A few quick 'Gold' questions...

[Talenn]

Hey Folks,

Well, I've been away from SE4 for some time, but I decided to hop back in with Gold to see what all has changed and whatnot. So far, so good and I like a lot of what I see, but I have a few questions for folks:

1) Is there any way to STOP the replaying of moves in SI-Move games? I hit the 'replay all moves' or somesuch button late in the game and it dutifully shows each move, of each ship, into each square................................oh my god..........and in my attempts to stop it, I hit the buttons again to see if they were 'on/off' type and instead, I got to see it repeat the moves again....and again....until finally I just rebooted my system to get it to stop...There has GOT to be a better way, though...anyone?

2) In the manual, it mentions that SI-Move games are only available for multiplayer. I was playing one singleplayer...is that a mistype, or is the game not actually playing the AIs correctly or somesuch?

3) What kind of 'support' for the Devnullmod is there going on? I saw that Geoschmo and Rollo 'picked up the torch' and got it to 'gold', but is the support for it ongoing (with new races and updates when patches are released)? I really like 'standard' SE4's additional races and stuff (especially from the TDM mods) but the base 'tech set' in SE4 is kind of bland and unbalanced IMO. I really like the Devnullmod, but you can only play against a much more limited selection of races and I no longer have the time or know-how to convert other races into a mod that I didnt design.

4) In the replay of Tactical combat, is there some setting between 'painfully slow' and 'too fast to see what is happening'?

Thanx in advance for any input on this stuff.

Talenn

[Suicide Junkie]

#1: You could try the "one day" stepping button.

#2: Simultaneous is the only option for the PBW system.
Both simultaneous and sequential are available for PBEM, Hotseat, and Single Player.

99% or more of multiplayer games are played simultaneous, for reasons of speed, but there is no hardcode reason why you can't PBEM in sequential turn mode.

[ 09 March 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Rollo]

Hello Talenn,
concerning the Devnull Mod I must say that I am sorry. I was going to update a few more races and have a patch ready by the time gold came out (now), but my new job and moving to another town didn't leave me enough time . It is still my goal to update the remaining races and keep the Devnull Mod up-to-date when new patches come out. Please bear with us, we will get there eventually. In the meantime enjoy the Devnull Mod in its current state. All the races that have not been touched by Geo or myself are still working as they were before going gold, so there is nothing lost really, only a few racs (10 or so) that work much better now.

The future of the Devnull Mod (personal view and time permitting):

1 optimize or at least improve the remaining races
2 minor changes to the Mod to improve the AI further (goes hand in hand with 1)
3 add Space Monsters (about halfway finished)
4 add a few more races (I have at least one good idea for a new AI)
5 continue support

We welcome any feedback and suggestions on Devnull Mod Gold.
Happy gaming .

Rollo

[Talenn]

SJ:

Thanx for the info. I've been 'one stepping' ever since that disaster.

Rollo:

No probs. I was really just checking to see if it will be continued to be updated in the future. One of the things that drove me away from SE4 in the first place was the IMMENSE amount of work required to manually update my game every time a patch was released. Every data file and every AI file for like 40+ races had to be checked and tweaked each patch. That just became a time consuming nightmare that I didnt want to deal with.

I really like the feel of the Devnullmod, but I didnt want to play it a lot and get used to it only to have it be obsolete as soon as the first patch comes out. Also, I like being able to just download new races and AIs at will, and that pretty much requires use of the 'standard' tech set. I'm kind of split at the moment as to which I'm going to play.

I'll keep an eye out for further developments in the mod.

Thanx again,
Talenn

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

the IMMENSE amount of work required to manually update my game every time a patch was released

---

Really? All I've ever done is glance through the history file, and copy in any good ideas I see.
Even for Classic to Gold, a bunch of search-replaces and a handful of new feature edits was all I had to do to P&N!

Between 1.41 and 1.49, the only change affecting a data mod was:
"14. Changed - You cannot repair an Emergency Propulsion Pod or an Emergency Resupply Pod without a space yard being present."
And that dosen't really require data changes unless you depended on the pods for a special function.

[Q]

I too feared the amount of work to adapt my modifications to SE IV Gold. However it turned out to be only a matter of a few hours mainly for the component file to adjust. I am positively surprised.
To make the AI use drones efficiently however might be a completely different story and I did not yet start this.

[Talenn]

Suicide Junkie:

Hmm, maybe I was just doing something wrong, but those first few patches (say, till about 1.27 or so) required me to manually update a lot of files so as not to overwrite them. The components and facilities files seemed to change almost every patch and doing a file compare to update them was really tedius.

If there had been an easy way, I prolly never would have left SE4 in the first place. I think I was gone before all of the GUI file editors were out there cuz I never saw them...might have made the job a bit easier...

At any rate, maybe I was just doing things the hard way, but it was hours worth of work to get everything up and running again with each patch. After a while, I wasnt playing the game often enough to warrant that kind of investment.

I'm not even going to touch the data in Gold. As much as I am tempted to tinker, I'm going to leave well enough alone and play with the base set. At least then I wont have to do any updating.

Talenn

[Suicide Junkie]

It sounds like you are trying to rebuild your mod from the patched files. Once you've gone beyond about 10 changed components, it is easier to tweak the existing mod, rather than to remod the patched files.

In order to update for Gold, you need to:
- add two lines to settings.txt.
- search-replace in components.txt the allowed vehicle, and can target lists. (about 6 changes)
- insert the seconday image line into all entries of vehiclesize.txt (may be easier to remod this one file, depending on how much you've changed)
- maybe a few other things I can't recall.

I can write a program to do all the above things automatically, which should get your mod running under Gold.
After that, you'd just need to copy the drone bits from Gold.