A bit of randomness

S

spiritplumber

Spaceman
Home Away From Home thought (small download)

Home Away From Home mini-patch for 009 and 1pre5:

http://spiritplumber.dynip.com/privr1pre5_hafh.zip (fixes beams & has an example save)
http://spiritplumber.dynip.com/privr009_hafh.zip (fixes beams & includes turret fix, eh)


( files replaced: weapon_list.xml, units.csv and master_parts_list.csv, plus it creates files for the beam sprites and the added docking screen.)

Please don't flame me for not being canon, this is a tiny lil patch you can safely ignore.

What it does:

-You can buy ships which should have been buyable because everyone and their mom has them, namely the Talon and the Demon.

-You can buy a Drayman because in the manual, the Scarab is basically a Drayman with extra turrets... so here it is, a Drayman with turrets :) Note that the Drayman IS as slow as it looks and note that it has 10 charges for jump fuel, not 6 -- not a big deal in Gemini, but it seems realistic to me.

-If you own a Galaxy or Drayman, you can use up part (a lot actually) of your cargo hold to host a light fighter (Talon or Demon).

-You can dock at your own Drayman if you're flying another ship. If the Drayman was carrying cargo or extra upgrades, you can get them from it at no cost (I think I got them all, please tell me if I didn't). Cool thing to do: Keep your ship, buy a Drayman, leave it parked at an empty nav point somewhere, eject, and dock to it. Retrieve your ship from the My Fleet option. Undock. Leave the Drayman parked. Congratulations, you now have your own mini base :) useful as a repair point, or as somewhere to dock to get some jump fuel. Or just spend a gojillion dollars in turrets beforehand and make yourself something to hide behind.

-Eject pod goes a little faster on afterburner so you can go on a spacewalk around your ship.

-Orion is listed as both a heavy hunter ship and a medium merchant ship, this was mostly done for symmetry. She is kinda both anyway. (Minor change: the hunter model carries more missiles and the merchant model carries a little more cargo).

-Gun speed & damage upped slightly to match original priv's feel

-Hitchhikers give you 42$ when you deliver them. :)




Why I think this is all acceptable: You can already dock at NPC Draymans (Draymen?), and they are big enough to have a bar for passengers, a ship mechanic and so on -- I used a simpler interface for when you're docked because I figured that a player wouldn't want other people like fixers or a ship salesman on board their own ship. And about buying Talons and Demons, frankly, if you can buy an Orion/Centurion you should be able to get a bounty-hunter fighter that is smaller than them, and the Talon... well that thing is all over the place anyway, bound to be a few available on the used market. Admittedly the main reason why I made the Talon buyable is that you can get a basic ship with $30k if you die.

Please tell me if it's worth the time to polish this up! I didn't want to make a dedicated docking screen because I wanted to keep the download small.
 
That's really awesome :) if you can make a dedicated docking base for the drayman that's cool.
So what was wrong with the gun speeds and the damage...I thought we measured them perfectly--I'm happy to be proven wrong, esp by someone who does the work of polishing it up...I'm definitely going to go through these patches with a fine tooth comb and see what stuff we can pull into 1.0final :)
thanks for your hard work spirit :)
 
Hey, YOU made the whole thing, YOU are awesome :p and yeah, you can dock at your drayman OK-ish. Basically you get all the functionality of a base minus getting extra missions (the reason for that is that otherwise someone could just "camp" in a system and never visit an actual base when doing missions, what's the fun in that?) Both the demon and talon in my patch are "escort" versions, meaning "I just created an extra entry in the csv files to avoid messing with everything else and to make them and only them tractorable". If there was more than one player in the game they'd be able to capture each other's wingmen, but hey...

About the guns: I know you got the numbers down perfectly, but they didn't *FEEL* right. I looked in the .tre files of the original and the game internally uses its own system of measurement as far as speed, damage etc. go, so I thought "whatever" and tweaked according to what felt right. Turns out that 150% damage and 150% speed is just about right, maybe guns are a bit TOO effective now.

Also, NPC draymen DO have the extra turrets, although they have really wimpy guns on them. Try to do a low-altitude pass on the top of a drayman in a Talon.

You mentioned something about being able to fly Talons/Demons after some missions, that's really cool if it's possible. Demons should be available from start though, I think... (it's a Hunter ship, and you can buy centurions and orions whenever). Talons... I guess, would make for a cheap and portable escort, you can stuff 2 in a Galaxy and still have some room to carry stuff in. Is this already implemented or should I look into that?
 
Gun strength matches all the stats we've found. If anything, enemy shields are too strong (which would have the same effect hehe). The remake doesn't let the player cheat as much as the original, where enemy fighters had different shield and armor values than the player (theirs were weaker of course). Anyway, upping gun strength and speed does the same for the enemies guns and makes life that much harder for the player as well, so it's hard to say how much of that should be done.

If by 'fixing the tractor beam' you mean 'gving it a new texture' maybe you could weigh in on this thread

Nice idea for being able to swap cargo with your home base drayman. It's all good as long as no one else lands there :D (which won't really happen hehe)
 
Getcha on the gun strength, but I noticed that at the gun speed you picked, autotracking/ITTS was very inaccurate to the point of being unusable -- same for AI turrets. I mostly noticed this with turrets while flying a Drayman (where turrets are 90% of your firepower in the first place).
 
Worth pointing out -- recent evidence indicates that the Scarab is *not* a Drayman... it's another class of ship not mentioned elsewhere.
 
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