Biological Assembly and Automated Miners

posted on September 14th, 2011, 8:48 am

Two features I had requested a while back I ended up discovering are already possible in Fleet Ops. Biological Assembly: basically a visual trick that makes it looks like something is crawling or moving across the surface of a base or ship while it's being built, and Automated Miners: Mining ships that are controlled by the AI and automatically harvest from moons without the player's orders. Here's a small demonstration of it (as well as a sneak peak of a completely new race being added) in my total conversion mod Sigma:




If anyone is interested in this please check out my mod here: Sigma mod for Star Trek: Armada II - Mod DB
I've been trying to get a stable multiplayer base, but even with the help of the Fleet Ops devs it's no surprise that this has been overshadowed by Fleet Operations itself. 

posted on September 14th, 2011, 8:54 am

Wow. this looks really cool! Great job! 

Edit:
Does Sigma have a stable AI as well?
I'm really thinking of checking this out

[Arash8472]

posted on September 14th, 2011, 12:49 pm

Last edited by Arash8472 on September 14th, 2011, 12:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wow. this looks really cool! Great job! 

Edit:
Does Sigma have a stable AI as well?
I'm really thinking of checking this out

I agree that one race is great. I look forward to playing it.

to Denarius: The AI is very smart but tends to be defensive. The only problem I mostly have with sigma is that it sometimes crashes when you try to go into the main menu or when trying to close the game

to nephalim: Could you also make a quick youtube vid when you release this race in your sigma game as sometimes the fleetops page pushes threads like these down to page 5 or 6 when forum is active ... ^^;

(I subbed your Utube account)

posted on September 14th, 2011, 3:14 pm

Nicely done, glad it's working out 

posted on September 14th, 2011, 3:29 pm

That is wicked awesome!  How did you manage automated mining???

posted on September 14th, 2011, 6:40 pm

wudnt that be doable by making special = 0, instead of special = 1

posted on September 14th, 2011, 7:59 pm

@Denarius
The AI tends to be very hit and miss, and certain races operate better then others. Since some of the races are very modular station (basically the same concept as the Klingon Fleet Yard) reliant, they can be a bit buggy if one of the add ons are lost. Generally the AI suffers the same problems the FO AI does: It just mindlessly follows the build list and sends waves of ships after you.

@Arash8472
I'll make a video of this race (as well as the 6th) when they are done just before I release an update. 

@Dominus_Noctis
I probably would not have figured some of the stuff out if you had not mentioned about the build sparks. 

@Adm. Zaxxon
It's actually a replaceweapon trick. In Fleet Ops if you build a mining station the miner that comes with it automatically heads to the nearest moon to harvest from it. What I did was spawn an invisible mining station that in turn spawns the miner and it goes off to the nearest moon. The invisible mining station then deletes itself using the autoExpireTime command. Dominus gets credit for showing me these commands. 

posted on September 14th, 2011, 8:01 pm

@Adm. Zaxxon
It's actually a replaceweapon trick. In Fleet Ops if you build a mining station the miner that comes with it automatically heads to the nearest moon to harvest from it. What I did was spawn an invisible mining station that in turn spawns the miner and it goes off to the nearest moon. The invisible mining station then deletes itself using the autoExpireTime command. Dominus gets credit for showing me these commands. 

And the miner is not Human controlled?  And that works!   Awesome. 

posted on September 15th, 2011, 12:50 am

Hehe thanks 

Yea, there are a lot of really awesome commands that can be put to good use in any mod - if you have an idea and don't know how to implement, your best chances are to go through the guide and look for a command. There will usually be some commands there that can be nicely daisy-chained to produce some neat effects

posted on September 15th, 2011, 7:43 pm

Hehe thanks 

Yea, there are a lot of really awesome commands that can be put to good use in any mod - if you have an idea and don't know how to implement, your best chances are to go through the guide and look for a command. There will usually be some commands there that can be nicely daisy-chained to produce some neat effects

The Guide has been quite handy in that regard

That and being pointed to specific sections of it. 

posted on September 16th, 2011, 5:39 am

Well done TUN and Dom, some very cool features there and can't wait to see the new races TUN. I am sure at least one of them may become my new favourite. 

posted on September 16th, 2011, 11:45 pm

Two features I had requested a while back I ended up discovering are already possible in Fleet Ops. Biological Assembly: basically a visual trick that makes it looks like something is crawling or moving across the surface of a base or ship while it's being built, and Automated Miners: Mining ships that are controlled by the AI and automatically harvest from moons without the player's orders.

Question: how do you handle the automated miners ? Is it stock stuff, or flops specefic code ?
Also, this is related to a mod I've been helping a friend on, would it prehaps be possible to use the automated miners to handle trade between a players stations simulating trade routes ?
IE: you have two stations capable of handling trade, the automated traders go between them, you get three or more up, and ships go semi randomly between bases.

posted on September 17th, 2011, 12:07 am

Unfortunately, it wouldn't work that way.  When you build a mining station, a miner is automatically build and starts mining the nearest moon.  Trading stations do not do this.  The way he is doing it is by using replaceweapon and other new FO code to make a mining station which is not controlled by a human player, appear, then disappear, and the subsequently crated miner will mine automatically.  As I said, it would not work this way for trading, or in stock a2 for that matter.

posted on September 17th, 2011, 12:17 am

Ah ok, so basically placing a mining station you dont have control of and the mining ship it spawns just acts like any normal mining ship, it just inherits teh inability to be controlled.

Actually, I need to look thru the stock .odf's and fiddle with them, see if I can get a trade station to spawn a trade ship....

posted on September 17th, 2011, 12:25 am

I am not sure it is possible.  I may be wrong, but I think its hard coded into the mining station class label,