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Knightsoul
Dec 19, 2008

Polikarpov posted:

Thee other really good mod for X3 is Mayhem 3. It modifies a ton of game systems to turn X3 into what you could almost call a 4x roguelike. Its all built around building your own faction and economy and has a lot of really cool systems for fleets and economic automation.

This. Mayhem 3 is a wonderful mod.

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Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

chglcu posted:

Even an efficient XML reader and writer - which I seriously doubt this is, because Egosoft

Egosoft's tech stack is actually extremely boring. Boost, SDL2, luajit, openal, ogg, zlib, some ffmpeg bits, and, well libxml2.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

pretense is my co-pilot

I've been writing some ideas down for a 'combat mk 2' which was focused on improving module choice & ship configuration. I took some experimental stabs at changes to check whether things were possible, but I tend to play in X4 in relatively short spurts which hasn't really allowed the time to mod. Warning: wall of text.

Flare/Missile Changes

- Strip flares from most hulls
- Scouts & other mediocre light fighters (i.e. Elite) would probably keep flare capacity. Maybe 1-shield hulls in general. Possibly Frigates, they need the help.
- Add flare dispenser module for shield slots (limited to first slot to stop AI from taking all flare dispensers)
- Possibly Split would have racial shields that have 1 flare each to help make up for their poor shielding.
- Tightly restrict availability of missile turrets - no more 'All missile' capitals.

The idea here being to make missiles more useful in general but enable counterplay. So missiles would be strong against some targets, but others would be highly resistant. And when fitting your ship you would need to choose between total raw shielding and your ability to defend against missiles. Would probably require disabling smart missile's flare immunity, and possibly improving the basic performance of most shield generators.

Ideally this would enable fielding S/M ships with missile launchers more commonly for some factions.

Capital Combat Changes

- Improve DPS on most anti-fighter turrets
- Heavily reduce accuracy (&maybe velocity on L Pulse) on anti-capital turrets to make them less good against small targets.
- Probably nerf L Plasmas/Pulses and then add a Mk2 variant. Mk1 would be Station 'Bombard' turrets - longer range, low accuracy, less firepower. Mk2 would be the turrets used by capital ships, with more power & accuracy but less range.
- Add AOE and minor shield penetrating damage to most anti-capital weapons. This would be to make anti-capital weapons specifically good at devastating subsystems, and hopefully head off 'false hits' where hitting subsystems means you aren't damaging the hull.

- Rework L/XL shield generators. Basic generators would no longer have self-shielding but only shield the ship's hull. Basic shield strength would increase dramatically, making capital ships highly resistant to fire while their generators are intact. Some races and possibly sub races would use shielded generators that trade significant amounts of performance to shield themselves (but in turn have less generator hull, rendering them highly vulnerable against shield penetrating weaponry). A possible variant of this would involve moving some core shielding to the ship hull, but retaining most shield regeneration on the external generators. Or, having all regeneration on the ship hull, but all shield strength coming from the generators. Would need to play around with it - could even have different strategies for different factions, or different strategies between military/civilian ships.

Firstly, the anti capital weapons are simply too good at splattering small targets, which needs to be headed off. I also want to make capitals tougher, but preserve the role of fighters and the enjoyment of strafing runs. Knocking out shield generators should be an important contribution you can do in a small ship. There were issues with players sitting in a blind spot and holding down the trigger to kill capital ships, which was both boring and bad gameplay. But frankly if you've destroyed all their surface elements and they have no backup... this is fine. I mean, Egosoft undercut their own changes to the point of meaninglessness when they added all the shield penetrating weapons in Split Vendetta.

Other stuff

- Capital stat adjustments. It's ridiculous that so many ships seemingly have placeholder stats for S ships docked etc. I'm also generally against the 'Capital ships dying extremely quickly' balance that Egosoft loves, but fixing that is more troublesome than it looks on first glance.
- Additional turrets for XL Carriers, to make them more competitive as battleships. May require cost hikes, but honestly, that's fine.
- Possible global adjustments to turning stats. Frigates etc really don't need to turn as well as they do baseline, especially with stronger turrets, and the maneuverability of Scouts etc. is just pointlessly high. Reducing baseline maneuverability will make the stat more meaningful and make ships feel more different.

Pie in the sky ideas

- Bubble shield generators as an option - great for carriers to help defend docked ships.
- Drone bandwidth, differentiating ships by number of supported launched drones. Might be possible.
- Drone launches without using the S bay. Airlock launch? Xenon drones?
- Researching paint schemes to use them as defaults


I had some other ideas for reworking ship hulls but that was more trade focused. I dislike how trade is actually pointless in x4, so it was oriented around creating 'tiers' of ship manufacture, with low tiers being easier to manufacture than currently and the highest tiers requiring racial goods from other factions (representing a fusion of technologies.) For example an advanced Behemoth variant would use Teladianium plating to increase its hull strength. Ideally this would be in concert with geographically restricted sourcing or other problems (like very high rep requirements on unscannable parts) that would encourage trade over just building. I dry ran this in X Rebirth with a mod that was focused on building up the Canteran economy, part of which was letting you manufacture low end ships with basic outputs and generally making it easier to bootstrap.

OwlFancier posted:

I guess in some respects that is something X4 does a bit better because in X3 if you got in a fighter anywhere near a fleet engagement you would just get loving obliterated in a blink.

X4 makes fighters in mass engagements a lot more survivable.
On that note: In case people missed it, there's now an auto eject that can happen in smaller ships, so its a lot safer to just hop into random fighters and have at it without risking another 5-minute reload. I'm not sure what the restrictions on this are, i think if you get insta blapped by big enough guns you can still just die.

Also, nice HQ, terran modules looking great.

Thom12255
Feb 23, 2013
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY
A Kha'ak ship has definitely killed me without eject before.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

I now have all the blueprints to make Claytronics (whose blueprints themselves I stole lol), as well as claim sectors with admin stations! Though there doesn't seem to be a great reason to tbh, I'm taking the Nop sectors anyway. Unfortunately I blew all my money buying the blueprints and making that station so I'm going to have to wait for my bank account to return lol

I'm making millions off of energy in Terran space though, it's absurdly profitable. The protein paste not so much though the game insists they def want it

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Apr 2, 2021

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I have also noticed that I seem to be selling a lot of ecells off the HQ, I wonder what changed and when, cos it used to be you could never shift the drat things.

e: I also today installed faction enhancer, and the xenon have immediately started pushing the terrans out of savage spur, the ZYA are completely collapsing under the combined weight of the argons and the xenon, and the teladi are starting to lose ground on the Company Regard branch, so this is going to be entertaining!

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Apr 2, 2021

Taerkar
Dec 7, 2002

kind of into it, really

AI stations that get built as the game go on tend to not have ecell production on them, so the supply begins to diminish.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



RBA Starblade posted:

I'm making millions off of energy in Terran space though, it's absurdly profitable. The protein paste not so much though the game insists they def want it
I noticed that the terran sectors i have access to all seem to have horrible sunlight levels, maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe I should spin up a solar farm in pioneer space and see if they come to get them.

EDIT: Or that.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Taerkar posted:

AI stations that get built as the game go on tend to not have ecell production on them, so the supply begins to diminish.

I had a several days old game before 4.0 that still never had an ecell trade, even when I stuck economy ramper upper mods on, definitely feels like something is different.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Zereth posted:

I noticed that the terran sectors i have access to all seem to have horrible sunlight levels, maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe I should spin up a solar farm in pioneer space and see if they come to get them.

EDIT: Or that.

The sun drops off precipitously as you get out past the orbit of earth, though they tend to shuttle in quite a few from getsu fune and segaris. But yes a lot of the terran outer system has no viable ecell production.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



So what i'm hearing is I should build energy cell stations right near the jumpgates into terran space there.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

You could try certainly, though the terrans also usually build power stations there too, you can undercut them of course, one of the benefits of solar power is it's input free, and also you can use the commonwealth solar blueprint which is significantly more powerful than the terran one.

Brennan's Triumph is probably a good spot because it connects to the middle of the outer sol system and has 120% sunlight so you will get a little boost too. It's also quite secure as I don't think anyone hates the pioneers and it's several gates away from xenon space, unlike getsu fune.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Apr 3, 2021

Travic
May 27, 2007

Getting nowhere fast
Well the Xenon are back in my game and they are pissed. Finally, a real challenge.

Is there any downside to putting all my factories in the same sector? It seems too good to be true.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

pretense is my co-pilot

Travic posted:

Well the Xenon are back in my game and they are pissed. Finally, a real challenge.

Is there any downside to putting all my factories in the same sector? It seems too good to be true.

Other than framerate if they're close together, not really.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



OwlFancier posted:

You could try certainly, though the terrans also usually build power stations there too, you can undercut them of course, one of the benefits of solar power is it's input free, and also you can use the commonwealth solar blueprint which is significantly more powerful than the terran one.

Brennan's Triumph is probably a good spot because it connects to the middle of the outer sol system and has 120% sunlight so you will get a little boost too. It's also quite secure as I don't think anyone hates the pioneers and it's several gates away from xenon space, unlike getsu fune.

I meant RIGHT next to the gate, so it's the closest station.

... does that actually affect AI choosing where to buy things? If i just tell the manager to charge market price do they consider in-sector travel, or just sector distnace?

EDIT: Or... I could make factories there, and then a station with just docks and storage in terran space and get some mules or whatever to move the energy cells into more convenient locations for the terrans, and sell the cells there :thunk:

Zereth fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Apr 3, 2021

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I think the AI prefers pricing over distance under almost any circumstance, certainly I'm not sure if in-sector distance matters to any degree I can think of.

Which makes sense, your ships have engines for a reason, they can fly a bit further if it means spending less money which directly determines the profitability of an enterprise.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Zereth posted:

EDIT: Or... I could make factories there, and then a station with just docks and storage in terran space and get some mules or whatever to move the energy cells into more convenient locations for the terrans, and sell the cells there :thunk:

You could! Though I would also say that brennan's triumph is plenty close enough for anyone in the outer sol system to travel to buy, you'd probably be just as well served buying a trader fleet to sell directly to stations, especially as this lets you pay their potentially higher prices rather than having to set yours low.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Is there a checkbox for "undercut by 1 credit" then? EDIT: or that, good point

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

There isn't because it's kind of hard to determinively figure out what "undercutting" means given that trades can potentially happen across the entire universe I think.

But that functionally is what automatic pricing does, it cuts your price as your storage fills up, so your storage will fill up and your price will decrease until someone buys a load, then the price goes back up again. The ~*invisible hand of the free market*~ determines the viable price and it varies depending on how much production there is, as if production goes up then prices will go down because storages will fill up faster between sales.

Or you can just set it at the minimum credit value and put everyone else out of business (not sure if the game still deletes stations that make no sales)

Honestly the ecell economy doesn't make sense anyway you're in space, how the gently caress is there an economy based around charging up piles of batteries and then trucking them across the system to stuff in your steel plant, you would just put solar panels on your loving steel plant you lunatics. There is infinite space around you and solar power is literally free.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Apr 3, 2021

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos
I think AI pilots and managers have the same limitations on jump count as players so they'll generally be looking at price within that range and doing their thing.

I doubt they'd do a lot with sector distance, thats computationally expensive. You're generally not going to have wares sold at the exact same price unless you have manual prices set at a lot of player stations, just the manager price setting should let them just pick cheapest in their jump range and thats a single station for the ware they want.

And yeah manager set prices kind of fundamentally reach the ideal point on the supply/demand curve. If you overbuild storage like I do you probably want to set storage volumes but otherwise its hard to really beat the market in a way thats better than manager set pricing.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Are all the roving traders actually tied to stations? I was never sure if the NPC traders were just pure traders.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos
The roving traders are freelance, I think they use autotrade AI or a hobbled sort of autotrade if they are <3 star.

ughhhh
Oct 17, 2012

can terran ship parts use final products of the other races such as hull parts and weapon parts, or do they have a completely separate production flow that requires their special items i have seen around like computronic substrates etc?

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Jesus christ a xenon U showed up in argon prime and just wasted half the sector.

I have no idea where it came from because hatikvah's choice is still ANT controlled.

And the argon flag titan is just on a loving pleasure cruise through hatikvah's choice while the U shoots the wharf to bits lol.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

ughhhh posted:

can terran ship parts use final products of the other races such as hull parts and weapon parts, or do they have a completely separate production flow that requires their special items i have seen around like computronic substrates etc?

Completely separate afaict, but they do probe around the universe to see what's going on

Ass_Burgerer
Dec 3, 2010

How do you guys usually fit your PHQs? In thinking hull parts and claytronics and having it be my station factory. Is there any other good use for it? I want to avoid making it too big (for fps) and I plan to space out my empire with multiple stations.

BMan
Oct 31, 2015

KNIIIIIIFE
EEEEEYYYYE
ATTAAAACK


Is there any reason to actually build factories on the PHQ?

Ass_Burgerer
Dec 3, 2010

I mean, like, why not? It's a max-size station plot you get for free and it can eventually teleport. It's also indestructible maybe? Idk.

I just don't really know what direction I should go with it. Should it be a massive shipyard? Claytronics/hull parts? Fleet supplies? Or maybe a massive teleporting defence station that turbofucks stations and sectors it pops into?

ughhhh
Oct 17, 2012

I use it as a food/medical station with some microchips and hull parts with lots of storage. Because grand exchange is right in the middle I use it as a supply depot. Don't really see a reason to teleport the drat thing.

Sedisp
Jun 20, 2012


Ass_Burgerer posted:


I just don't really know what direction I should go with it. Should it be a massive shipyard? Claytronics/hull parts? Fleet supplies? Or maybe a massive teleporting defence station that turbofucks stations and sectors it pops into?

Yes

Sedisp fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Apr 3, 2021

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:
Shipyards are pretty bad now because the input materials cost more than the ships you sell, though you can use them to shift a lot of volume you may not otherwise have.

Turret Components, Shield Components, Advanced Electronics sell like fresh Semmeln in my game, but every start is different.

Mokotow
Apr 16, 2012

How long does a station hack last? I hacked a production module on a silicon refinery next door to the PHQ and it’s been hours now and it still shows as hacked.

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



Antigravitas posted:

Windows NFS support is pure garbage anyway. But I don't run X4 on Windows, so I can just mount a dataset over my save folder.

I'll try it out. I'm not certain that it'll speed up saving by much. I suspect most of the time is going to be spend with the grueling work of deserialising all those world objects…
NFS in Windows is always going to be pure garbage, because NTFS nor the VFS support proper file locking primitives which NFS and every Unix-like filesystem uses, despite Microsoft claiming to have some POSIX compatibility.

I'm not interested in dealing with the care and feeding of Linux, but if there is an appliance Linux that I can put in a VM with my graphics card passed through, which will just launch Steam and GOG Galaxy when I start it, so that I can play games like X4 - then I'd be interested in that.


Perhaps related, perhaps not - I've been struggling with the game sometimes freezing during saving.
When a normal save happens, I can see the CPU utilization change but it looks different when what I'm talking about happens in that CPU utilization takes a nosedive down to whatever levels it's at when Windows is idle.

OwlFancier posted:

VRO sort of has that in that some of the gunships like the minotaur have a special plasma bomb launcher in the front that entirely bypasses shields. There are also some guns that do it including capital guns which gives you an interesting choice of loadout for your craft.

I will have to try the star wars mod at some point, it's the same guy who makes it, I think.
VRO makes the Terran scripted mission, where they fly through Xenon territory to take out the Yaki absolute rear end. The ships can't maneuver for poo poo.

All my savegame problems led me to a point where I managed to save the Yaki and still get Syn, though :comfyoot:

Falcorum posted:

I wish they'd move away from text-based save files and just went with binary dumps (or had that as an option) since that'd make saving so much faster. Egosoft seems to have a weird love relationship with XML though.

Still can't believe X3 mods were done via XML "scripts"
Heck no, binary save formats are the loving worst, because not only does compatibility become a loving nightmare (as Antigravitas pointed out below), there is absolutely zero reason that binary images would make sense.

Binary saves happen not because they're faster, but because it's basically dumping the state of the game in memory to disk in one fell swoop.
However, that can't happen with X4 because they've programmed the game in such a way that different parts of the game runs in different threads as a separate virtual machine - so the only way to save data from those multiple independent virtual machines is to grab the data and write it to a plaintext XML file.

It's the same reason why processes in Unix-like OS' expect to load the configuration from disk when you start and restart them, rather than save their running configuration to disk, let you configure that, and read it again.

Antigravitas posted:

Saving my game:

Savegame compression on (99MB): 76.7 seconds
Savegame compression off, no file system compression (882MB): 59,4 seconds
Savegame compression off, zstd3 file system (119MB): 62,7 seconds

I used a btrfs image sitting on a local SSD for this. So, I guess I've finally found a use for btrfs?

To be honest, I think I should just write them a mail because this is some really low hanging fruit.
I do wonder what compression level they use for gzlib - must be pretty high to do better than zstd3.
zlib is pretty well-optimized (it's now the default implementation for all of FreeBSDs base system, through libarchive), but it just can't compete with zstd, unless you need the absolutely best compression and have a daughterboard or Intel QuickAssist (either built-in to the CPU or as a daughterboard) that can accelerate the compression primitives for you.

Thom12255 posted:

A Kha'ak ship has definitely killed me without eject before.
I'm having trouble finding it right now, but there's a mod out there which makes it so that you either have an option of ejecting in a pod, or your character "dying" then you either get resurrecting or you start a "new" and can inherit your old base again (which is a pretty neat gimmick), or using an emergency teleport.

BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Apr 3, 2021

Taerkar
Dec 7, 2002

kind of into it, really

Antigravitas posted:

Shipyards are pretty bad now because the input materials cost more than the ships you sell, though you can use them to shift a lot of volume you may not otherwise have.

When was this change made?

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

Started playing X4 recently with all the latest DLC. It's basically what I remember from X3, which is a good thing.

So what are you guys doing to train pilots? I remember in X3 having a kind of training pipeline of sorts to unlock better order options where I'd have certain sectors I'd use for training traders etc until they could expand their range, but the little bit of searching I've done about this for X4 says training in this fashion takes way too long and to just mod the whole training thing out.

Edit: Also, is there an easier way to order a ship to go to a specific station other than changing their default orders?

Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Apr 3, 2021

Thom12255
Feb 23, 2013
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY

Ice Fist posted:

Started playing X4 recently with all the latest DLC. It's basically what I remember from X3, which is a good thing.

So what are you guys doing to train pilots? I remember in X3 having a kind of training pipeline of sorts to unlock better order options where I'd have certain sectors I'd use for training traders etc until they could expand their range, but the little bit of searching I've done about this for X4 says training in this fashion takes way too long and to just mod the whole training thing out.

Edit: Also, is there an easier way to order a ship to go to a specific station other than changing their default orders?

You just click on the ship in the map, then right-click on a station and tell it to dock there from the context menu. If it has other orders queued up it will do those first though and you can cancel them in their orders menu.

The default way to train pilots is do war missions to get higher tier training seminars. The end-game method is terraforming which opens up the ability to train bulk crew up to 4 stars and 1 crew to 5 star. Managers gain stars pretty quickly so just assigning your traders and miners to stations usually works better.

Ice Fist
Jun 20, 2012

^^ Please send feedback to beefstache911@hotmail.com, this is not a joke that 'stache is the real deal. Serious assessments only. ^^

Thom12255 posted:

You just click on the ship in the map, then right-click on a station and tell it to dock there from the context menu. If it has other orders queued up it will do those first though and you can cancel them in their orders menu.

:negative: I swear I tried this and didn't see this, but as soon as you mention it I go back and try it and it worked.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
I played X3 and enjoyed it, but eventually washed out because the pacing was just a little too slow for me. Does X4 improve that a little? Or at least give some QoL changes to make that initial start up less harsh?

Ass_Burgerer
Dec 3, 2010

Ice Fist posted:

So what are you guys doing to train pilots? I remember in X3 having a kind of training pipeline of sorts to unlock better order options where I'd have certain sectors I'd use for training traders etc until they could expand their range, but the little bit of searching I've done about this for X4 says training in this fashion takes way too long and to just mod the whole training thing out.

Yeah you just mod it away. I've gotten so tired of playing the lovely crew leveling game I just completely modded it the gently caress out completely.

I have a mod that slowly trains all my crew over time based on their job and a little randomness. I have a mod that removes the star requirement for fleet formations. And just recently I got a mod that adds all the seminars for sale at traders.

Now I can play the game without having to jump through ridiculous, unfun hoops. If I want a trader set up, I can just do it and put it where I want and be done with it. Same with miners and such. I don't want to have to check back every so often to see if I have permission to finally automate something.

Ice Fist posted:

Edit: Also, is there an easier way to order a ship to go to a specific station other than changing their default orders?

You click the ship on the map to select it, then right click somewhere to add orders. These orders stack into a list. You can also hold shift and click-drag multiple ships to give commands to.

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Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon

Taerkar posted:

When was this change made?

In the big 4.0 patch.

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