoded. It's very dissapointing to have a nice idea but then hit the wall of modding limits in FTL. The biggest problem here is that even if you can get one ship to work as intended, it will force all other ships to work the same way. This badly hurts Total Conversions.

UltraMantis wrote:Sadly no, you can't have individual sounds for each ship. I was wishing for more myself recently. The game has 1 sound effect for cloaking or teleporting and while you can certainly mod the sound, all ships in the game will use that 1 effect. Similarly, repainting teleporter pads makes them appear on every ship.

Weapons are the only fertile soil for sound modding because you can:
a) create new weapons for the game
b) control which ship uses which weapon

This means you could have a set of different sounding burst lasers or missiles for each race if you wanted to. But unfortunatly you can't add new systems or races.

Even the devs ran into this problem. You can see it in the way the cost of 1st or in some cases 2nd system upgrades were decided. Mantis A has a special price for the 2nd lvl weapons upgrade, which fits it's theme nicely. The price is the same for all other ships, but they all start with at least lvl2 in weapons so the player never notices this. 2nd lvl shield upgrade also has a special price that only affects Zoltan B (iirc). Normally buying shields for cruisers that start without one, you get to lvl2 right away, so again the player doesn't notice this.

Despite of all the funky stuff modders can do, much of the game is hardcoded. It's very dissapointing to have a nice idea but then hit the wall of modding limits in FTL. The biggest problem here is that even if you can get one ship to work as intended, it will force all other ships to work the same way. This badly hurts Total Conversions.

Bah. I've been able to design different feeling weapons, augs, drones and different looking ships, but looks like that's the limit.

Thanks for the info.

The reskin of the osprey or nisos should be a unicorn, with the artillery laser coming out of their horn.

Pew pew.

Also, pinkie should have a weapon mount on the part of her mane that sticks out in front of her face.

I know this is likely to sound really dumb - I am not a modder - but I'm going to say it anyway. Would it be possible to create new systems that mimic the function of a system in every detail and take the same space as it, but can (as technically a different system) have its own settings?

As an example, the Flak Cannon and Advanced Flak Cannon for essentially equivalent items, the Medbay and Clone Bay for systems that share a space.

You could then make special ship specific versions of systems that take the same space as the default and cannot be bought, but could hypothetically be replaced at a store.

Example, an energy efficient shield system that provides a shield for every bar of power, but is very expensive to upgrade and weak to ion damage, so a normal shield system might still seem a good idea. It would be a completely seperate system, and would occupy the same space as normal shields so you could only have one or the other, sim ilar to the medbay vs clone bay

A more on topic example would be NewAgeOfPower's shields. Would it be possible to make a system called Light Shields, costs 125 in the stores, works like shields, etc. but has a cap of 6 upgrade levels, and make that system the default on lighter ships, and leave it possible to buy regular shields (which would replace Light Shields and inheret their upgrades, same as Clone Bays) and otherwise leave those alone?