Cargo wingmen question

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maze
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Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

OK now I'm gonig to stop with missions since I just got enough money to buy my first AI Core... I've estimated it's really not that many hours of play before I can shift to trading automated factories in a mule. And once I get to that point, again not that many hours until I own a Clydesdale and a truly frightening horde of wingmen.

Therefore I have three questions:

1) Does the CommDockWithMe command work? I guess it does but I'm reading contradictory statements on these forums.

2) If I launch a wingman, switch control to take its command, and dock my own mothership just like I could dock any capship in the game universe, what happens?

3) Will the ships of cargo wingmen retain their upgrades after I save and quit the game?
maze
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Oh well... I saved this morning with an AI Core in the trunk. I loaded the game this evening, my AI Core was gone. I guess the same would happen with cargo wingmen then. Is it a bug or a missing feature?
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

maze wrote:Oh well... I saved this morning with an AI Core in the trunk. I loaded the game this evening, my AI Core was gone. I guess the same would happen with cargo wingmen then. Is it a bug or a missing feature?
Do you have a save before you did that? Can you attach both?
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maze
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

I may have been a little too quick.
I looked at the serialized_xml files myself, it appears that on on the first and second save after purchase, the AI Core was there. On the third save, it's gone.
At thsi stage it's not impossible that I dropped cargo by mistake.

I'll be on the look for new occurences but at this stage it would be a waste of time to investigate on this.

Don't forget to answer the OP's questions though.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by pheonixstorm »

If it does happen again though post a bug report.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

If it happens again, I will.

But with all this the OP's question still hasn't been answered!
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

maze wrote:3) Will the ships of cargo wingmen retain their upgrades after I save and quit the game?
Well, not sure about any of the questions in fact (I don't use cargo wingmen), and this isn't an answer to 3 either, but your fleet ships do retain their upgrades and cargo. So if you switch ships, go somewhere, and then pay to have that ship brought to you, it will be brought to you with all its cargo (for a fee).

I use that feature as a simpler way to have a fleet of transport ships.

Eventually, that transport action will entail some risk, and you could be summoned to defend your ship if something happened. That hasn't been implemented though, so it's just a transport cost what you pay.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

I very much want to play with cargo wingmen, actually. But I've read about how clumsy it is, also. Now that I've looked a little bit more at the way cargo is structured in the data, I guess historically the feature is here because at some point it appeared to follow naturally from the way cvs data for units is structured, though not much effort could be put into its implementation. In the long run this might be more good than bad.

Reason I was asking my question 2) is because I've had an idea, or maybe I should rather say a vision yesterday during lunch: large vessels belonging to players should have a way to load upgrades not for themselves, but as spare parts available for other ships. This method, which is basically implementing another way of storing stuff, could also be implemented for trade cargo, though it's less important. Then, these items would be available for purchase to the ships which dock the player's ship, through the existing interface that you get when you dock a ship or base or planet.

Here's the added value I see for the feature:

1) First, a better immersion for the player, which is a major factor in a RPG. It does nake sense for a fighter to be upgraded or repaired in its carrier's workshop, while it's totally absurd that the ship would be sold as cargo, bought back as a player ship, upgraded, sold again, and finally re-bought as cargo.

2) Then, it would probably cut the time that you have to spend handling your cargo wingmen by at least a factor 2. So not only could you handle them in a more enjoyable way, it would also leave you more time for actual playing.

3) Lastly, In MMORPG mode, could be the basis for a new and interesting sort of interaction between players.

The first 2 of those benefits might be achievable with a pretty small coding efforts, since the whole thing tries to take advantage of features and interfaces which already exist in the game.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by pheonixstorm »

before we get into too many ideas on the mmo side we need to get the server working properly and not blowing up the player when they buy a ship.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Before being (potentially)) an idea for the MMO, it's an idea for the plain old single player mode.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by Deus Siddis »

The best way to get these answers is to hack your save game so that you have plenty of enough credits to buy a carrier craft and several escorts. Then run all these tests on your cargo escorts to see where their limits are if they have any.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

That's right in general, but I'm not so far from being able to do it without cheating, so I guess I'd rather not waste time now and go on for the time being... Anyway once I buy that mule I'll first go on with a series of test about cargo wingmen.

Regarding my question 3), I'd be in fact surprised if the wingmen did retain their upgrades. The structure of the cvs ship save file seems to not support it. A workaround is probably not materially impossible, but it's unlikely.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

OK, I just tried the cargo wingmen in a mule. In a nutshell, it's quite broken, though maybe it could work with not that much effort.

I still can't tell if they retain their upgrades after loading a savegame, because they are impossible to tractor back in. It's funny though because cargo pods are fairly easy to haul, but with my Schroedinger wingman, it just refused to work. Maybe it fails because the wingman is always actively trying to stay right in front of me as he is under a CommDockWithMe order. I don't really understand, because I thought you could do this in VS, actually I thought you could even tractor an enemy ship into your cargo hold, à la space pirate. I'm going to try this as a last attempt.

You can take control of a wingman and dock him to your own mothership. What happens then is that you can buy cargo from the mothership at the same price it was bought. You can also buy its upgrades (sic), except for weapons. It's basically the same as if you were docking just any ship, there's no way to register yourself back into the mothership's cargo. One interesting aspect is that you can purchase the shipment of any of your ships from "My Fleet," just as if you were on a planet, then take back control of your wingman and leave the "My Fleet" ship (presumably) docked at your mothership. I don't know what would happen if you did this, then saved, then quit the game. Or if the mothership left the star system.

That the cargo wingman is able to dock its mothership might be the easiest way to render the feature workable.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

maze wrote:That the cargo wingman is able to dock its mothership might be the easiest way to render the feature workable.
I'm wondering why you need to tractor it in, instead of it docking automatically.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Well, first, that's what everybody says, tractoring them is the way it's supposed to work.
The order "CommDockWithMe" is really for this. The wingman doesn't go to dock with your hangar, he simply goes right in front of you so that you can attempt to tractor him into said hangar. Except what works really fine for cargo seems to fail with actual ships.

Maybe I should try with heavy tractor beams...

But I think we agree about the way it should work. Good thing here is that it really looks to me as if the AI knows how to dock a base, so what about docking a ship?

At the very least, you should be bale to transfer control to your wingman and dock him to your hangar yourself. Except that if you do this, it does what it normally does, that is it simply takes you to the base interface for the inside of your own ship!

So there's a defined set of circumstances where we want to put the docking ship in the cargo of the docked ship, and we want to transfer the pilot to the control of the docked ship, instead of opening the base interface. I haven't looked into the code yet, but I guess we could test one of two things:
* we could test that docking and docked ship are both from the same flightgroup (aka Shimazel in normal play)
* we could test that dokcing ship is cargo wingman of active player and that docked ship belongs to active player.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

maze wrote:Well, first, that's what everybody says, tractoring them is the way it's supposed to work.
The order "CommDockWithMe" is really for this. The wingman doesn't go to dock with your hangar, he simply goes right in front of you so that you can attempt to tractor him into said hangar. Except what works really fine for cargo seems to fail with actual ships.

Maybe I should try with heavy tractor beams...
No, I bet the tractorability flags are missing in units.csv
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

I think I know what the problem may be. Tractorability flags are OK, but there's a setting, "physics/percent_to_tractor" in the .config, that is set to 0.1 by default. That means ships must be 10% your size or less to be able to dock. I bet your wingmen aren't.

We either fix that setting to be bigger, or make it impossible to get cargo wingmen above that size. Either would return consistency.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

I'll try. For the record I've been doing my testing with a mule and a Schroedinger.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Good guess. That was it.

So, since the .1 makes sense as a matter of fact (at least to me), it means the mule is not a ship fit to carry cargo wingmen. Unless it's possible for the wingmen to register back into the manifest by docking their leader (which also makes a lot of sense to me). I'm going to start a thread to propose this as a feature.

Still have one more test to do about wingmen's ability to retain their upgrades after quitting the game.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

maze wrote:So, since the .1 makes sense as a matter of fact (at least to me), it means the mule is not a ship fit to carry cargo wingmen.
Maybe it's too low, though. The mule is one of the bigger player-flyable ships, I'd imagine you'd be able to fit smaller ships inside. Are there any ships at all below the threshold for it?
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Smallest ship I had in my hold was a 800m^3 Gawain (go figure why it's considered heavy). I removed the setting from my config file, and it wouldn't let itself be tractored in.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

Bad news, upgrades bought by the cargo wingmen are not saved. I did the test yesterday evening.

On the other hand, it's very painful to upgrade them anyway given the functionality available. Have to think something up.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by travists »

I still say that the quickest solution would be to co-opt the player ship functions and save them in a special "system" that flags them to piggy-back on another player ship. AI landing would still need work, but at least you could upgrade them, you could also set up a button to load ships into your flight deck that are already in your inventory.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by klauss »

No, I think it's a matter of serializing cargo wingmen as it's done with your fleet.
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Re: Cargo wingmen question

Post by maze »

klauss wrote:No, I think it's a matter of serializing cargo wingmen as it's done with your fleet.
That's shat I was thinking about.

Specifically, I think we could simply add lines for the cargo wingmen to the file storing their in serialized_xml folder.
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