Subset Games Forum

That's exciting to see! Keep it up!

If you want any help distilling the list of features down into an object design spec, or some other design tasks, let me know.

Hi, i cant help (unfortunately my skills on coding are not enough for this proyect..) but i really support this proyect. FTL is great, but it wont last more than 1 year only because the modding capabilites are limited. Not to be able to add new content, only replacing default one is a bit dumb for a game like this, i tried a lot of modeable games and all of em were able to add new content apart from the original one.

I only hope u have time to keep it up, since this is the only way out for the game to stay alive (since there are no news from the developers about any dlc, update or anything..).

Good luck!

Very ambitious project and exactly what FTL needs! I see this as comparable to minecraft I think, which is a pain to mod but its obviously been done through various other extensions. (Modloader, etc).

Nonetheless keep at it! Can't wait! If you need any help with graphics let me know! I'm a graphic designer (I work as an ad designer) that can help! Check out my current WIP mod in my sig for some of my art.

KuroSaru wrote:Just to show from a dev point of view that I'm not inactive. Due to wanting cross platform support. I've spent alot of time porting code from C# to Java. Before saying C# can use mono for cross platform support, your correct it can. but when it comes to Android and iOS things quickly get harder.

Thus I present the following image. Yes this is a current implementation of FTL on a Nexus 7 android device, at present all you can do is select a ship, the code base for Android / OSX / Win / Linux at this point is almost 100% the same, hence using JAVA.

Things to keep in mind.
1: Ships are loaded based on those found in the blueprints, not sure how to handle custom extras yet but will be discussed via IRC at some point, any ideas are welcome.
2: races are loaded from blueprints.xml so its possible to add new custom races.
3: There is no set release date.

Well that is... dissapointing, I find C# very easy and was considering maybe helping, Java I find to be much more of a pain in the ass buuuut maybe I could still help. Have you considered how the controls will work on Android and iOS though? Can everything in FTL be converted to simple touch controls?

DLTyrus wrote:Can everything in FTL be converted to simple touch controls?

Why not? It's mouse driven entirely with a few keyboard shortcuts. Cloaking, pause and Esc menu are all i can think of that are not regular mouse movements/buttons, with pause assigned by default to mousewheel/middlebutton.

UltraMantis wrote:

DLTyrus wrote:Can everything in FTL be converted to simple touch controls?

Why not? It's mouse driven entirely with a few keyboard shortcuts. Cloaking, pause and Esc menu are all i can think of that are not regular mouse movements/buttons, with pause assigned by default to mousewheel/middlebutton.

Well phone games are typically limited to controls with either a touch or swipe of the finger. In FTL, this would cover powering systems, aiming weapons, but what about unpowering systems? Right click on a phone is usually a long press, but that would be pretty inconvenient/not fast enough when it comes to power management.

How would you pause? By tapping a menu key to open the menu, then hit pause? That could potentially be a bit cumbersome enough that it makes the game harder (e.g. pausing at last minute in time to activate a cloak to dodge a missile, which I do frequently )

How would you drag a border around your crew to select them? Or right click to tell them to move as opposed to de-selecting them. Like I said above long-press could be a pain when trying to manage a lot at once, quickly.

The only way either of these can easily be solved that I can see would be adding additional elements to the UI, to accomodate limited controls on a phone, however screen-space itself will be an issue on phone screens. Take android phones for example, which almost all have 4 inch screens. The character sprites by default are very small, scaling them down to fit on 4-inch screen could make it so small as to be difficult to see/control, and targeting specific rooms of the enemy ship could also be a pain with how small the display would be.

Another point that springs to mine is that in the OP, KuroSaru says that he hopes to avoid legal issues because his re-write of the engine will require someone to purchase the vanilla game in order to run. Having looked at the source code it seems that, among other things, it pulls the art assets from your game installation directory. How can you distribute this mod to run on smart phones/smart pads, without redistributing parts of the original game such as the assets?

I'm curious mostly because converting everything to Java seems a pretty momumental task and a big slowdown in getting this mod finished (which I'm really interested to see happen ), in order to gain the ability to put the game on devices which I'm not sure is even possible/practical.

And on a personal note as I've stated, I like working with C# and hate working with Java

Is there a way to somehow, "unpack" or decompile FTL.exe to edit it?

nataryeahbuddy wrote:Is there a way to somehow, "unpack" or decompile FTL.exe to edit it?

From what I understand, it is possible to decompile an .exe and there are a few decompilers out there to do it. But each one will do it differently as it needs to make assumptions on a lot of different things, and even then it comes out missing comments, classes, etc.

This may help: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/4210/C-Reverse-Disassembly

So is it possible to fully decompile and recompile without any loss to the gameplay experience? (I'm not talking about comments, etc. just the actual code)

Technically yes, but the code would be pretty much unreadable to you as a human being. The amount of time it'd take to comprehend the code and rework the game's logic that way would be greater than just shrugging it off and rewriting the game based on its observed and documented behaviour.