[MOD][WIP] FTL: Overdrive

[John Luke Pack Hard]

For those of you currently working on the project.

The game start screen is in the NewGame.cs file, which is a Gamestate child class.

As said, most of it is incomplete/not implemented. The start game button will only give you a star map.

I plan to resume work when I get back to college. Haven't been working b/c, surprisingly, winter break is not conducive to work at all.

[madman200]

Just a suggestion, not sure if this is possible, but later in the project would it be possible to allow at least pvp multiplayer? Maybe even co-op multiplayer? It would make the rewrite so much better.

[John Luke Pack Hard]

Hello gents, getting settled into the new semester here at school.

Arovix: According to GitHub, you are updating at lightning speed. Other than the new races you added, what else did you update the code with and what do you plan to do in the near-future?

All else, I'd like to have a general discussion about features before planning.

Thomasfn wanted this mod geared towards open mod-ability. I would like to deconstruct the game down to its very variables to the point where modders who know enough code can customize almost anything, down to the races and the ship's systems. Once I have everything settled in my daily life, I'll begin drawing up a proposition.

What would you like to see implemented?

[NewAgeOfPower]

As Kieve said, we aren't programmers. We'd love to be able to, for example, choose beam color, modify resource usage (a scrap cannon, weapons that use fuel, missiles that use up drone parts), customise augments, custom abilities such as the hard-coded Boss abilities.

[KuroSaru]

I was going to do the exact same thing as Overdrive, but implement it via JAVA for cross platform, but its same as compiling c# with mono really. I wanted to implement a Multiplayer option, Random Ships are replaced by players assuming there is enough online.

2 Modes:
1 : Play as normal and random ships replaced by players.
2 : Play as rebel (unlimited fuel), attack players from mode 1.

granted mode 2, you would not be able to upgrade your ship it would auto-upgrade,
and you'd have to beat X players per sector before you moved to the next one,
last level you play as the boss. unlike in mode 1, each spot you warp you will always enter combat.
either vs another player or vs a AI.

needless to say i'm happy to help out with development of overdrive to get it finished and then add multiplayer support.

@John Luke, due you idle in any IRCs? and same to any other who are working on the code at the moment.

[UltraMantis]

I was just thinking that something like IRC would be usefull for coordination before KuroSaru mentioned it.

Although not mod-specific there's a chan on QuakeNet, #ftlgame. Modding, newbie questions, live play comments, etc. Feel free to drop by and talk about anything FTL.

http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=ftlgame

[Kieve]

Thomasfn wanted this mod geared towards open mod-ability. I would like to deconstruct the game down to its very variables to the point where modders who know enough code can customize almost anything, down to the races and the ship's systems. Once I have everything settled in my daily life, I'll begin drawing up a proposition.

What would you like to see implemented?

I know a little code - not enough to be useful rebuilding the game, mind, but enough to tweak minor things post-release probably.
The one major achievement would be an engine that isn't hardcoded down to its bones and will actually recognize additional races, put their core stats like HP, combat abilities, repair speed, etc. into the XML sheets to be easily tweaked. Same for augments, if slightly trickier. A hangar menu that'll register new ships (suggestion: anything "PLAYER_" prefixed), replacing the original 18 only if the ship names match. That way GMM's .append won't cause it to freak out if the game is reading two entries for a Kestrel.

I read earlier in the thread that Thomasfn was aiming for LUA script support - that, or any other scripting ability would be supremely useful for adding in new custom augments or weapon effects. DOT poison bombs, for instance (Mantis would be immune? Or bugspray - they take double damage! ) *ahem* ... anyway, I'm not sure how you'd go about creating hooks for mod-scripts, but I'm more than willing to learn how to use 'em once they're in place. I would suggest the first priority mod-wise just be pushing core game stuff from engine to XML.
So glad to see this being worked on again...

[KuroSaru]

I was just thinking that something like IRC would be usefull for coordination before KuroSaru mentioned it.

Although not mod-specific there's a chan on QuakeNet, #ftlgame. Modding, newbie questions, live play comments, etc. Feel free to drop by and talk about anything FTL.

http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=ftlgame

Sounds like a good place to start, ill start idling in there under the name MuNk.

[thomasfn]

Hi guys, sorry it's been so long since I was last active here. Hope you've all had a good christmas and happy new year etc.

It's great to see lots of interest in the project still remains even after the lack of updates. Unfortunately I've been busy with a number of things (coursework and such for uni, as well as steam holiday sales ) so I've not really had much time to work on overdrive, but I have been checking in every now and again.

Now, I still don't have much time for actually programming stuff but I might be able to do some documentation or suchlike.

I know a little code - not enough to be useful rebuilding the game, mind, but enough to tweak minor things post-release probably.
The one major achievement would be an engine that isn't hardcoded down to its bones and will actually recognize additional races, put their core stats like HP, combat abilities, repair speed, etc. into the XML sheets to be easily tweaked. Same for augments, if slightly trickier. A hangar menu that'll register new ships (suggestion: anything "PLAYER_" prefixed), replacing the original 18 only if the ship names match. That way GMM's .append won't cause it to freak out if the game is reading two entries for a Kestrel.

I read earlier in the thread that Thomasfn was aiming for LUA script support - that, or any other scripting ability would be supremely useful for adding in new custom augments or weapon effects. DOT poison bombs, for instance (Mantis would be immune? Or bugspray - they take double damage! ) *ahem* ... anyway, I'm not sure how you'd go about creating hooks for mod-scripts, but I'm more than willing to learn how to use 'em once they're in place. I would suggest the first priority mod-wise just be pushing core game stuff from engine to XML.
So glad to see this being worked on again...

The project already has Lua support, and via Lua scripts, you can already add new weapons, ships and systems (although not much of it is functional yet). Everything in the game currently is loaded in the form of a mod called "vanilla".

[Arovix]

Hello gents, getting settled into the new semester here at school.

Arovix: According to GitHub, you are updating at lightning speed. Other than the new races you added, what else did you update the code with and what do you plan to do in the near-future?

All else, I'd like to have a general discussion about features before planning.

Thomasfn wanted this mod geared towards open mod-ability. I would like to deconstruct the game down to its very variables to the point where modders who know enough code can customize almost anything, down to the races and the ship's systems. Once I have everything settled in my daily life, I'll begin drawing up a proposition.

What would you like to see implemented?

My goal was to finish the new game screen, but I realized I couldn't test a lot of the elements without updating the vanilla .Lua file so I started with the races. I think the only things missing on races at the moment are the lists of random names and health point amounts, both of which are fairly trivial to add once we need them. Next I was going to add weapons and drones, of which drones will be harder because the C# class that handles their library is not yet implemented yet. Basically I want to get it to the point where you can start a game and move through the map before I start on things like combat, events, and stores. I'm trying to set my sights low here as I recently got a lot busier and don't know how much time I'll be able to put into this.

As for other changes I made, I fixed a few rendering bugs in the Ship Render-er and the Crew Render-er that I noticed while testing the animations and I re-positioned some buttons for better alignment. Also, just because all the animations are in now doesn't mean you can actually control crew yet, that will require a lot more work which I'm leaving until after the new game screen is working.

You can already add pretty much all of the things you mentioned in your last paragraph through the Lua files fairly easily. That's why I was able to add the races in so fast, and I hope that anyone who wants to mod in more in the future will just be able to look a the vanilla.lua file in the mod folder for examples of crew, ships, and weapons (and maybe events in the future) and be able to create their own NAME.lua file to add whatever they want. (Side Note: I think DOTs and effect that treat different races separately would require support functions from outside the lua, which is definitely possible but I'll focus on vanilla stuff first.)

Edit: I forgot, I also normalized all of the line endings in the project and set up GitHub to automatically take care of it in the future, so don't worry what OS you use to make changes anymore.