Trek Revived (2.0x Version)

[Sandtrooper]

I'll get to the point and keep the clutter away from the 2.0x dev. thread so...

4 races fully ported, those would be the Big Four in Star Trek if you played Star Trek: Armada.

Weapons need to be redone, as none have been ported except for the Cutting Beams which do unholy damage but I need to figure out how to make them not cutoff after HALF a SECOND.

Planets don't seem to be an issue this time 'round, because the new PNG engine seems to work perfectly for me, the only problems found in this area is the placement of planets ("year" problem) and the stars (this is a bitmap problem with the original sun graphics).


The rundown:

• Weapon/tractor hardpoints seem screwy, 2.0x porting issue.
• Random crashes, highly annoying when I can't get help on this.
• No 256x starship/installations. 2.0x image limitation when using a single-column rotation file.
• Trek AI can be dumb at times, either due to distance limits or size of ship
• No problems with irregular-sized starships anymore! (IE: 38x38)
• Average framerate of 1300 FPS when not using bots. 450-700 when using bots/gunfire.

(the above was tested on my "real" computer, one with a 128 MB GFX card.)

In a nutshell, this mod will make really old computers beg for coolant.

[NiteHawk]

I'll get to the point and keep the clutter away from the 2.0x dev. thread so...

4 races fully ported, those would be the Big Four in Star Trek if you played Star Trek: Armada.

Weapons need to be redone, as none have been ported except for the Cutting Beams which do unholy damage but I need to figure out how to make them not cutoff after HALF a SECOND.

Planets don't seem to be an issue this time 'round, because the new PNG engine seems to work perfectly for me, the only problems found in this area is the placement of planets ("year" problem) and the stars (this is a bitmap problem with the original sun graphics).


The rundown:

• Weapon/tractor hardpoints seem screwy, 2.0x porting issue.
• Random crashes, highly annoying when I can't get help on this.
• No 256x starship/installations. 2.0x image limitation when using a single-column rotation file.
• Trek AI can be dumb at times, either due to distance limits or size of ship
• No problems with irregular-sized starships anymore! (IE: 38x38)
• Average framerate of 1300 FPS when not using bots. 450-700 when using bots/gunfire.

(the above was tested on my "real" computer, one with a 128 MB GFX card.)

In a nutshell, this mod will make really old computers beg for coolant.

Year problem?

Also what crashes you getting exactly? Trek is a rather big mod so you might of missed some changes to port so can take a look, send it to me email or somethign. I wont' be around too much though today. Found out I'm moving as Lise has a new job offer so have to start packing for next weeks move.

[Sandtrooper]

Year problem?

Code:

SF_DATA_GAME.sec

Year    3015

This screws arounds with the positioning of planets, it gets ugly if you play around with it, but with spread out planets, its not an issue, plus it just sets the planets to be positioned a different place of it's orbit. In other words, most of the moons in Sol overlap each other if this is played around (plus they're not orbiting so it doubles as a extended planetary shield lol), plus Venus is awfully close to Terra in my current setting.

Don't worry. I'll have to spread out the planets anyways now that the FTL drive is insanely FASTER, might also make the mod more realistic in a sense where it won't be like 1.2x distances.

Also what crashes you getting exactly? Trek is a rather big mod so you might of missed some changes to port so can take a look, send it to me email or somethign. I wont' be around too much though today. Found out I'm moving as Lise has a new job offer so have to start packing for next weeks move.

I do not know exactly WHAT the hell trips it to crash, sometimes I just attack a planet and CRASH, or if I'm not fighting and the bots trip something, CRASH. I have the latest crash dump and zipped build...check your PMs...

[NiteHawk]

I'll take a look at it anyways early this week. ATM working on moving/packing junk.

But I thought you could always make them overlap even in 1.4 via playing with the year setting. I'll check it out though.

[Sandtrooper]

More progress:

3 more races added, one race is allied.

Nasty surprise during coding, apparently I can't make a bot use an alien design when using the planet location code (like placing the bot somewhere else rather than spawning at Terra), it defaulted to the first ship (freighter, of all jokes); So I had to copy the damn design in that race's ship design file for the trick to work....that was for Deep Space Nine, BTW, a heavily modified version of the  Cardassian "Nor" starbase design in Federation hands. I thought I'd get away with forcing it to use the Cardassian version but SF didn't seem to know what I really wanted, as it only looked in the Terran design file.

More star systems added, at least 6 now. Average FPS on my end does not drop when testing without any bots beside the bases.


431 starship/weapon files, BMP/PNG mixture. (The original had 608 files)

Code:

GameStateClass profile for  on frame 0
number of ships           =   30
number of planets         =   51
number of missiles        =   0
number of colonies        =   27
number of ship designs    =   95(150)
number of missile designs =   75(200)
number of modules         =   495(750)
number of loaded modules  =   0

Trek makes Frontier consume 41 MBs of memory in Software render mode, basically HALF my memory on my personal computer, and almost no memory left LOL (out of 640 MB DDR1 RAM). It also crashes once I exit LOL. This is subdued on my "real" computer, but it takes at least 20 seconds to load all the images, compared to 4 minutes on this one.

The final goal is to make a somewhat balanced mod with all original planned races (13) and all originally planned star systems.  Later additions and functions would to incorporate Construction vessels and their workbees to build turrets, as they're already in the game but are currently coded to be starbases.

If you are very interested (I know you might be), you will need to PM me, but I cannot guarantee you receiving my mod for testing.

[Trompete]

Sounds really cool! Glad to hear there aren't framerate drops

[NiteHawk]

Yeah the trek mod is pretty nice.

As for the random attack crash, that is prob on our end, but I still need to tackle it.

I'll be at Lises Mom for two weeks, so for the most case going to have tons of time to work on SF ;p

[NiteHawk]

I tested the year thing and it is exactly the same as it was in 1.4.0. Did a bunch of years.  Though yeah, planets will hit because of 'rotation' not inputting a set angle for moons means it decides via the year, if you have planet rotation on, and some planets are farther out, even by a tad, they will eventally 'overlap' for a bit I would think.

Though the alternative is to keep the year locked at 3015 for planets (Keep the year setting for description purposes) because SF seems to be 'based' on being healthy on that year. Or you can set the moon planet angle to be a 'set' angle on your own rather then based on year. Either or. Not sure yet what I will do yet.

[Sandtrooper]

Latest Frontier.log statistics

GameStateClass profile for  on frame 0
number of ships           =   30
number of planets         =   65
number of missiles        =   0
number of colonies        =   32
number of ship designs    =   97(150)
number of missile designs =   89(200)
number of modules         =   515(750)
number of loaded modules  =   0

Redid two star systems, and started on the weapons.

[Sandtrooper]

The mod grows larger everyday it seems at my pace...4 new star systems (61 Cyngi, Sirius, Alpha Centauri & Proxima Centauri, Procyon), two of them having above-average sized stars to correspond with real-life.

Currently the size of the mod is 116 MB in image size, something that'll just piss me off once I hit the 128 MB limit of my card LOL....A PNG rotator would help reduce the graphic load by at least half the size...otherwise the mod is not recommended for anybody with a 128 MB and below GFX card, and I will intentionally become part of that group 

105 Planets as of the last Frontier.log statistics

[Trompete]

So in response to "how many planets", the answer is "all of them"

Sounds like your mod should be a good benchmark point for us optimizing code. I've got 2x 1024 MB of video ram, so bring on the bitmaps!

[NiteHawk]

So in response to "how many planets", the answer is "all of them"

Sounds like your mod should be a good benchmark point for us optimizing code. I've got 2x 1024 MB of video ram, so bring on the bitmaps!

Yeah his mod is pretty extreme. Back then, it wouldn't run on most slower computers because of memory issues (leaks/huge amounts of memory eat nomnom). Though most of those are solved compared to how 1.2-1.4 was though.

[Sandtrooper]

So in response to "how many planets", the answer is "all of them"

Sounds like your mod should be a good benchmark point for us optimizing code. I've got 2x 1024 MB of video ram, so bring on the bitmaps!

Well not ALL of them, just a few local systems near Sol so the bots don't get lost.

And yes, most of my mod ideas somehow end up being benchmark tests, Sol Expanded (ATC's idea) was one of them for 1.2-1.4x. If you want the mod, I'll PM you the DL link for the (latest) stable build. (Last image # count was 526 files).

[Sandtrooper]

Showing an example of a "uneven" sized ringed planet (Melbia from the Trill / Gliese 67 system) shows up on the radar, seems to actually WORK now! Complete with alpha texture for the rings...This will allow me to redo Sol's Gas giants, although I don't know how SF's collision detection will work with this type of planet (AFAIK the physical planet had to be at dead centre or else bombs would go blow up nowhere near the planet...maybe we need a "hardpoint" for ringed planets now)...plus I need to move Cardassia, not supposed to be there, but rather near Bajor.

Code:

Planet    all     Trill4         sftf-f-Trill4   1  1  386   stationary   0   100

(see attached for the planet)

EDIT: To obviously declutter the "Systems" folder I'll create subfolders for the Big 3, that way that mess isn't filled with 12+ Federation systems

[NiteHawk]

Yeah I was aiming that DirectX handles the sizes. I was aiming to have a 'height' and 'width' for sizes too so you can create differently sized ships, which would be GREAT for reducing the extra hitbox on manys hips, like freighters for example, to be more precise because some ships are LONG but not very width wise. Right now uneven sizes should work with 'one' frame since it just grabs the whole image that way anyways.

You are correct, right now those rings and the space around it will be considered a hitbox, so it will get hit. It would work like rectangle hitbox instead of a square one though. I was aiming to have a second layer for planets. For example sf-planet-1.png has the BASE planet and sf-planet-2.png has a 'top layer' that isn't considered part of the hitbox, so it would be like just adding a top layer thats not hittable.

Example image, but mind my work, this is why I don't draw. Overall it would probably set the image on the minimap to be circle again, since the actual hitbox is now a circle yet again.