4.3 Suggestions

[Paul M]

Is there anything I can do to save my game state right now and continue or am I stuck in restarting everything from scratch?  Autosave for the win!

[waresky]

better make a Backup rar STEVEFIRE.mdb.
and am make a second backup named: Stevefire2.mdb..for security

[sloanjh (OP)]

Is there anything I can do to save my game state right now and continue or am I stuck in restarting everything from scratch?  Autosave for the win!

I used to stop the game in order to save the database, but recently I've been simply copying the DB while the game was running (albeit in a "waiting for player input" state as opposed to actually working on an update).  Doesn't seem to have caused any problems so far....

Note that I've assumed you know the answer to the question "How do I save my game state" - it's "copy Stevefire.mdb into another location".

John

[waresky]

Yes,good idea SLoan.

[IanD]

I have been surprised by the actions of a precursor ship. Having engaged and destroyed 3 other precursor ships for the cost of my missile frigates, I closed in on the survivor which just sat there ). Should it not at least have hidden itself in a remote part of the system, tried to ram my FACs or self-destructed? Is this difficult to code for?

Regards

[IanD]

But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully  ).

Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that

Regards

[Paul M]

Is there anything I can do to save my game state right now and continue or am I stuck in restarting everything from scratch?  Autosave for the win!

I used to stop the game in order to save the database, but recently I've been simply copying the DB while the game was running (albeit in a "waiting for player input" state as opposed to actually working on an update).  Doesn't seem to have caused any problems so far....

Note that I've assumed you know the answer to the question "How do I save my game state" - it's "copy Stevefire.mdb into another location".

John

Nah this was more a "can I somehow save the game so I can reload it without the errors" and since that seems impossible I just bit the bullet and restarted.  I may spend another hour doing random system creation as I'm not thrilled with the one I finally got.  I do wish there was a way to save a race and custom ranks and such so I didn't have to recreate that from scratch as well.

[Steve Walmsley]

I have been surprised by the actions of a precursor ship. Having engaged and destroyed 3 other precursor ships for the cost of my missile frigates, I closed in on the survivor which just sat there ). Should it not at least have hidden itself in a remote part of the system, tried to ram my FACs or self-destructed? Is this difficult to code for?

Normally they run away or head for reloads when out of ammunition. Is it possible you destroyed its engines during the battle?

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully  ).

Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that . I haven't bothered because of the difficulty involved in boarding ships moving at several thousand kilometers per second. However, disabled ships and shipyards would be possible targets for boarding.

Steve

[welchbloke]

But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully  ).

Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that . I haven't bothered because of the difficulty involved in boarding ships moving at several thousand kilometers per second. However, disabled ships and shipyards would be possible targets for boarding.

Steve

Boarding combat actions against static targets really appeals to me, but, looking at all the other updates you're doing, if you spread yourself any thinner you'll be transparent  

[IanD]

Normally they run away or head for reloads when out of ammunition. Is it possible you destroyed its engines during the battle?

No, as far as I know its untouched, I did not engage it. I think this was the ship which destroyed my geo-survey ships and probably my FGs from way outside my missile range. All I had left were laser armed FACs that closed the contact, which just sat there instead of blowing me away. It has a thermal of 1500 and is 14700 tons, and while there were a couple of alien wrecks in system from which I didn't get tech data on salvage, I assumed they were ancient, not recent NPR (I could be in error but it was the second system I entered and having been two systems beyond found nothing.) I have continuously kept a FACs squadron on top of it since the battle (they have better endurance than my FGs).

This ship has sat there over, it turned out a ruined city for about 4 years while I scrambled to rebuild my navy and upgrade ship yards and eventually build more geo-survey ships, which have just located a precursor listening post. We will see what happens when I invade the precursor installation. If I had thought it could reload I would not have left it untouched for so long .

Regards

[IanD]

Steve, are ellipses much more difficult to code for? In Aurora all planetary orbits look circular, while they would actually be elliptical. Since you are going to the trouble of adding the near star catalogue, it would be a nice touch to have "realistic planetary orbits" to go with it, not necessary you understand but nice to have.

Regards

[waresky]

Two hot questions

A)
A Realistic "Hot and Damage from Near STAR prossimity".
B)
And a "realistic hidding behind planets mass for radar cover"
Are difficult to manage'em?

i think go and near a Star r too risky,only shileds can manage (motie's example)
and for intriguing Fleet management and escaping tactics,radar coverage from Planet Mass

no?

[Brian Neumann]

You might want to make the first generation of grav survey instruments be a civilian system, and all other genrations be military.  There are plenty of reasons that the civilian economy would want to survey systems, but they are unlikely to pay for the more expensive systems.  It would also help civilizations just getting out into space to expand.  Latter on if a civilization wants to continue using them as a cost measure, then they are making the trade for a slower expansion for lower overhead costs.

Brian

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve, are ellipses much more difficult to code for? In Aurora all planetary orbits look circular, while they would actually be elliptical. Since you are going to the trouble of adding the near star catalogue, it would be a nice touch to have "realistic planetary orbits" to go with it, not necessary you understand but nice to have.

I have looked at ellipses in the past. The system generation code already includes generation of orbital eccentricities for each star/system body but it is currently commented out. I haven't added the code though for the actual mechanics of elliptical orbits. It is tricky but I am sure it could be overcome. The main problem however is that the colony cost of planets/moons would change over the course of their year, quite considerably in some cases. This means I would have to recalculate the colony cost of every colony after every orbital movement phase. I would have to recalculate the atmosphere, temperature and albedo of every system body in the game because changing temperatures may cause ice caps to form and melt as well as causing different gases to freeze out and later turn back to vapur.  I would also have to find a way to display the range of possible colony costs for each colony and each potential colony and the effects of terraforming on all of that range. The player would have to plan colonization more carefully as he may well need infrastructure for parts of the year. I would also have to modify the pop growth code so that the worst possible colony cost was used, not the current one, otherwise the pop might grow and then die off at different times of the year. There are no doubt other complications I can't think of off-hand. I came to the conclusion that the complexities weren't worth the potential increase in realism and gameplay and abandoned that effort.

I may still look at it in the future but it would be a considerbale task.

Steve