WetWareV7 wrote:
1. Do other ships travel throughout the universe, or do they spawn around the player?
As of 0.4.x:
Depending on what exactly you mean by "spawn" the answer is both. There are a fixed number of actual ships in the game at any time. New ones are created based on a (currently extraordinarily simple and destined to be replaced) production schedule. However, most of these ships are modeled somewhat "offline" from the players perspective until they are, for any of a number of reasons, promoted or "spawned" into the same level of existence as the player - that is, it's too computationally expensive to actually have all of the ships in all of the systems actually flying around and having to do collision checks and ai-scripts for maneuvering around each other and such, so, most of the time, most of the ships exist only as a set of statistics describing the existence of a flightgroup in a system. This flightgroup can, without spawning, move around the universe and attack each other and otherwise behave like very low granularity simulations of a fully simulated flightgroup. When you see ships appear around you, they have either already been promoted to full simulation and have jumped to your location, or, they existed somewhere in your current system, and were promoted to full simulation around you.
2. Since I don't know the above answer, do the other ships scanners have set ranges, i.e., can I sneak around, avoid detection, hide out in an asteriod field, etc....(without cloaking device)
Scanners have set ranges, but
A)the default range is large enough that hiding is somewhat hard in general
B)The difference between the ranges tends to be such that the usual case is, like the old military axiom, "if the enemy is in range, so are you"
C) scanners are not currently affected by there being other objects between you and your target
3. When browsing ships to purchase, the specs don't show cargo capacity or weapon mounts. How can you tell if a ship is able to mount a tractor beam before you buy it?
This is a known deficiancy, and has been addressed in post-release code changes (available via CVS), and so will be fixed come the next release.
4. If I want to create some mods, specifically, creating a player base or adding alien artifacts to existing planets(blank), can I do this via scripts, or am I going to need a compiler?
Assuming that I am understanding what your intentions are, you should be able to do what you need via changes to the data set. For more assistance, look to the modding forum.
6. While doing some exploring, I jumped out of the starter system, thinking I would be able to find my way back, but after I jumped, I could not target the wormhole I came out of. Is this a bug or operator error? I tried "u", "t", "n", etc.....and "p" while looking at it....(maybe to close?)
If this happens again, please save your stderr and stdout and post in the bug triage forum, noting version+patch number.
