Few questions

pokrak · Post by **pokrak** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 5:08 pm

First of all good work with creating this remake.. bravo !!

And now the questions:

1. I had accepted three missions from the computer (all to the same base, but different cargo), total income would be about 65k, but it was only like 20k (profit from 1,5 mission) - why ? is this some kind of a bug ?

2. I have bought the second version (dont remember the name right now) of hull and armour. Now I have BOTH versions of hull and armour on my ship - is this normal ? I thought the second version would replace the previous one..

3. Same thing with shields.. I had shield lvl.2 and bought lvl.3. Now I have BOTH installed (is this also normal ? are they adding their power to each other, or the weaker one is useless ?)

4. In the original Priv, You have to had the torpedo launcher in order to use torpedoes.. In the remake you dont need one to fire torpedoes ?

5. When I am at the ship dealers place I can see three ships (on the first screen) and I can choose to buy any one.. But when Iam in the upgrades menu, sometimes there is only one ship and sometimes none to buy.. why is that ?

6. Also, I read somewhere on this forum that you can tractor-beam ships and strip them apart. How I can do this ?

Thanks and sorry for my poor english..

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 8:36 pm

Hi pokrak + welcome to the forum.

1.) It is indeed a bug. Missions normally disappear when you accept them. If they still are on the computer and you take them a second time, you will have them in your objectives but no cargo and no payment. Other reasons: Maybe your cargo bay was full. The missions can be accepted but you fail as soon as you launch.

2.) Again some sort of bug. You'll get the armor values of Tungsten. The bug refers to capships which can have multiple "layers" of armor. It only works with the Tarsus as far as I know. Just sell the Plasteel armor.

3.) Again, always the values of the best item count (concering fighters only)

4.) Yes, I don't know why launchers are not implemented, maybe because of the WCU stormfire guns, guns which have buyable ammo and behave like missiles. Just see your ship as universal warhead launcher and forget about buying launchers.

5.) The ship dealer always has those three original priv ships, you can always buy them and you'll automatically sell your old ship if you do so. The upgrader also has other ships, sometimes more, sometimes less, and your old ship is saved in the bases' hangar. I think this is because some oldschool devs wanted to keep the original ship dealer but also have additional ship classes.

6.) You need a really big ship for that... Finish the oxford campaign missions and visit the Oxford ship dealer afterwards.

pokrak · Post by **pokrak** » Tue Feb 06, 2007 3:40 pm

Thanks for such quick reply.. but

as for question 1: all of the missions were different and each one I have accepted disappeared from the list.. So I take three of them (different cargo - same destination base) After accepting three missions, I went to commodities and there I had three types of cargo marked in red.. Also after launching to the orbit I had three missions on my MFD.. so it is a bug and please fix it :)

When I buy another ship from the upgrade menu, where I can switch back to my previous ship ?

Also someone has written about dismounting guns from ships that he has bought and mounting them on your ship. How can I do this ?

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Tue Feb 06, 2007 4:48 pm

I never had this sort of cargo bug before or at least I didn't notice it. So I don't know where to start from, but I'll keep it in mind and point the issue towards the others.

If you own multiple ships, a "MyFleet" tab will appear in the upgraders ship section. You can switch for free between the ships if they are in the same star system, otherwised you'll need to pay 50.000. You can also buy or sell stuff for/from the other ships after you switched to them as usual.

Post by **klauss** » Tue Feb 06, 2007 6:12 pm

About 1, sometimes you don't have enough room for the cargo, and just a partial load is assigned to you - in such cases, the mission pays proportional to the relative amount of cargo that did fit into your hold. Some odd things must have happened for it to happen three times, you usually get a full cargo hold when this happens and thus you cannot accept any further cargo mission. But perhaps the first that failed (probably the second one) had some sort of very big (as in using a lot of volume per unit) item, and the second a very small one (as in using very little per unit), or just the third one failed in such way... or who knows.
But, in all cases, when the mission pays less, it's because of that.

The bug is not to warn the player. The player should be warned.

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Tue Feb 06, 2007 8:04 pm

Such big cargo could be hitchhikers or first-class passengers, for as they use up to 10 cargo space units per count. I've got another idea how it could have happened: You landed on a base, changed your ship to one with smaller cargo bay than before and accepted the missions which were generated for the bigger ship. Also, it is possible that the cargo space is decimated by internal system damage - e.g. you nearly got killed and in most cases, you have something like 75.5563 instead of 100 free cargo units.

Zool · Post by **Zool** » Tue Feb 06, 2007 10:25 pm

What pokrak is saying has happened to me also. Take two or three different cargoes to the same base, but not get paid in full as per the mission brief. The two or three mission briefs are all listed under the objectives. There's no warning about not enough space, I checked the manifest and the cargo is all there, It's just sometimes, you just don't get all the money.

@pokrak
This might help you not lose money on cargo missions. Try to pick cargo drops not all at the one base or same system, instead let's say you start in Troy. Look for a series of drops at consecutive bases along a path. ie From Troy, say you get one for Junction, one for New Constantinople and last one for New Detroit. Now when you get to Junction (whatever base it is) you will have dropped one cargo, so just pick up another one, say for Raxis or ND57. So one or two drops per system, picking mp more drops for the next system in line I find that it avoids the problem of missing money, and by doing runs like this you can rack up a good half million creds in an hour. Also I find "clean sweeps" to be really good money.

Bubba · Post by **Bubba** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 5:36 pm

I've had similar problems myself. Just a few minutes ago I took a mission for 18 grand and only got paid 1800, I figured that was just a scripting error, someone left off a zero somewhere. But one thing that has happened many times is as follows:

You get a mission for say, wood. You look in your cargo hold and you now have 20 units of wood. You get to the destination and not only do you get shortchanged on the fee, but also when you look at your cargo you have 9 units of wood left. And no, in this instance no additional "wood" was purchased before or after accepting the mission. LOL I always have an empty hold before accepting missions.

targ collective · Post by **targ collective** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 7:00 pm

About missile launchers: Creating these as mount upgrades would be possible! However, you would be able to apply them for every weapon mount. I think what we have is a decent compromise for now, until we get .exe modding talent - No, wait, if it is possible to give an upgrade a weapon mount (as opposed to a mount upgrade) - no reason this shouldn't be possible - then when we get forbidden upgrades tech we could implement this. We'd need a separate upgrade for each missile mount though, more if we use separate weapon points like CenturionMissileLeft rather than CenturionMissileArray - but this can be done. If you want I'll look into it with the armour stuff; just give me the prices per weapon per ship.

Bubba · Post by **Bubba** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 7:38 pm

Free is always nice.

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:03 pm

Bubba wrote:You get a mission for say, wood. You look in your cargo hold and you now have 20 units of wood. You get to the destination and not only do you get shortchanged on the fee, but also when you look at your cargo you have 9 units of wood left. And no, in this instance no additional "wood" was purchased before or after accepting the mission. LOL I always have an empty hold before accepting missions.

Melonhead is currently reworking the trade system, I'll point that to him as soon as he is back on the boards. I don't suspect a script error for it should happen all the time then. I believe it happens when you have several cargo runs with the same type of cargo, but I currently don't know where to start searching for it is just a tip and there is no way to recreate the error in reliable terms.

targ wrote:About missile launchers: Creating these as mount upgrades would be possible! However, you would be able to apply them for every weapon mount. I think what we have is a decent compromise for now, until we get .exe modding talent - No, wait, if it is possible to give an upgrade a weapon mount (as opposed to a mount upgrade) - no reason this shouldn't be possible - then when we get forbidden upgrades tech we could implement this. We'd need a separate upgrade for each missile mount though, more if we use separate weapon points like CenturionMissileLeft rather than CenturionMissileArray - but this can be done. If you want I'll look into it with the armour stuff; just give me the prices per weapon per ship.

Solon talked about "special" capability some days ago. Since there's already a flag for specials, we could create missile launchers with the same requirements than tractor beams. This could also lead to an "double missile slot" item, mountable where missiles already are. Quasi a missile hub.

targ collective · Post by **targ collective** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 9:47 am

Ahh... Explain, please, I have no idea what you mean. You can buy Special capability, so if I understand you correctly we could by logical extension buy missile capability for any mount. What about ammo? It seems rather messy to me.

I favour ship-specific launcher array upgrades. But then I'd love prerequisite upgrade tech too. One thing at a time, as always.

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 7:17 pm

Buying special capability means making a mount compatible with a tractor beam in first case. But it means more - if you invented a missile launcher, a "warhead cargo expansion", mountable on special mounts, you got it.

targ collective · Post by **targ collective** » Sat Jun 09, 2007 2:43 pm

We can't define new mount-types, so we'd need to use one of the existing ones for this, and my new Capship weaponry has just used up all the spares.

Don't worry about it too much - I think they tried something similar in GG and ran into bugs aplenty - instead, once the .Exe has been patched, I can extend the armour system to use launcher upgrades too. No reason the launcher can't be added via upgrades, right? I'll just do that.

The more I think on this, the more I come to the opinion that we should really be using an allowable_upgrades system instead - some new prefix, like - well - allowable_ which disables an item by default and only allows it in ships which explicitly references it in allowable_upgrades.

Where's a dev when you need one?