A small step for this mod...

Ah... Ok, I'll have to look into that at some point.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I started to write some stuff in the modders documentation.

I currently have the missions in the same area as the units so there are some in the Entertainer folder, others in the Captives folder and others in the Subdued Animals folder.

The Captives use missions and the upgrade mechanism to convert one unit to another if I remember correctly. The only problem is that the cost is not displayed in the hover over. I could never understand AIAndy or ls?? info about it was correct in the code but not in the XML when every level of the mission/outcome/actionoutcomes has a cost and I was putting the cost in one of them

Click to expand...

Yeah I found that thread. It helped me to code the upgrade mission, which is pretty cool
But I still have no idea how to make the actual transport missions to get from earth to the moon.
The good news is: This is the last thing to do to make this module finally fully playable (graphics are only placeholders as well, but it's playable nonetheless).

I wanted to copy the paradrop mechanism, but I couldn't find it; maybe that is handled completely differently.

I would need a mission that will place a unit from a city with a certain building (pretty sure I know how to make this part) to a plot with lunar terrain. Also, I need a mission that allows a landing only on specific improvments.
When I have these, I'm pretty much done; the rest is just cleaning up a bit

You will need a pop-up for the player to select from a list of destinations and AI for the selection for non human players. Then you just change the location of the unit using setX and setY.

Have a look at the AbandonCity code for an example of

1) a pop-up and how to handle it

2) net messages so that it works in multiplayer (or maybe there is away to use the event mechanism)

Why do you need a pop-up? I was hoping that you could use the paradrop mission for the first one and the Air rebase mission for the second one. Neither of them need a pop-up

1) Because they will eventually be on different maps.

2) There can only be one Air rebase mission. It is hard coded somewhere. edit You can make it apply to one set of units but you can't have two, one each for two sets of units.

hmm... ok I just had a look at the code and I have NO idea what's going on there.
Is anyone with sufficient python skills interested in either guiding me through this or taking over this part?

What are the valid destinations or what is the way to find valid destinations?

I have not thought through this much. I though that for insertion into Earth orbit every nation would have a plot next to the Earth Orbit part of the map and that was the only place that units from Earth could go to in Earth Orbit at the start. Later each nation would have a Space Station or there would be one international space station everyone could go to as well.

On the Moon this is different. Perhaps there are a number of valid landing points for the initial missions. Later bases or proto-bases would be built that could also be destinations.

Both the insertion points and landing plots could have special improvements that can't be destroyed until later. Any one could move to one of them if it is empty or has friendly units on it.

On a specific map it could be latitude right?

Now that I have had some coffee and my morning shower I think your idea of paradrop and air rebase may work if

1) we can switch maps while the unit is selected with the mission

2) air rebase can be made a multi define thingy <- technical term

it could be TB, but this wouldn't work with multi maps. But perhaps that's fine, since this would be the only part of the project that can't just be copy pasted over when multi maps are established.

DH:

My plan was this:

At satellites, the edges of the moon are reveale (the poles so to say). Then you can send probes that land somewhere randomly on a 3x3 spot you chose. So if you select the "5" on your numpad, your probe could land on any number randomly. The rovers you send there could drive around for 5 turns or so and explore.
That was only an idea and I haven't done anything for that at all.

If you reach the tech Lunar Bases, you can send a Construction Ship to a plot of your choice (landing accuracy has dramatically improved). This can be any plot you want. There are slopes on the moon that would make landing a nightmare, but you can reach all plots on the moon equally well. So I would disagree with your "only so many landing sites". Rather than restricting them artificially, I'd like to restrict them by resource availability.
The Constructor Ship can't move over the surface. What it can do is building a Lunar Base Improvement, being consumed while doing so. This is like a fort; acts as a city and has some culture.
Then you have a Supply Ship. They can only land inside your Lunar Base or other "fort" and city type things on the moon. They can do various things: First they can upgrade the Base to a Lunar Outpost, then to a Lunar Habitation Complex. They are consumed while upgrading. They can also be turned into a Bulldozer type unit, that acts as the only available worker unit on the moon in the beginning and can only construct Paths and a Mining Outpost to connect the ores.
The Space Settler finally can only land on the Habitation Complex (and can't move), thus you can only found a city on this improvment. The whole mechanism is there to assure that the leading civ can't just spamming cities on the moon. Each launch should cost lots of money, so you have to be careful. I wanted to create a late-game challange / minigame. What I don't want to have is another plain "send settlers there and build cities" thing.
As the city grows, the colony becomes more and more self sufficient and later cities are easier to found since you can produce supply ships and the like on the moon, thus avoiding the high launch costs.

Here I pretty much got everything fleshed out, except for the actual transport from earth to the moon.

I do like your space / orbit idea a lot! One of the main reasons to go to the moon would be to create a fuel depot in orbit, like a gas station. That would drop costs tremendously; it would cut the costs for a manned mars mission by 66%! The fuel depot/station could be the target for a lower costing launch mission.

it could be TB, but this wouldn't work with multi maps. But perhaps that's fine, since this would be the only part of the project that can't just be copy pasted over when multi maps are established.

Click to expand...

Which is exactly why I'm reluctant to put effort into this direction yet. Multi-maps is ... frightening. But it's also the ultimate direction for the mod and to further delay efforts towards it and other projects by developing mechanisms that will be needing redesigned as soon as multi-maps is active is... frustrating.

I know. That's why my baseline for the whole project was to makeit as multi map compatible as possible. So you can test stuff before multi maps and when they are finally implented you already have some content.

Faustmouse said:

My plan was this:

At satellites, the edges of the moon are reveale (the poles so to say). Then you can send probes that land somewhere randomly on a 3x3 spot you chose. So if you select the "5" on your numpad, your probe could land on any number randomly. The rovers you send there could drive around for 5 turns or so and explore.
That was only an idea and I haven't done anything for that at all.

If you reach the tech Lunar Bases, you can send a Construction Ship to a plot of your choice (landing accuracy has dramatically improved).

Click to expand...

The whole of the moon facing Earth should be revealed at "Star Gazing" but the detail would get better as time progressed. The "Dark side" of the Moon would be a complete mystery until orbital mapping missions occur. I thing such orbital mapping missions would need to be a given, by each nation, before they should land any probes or maned missions. Of course such missions become redundant once the Google Moon/Universe world wonder is built.

The accuracy aspect is easily done including stuff to improve accuracy.

OK so use a para-drop style mission which starts with accuracy issues. That means we need to know how the para-drop mission is currently coded in the dll and how we can modify it to include what we want. Then we need to discuss how to implement the result moving as much as possible to the XML for flexibility.

Do you really thing it should be revealed by Stargazing? It makes somewhat sense and is pretty cool if only one half of it would be revealed but... Can you really tell if the terrain in the north-western region is basalt or something else just with your naked eye? Or see an iron deposit?
The problem is that there are not really steps in between in civ. Either you see the terrain type, the resources, hills, craters and stuff, or you see nothing.
This "all or nothing" problem was there for electricty, too. Technically, every building on the moon would need power. But I assumed that the first buildings (originating from the Habitation Complex) would have some basic solar panels and only more advanced buildings would actually require a bigger amount of power, so I just have no power requirement on the first ones, because it was funnier that way from a game perspective.

If you reveal one half "directly" and the other have simply by having a mapping mission, then rovers would be pretty useless (except from collecting goody huts). Having a unit discover the completely unknown terrain there is something you haven't done for a loooooong time (Renaissance at latest) and it's way more fun than mapping it from space.

That's why I think it would play out better that way. Of course the perfect solution would be if the map is kinda "blurry" first, revealing no "features" like terrain types, resources or hills... if this is doable and if it would be seen as beneficial to implent it.

Para-drop's not going to work because its entirely based on nothing more than range. I'm not entirely sure you can do this through python but I don't know all the mysteries therein and could be overlooking some potential somewhere.

I forgot about resources as it was them and features like dust filled pits that swallow your rover that I was thinking the missions should reveal.

We may need to rethink how resources are revealed some may need exploration. After all even on Earth you need to search for resources but in BtS this was assumed as part of can see. I have seen a mod where not all the copper was revealed at once as some of it was deeper down and not on the surface.

We may also have to rethink the way we do usable terrain (as in peaks at the moment) also. We may need more types and so have to generalise what we currently have adding new tags to the terrain for "usable" to define when a "city" can use it and passable as the minimum tech required for units to pass.

Thunderbrd said:

Para-drop's not going to work because its entirely based on nothing more than range.

Click to expand...

OK so it is not suitable then. Range is not important in what we want here whereas target terrain/map is.

Thunderbrd said:

I'm not entirely sure you can do this through python but I don't know all the mysteries therein and could be overlooking some potential somewhere.

Click to expand...

There are ways and means

@Faustmouse are you using a particular map for this work.

The bad thing about resources on the moon is that there are no real deposites. It is more or less all evenly distributed in the soil and concentrated ore don't exist. But I think it's better for game play this way. But a gradually revealing mod would be cool!

I have a quickly made map with only lunar terrain to test stuff. I can upload it tomorrow if you wish but it would take 5min to make it yourself in the WB.

I think when we start thinkering with launch missions I need a better map anyways, I'll do that tomorrow! I gonna set it up that the earth is in the south and the moon is - seperated by space - in the north.

Maybe the range or coordinates isn't what should be filtered. If it's a mission to the moon, a revealed moon terrain tile could be filtered as a valid target, thus made more maleable to a variety of maps with moons. Still probably not fully functional for multi-maps but it might be a start that would be workable.

Moon map could be generated without any resources and then resources would be spawned through events (that has very specific triggers) and the "improvements has a chance to spawn resources" feature. Other than that I also think we should rethink resource visibility in general.

Edit: &#8595;&#8595; Good Point Faustmouse. &#8595;&#8595;

If it is possible to filter for a moon terrain tile then I would definetly go this way.

Toffer:
If only mines would spawn resources then there would be way less strategy to pick a good site for your first lunar city. They all would be good and there won't be a race to get to one of the rare sites that have both a metal resource (or more than one) and He3.