Roots mod has been released!

posted on June 28th, 2019, 6:22 pm

Hi everyone, my Fleet Ops mod, called "Roots", has been released. It can be found here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/fleet-ops-roots

Among other things it adds the Cardassians and has a much improved AI,

Enjoy!

posted on June 29th, 2019, 12:52 pm

Congratulations.
What kind of factions or races you have in that mod ?
I'll will try your mod soon as possible. I'm on Linux (Ubuntu / Mint) , hopefully I can run it under that OS.
Actually, I managed to run some older versions of Fleet Operations and Star Trek Armada 2 under Linux and works just fine. Regarding the last version of Fleet Operations, I still trying to make it run under Linux.

posted on June 30th, 2019, 9:18 pm

It has all the Fleet Ops factions, plus the Cardassians. There are fewer ships and stations than in Fleet Ops because I wanted players to have more oversight and make all the ships in the game have a useful role, a bit like Armada 1. The Rock-Paper-Scissors system has been completely reworked: it now revolves around ship types instead of weapon ranges so if you have a Destroyer you immediately know it's going to be good against Artillery ships and Berserkers (Berserkers are ships like the Defiant Class), but weak against Battleships and Starbases. The AI has also been made much stronger (with both more efficient build lists and improved AI parameters/behavior).

Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions/comments.

posted on July 1st, 2019, 7:26 pm

this literally just uncloaked, i was randomly checking out moddb

wow
thanks
now going to install, very very amazed

posted on July 2nd, 2019, 9:07 am

Thanks, let me know what you think of the balancing and the AI!

posted on July 2nd, 2019, 9:14 am

played a couple of games for the feel of it, in terms of balance my preference is subsystem damage, with a tough hull , so i might be biased, ive played so much fo/armada(s) etc im keeping a fresh perspective

posted on July 2nd, 2019, 3:47 pm

Hi JanB

First: A 1000 thanks for Your new "Fleet Ops Root". Personally I'm very pleased with it, So G R E A T work :-D

MY suggestions to a Future version:
->: Please replace as much as You can with materials from "Star Trek Armanda 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire", the "Dominion War mod for Fleet Operations" ( https://www.moddb.com/mods/dominion-war ... /downloads ) and the present Fleet operations mod without the avatars in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will to replace the Big station(s) or The Main Starbase(s) with the ones from "Star Trek Armanda 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire" in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will make The Federation defence platform(s) fire both Phasers, Pulse Phasers an Quantom Topedoes at the same time in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will increase the fire range of both The Main Starbase(s) / Big station(s) and the defence platforms for All races / players.

Now that You have 6 races to play with then please also create some 12-player maps, 11-player maps and some 10-player maps as well to Your new "Fleet ops Roots".

Anyway: Please keep up All Your good work at Your "Fleet Ops Roots".

[JanB]

posted on July 3rd, 2019, 3:06 pm

Last edited by JanB on July 3rd, 2019, 3:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I found two bugs in the mod: the Federation and Cardassians cannot use their warp in abilities when a human player controls them. You can fix this by going into the game folder then to Data --> odf --> system and copying the line

maxspecialenergy = 300

into creinforcement.odf and freinforcement.odf (they can be opened and edited with any text editor, even Windows notepad).

The download on Moddb has been updated to fix this as well.

posted on July 3rd, 2019, 3:12 pm

Hi JanB

First: A 1000 thanks for Your new "Fleet Ops Root". Personally I'm very pleased with it, So G R E A T work :-D

MY suggestions to a Future version:
->: Please replace as much as You can with materials from "Star Trek Armanda 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire", the "Dominion War mod for Fleet Operations" ( https://www.moddb.com/mods/dominion-war ... /downloads ) and the present Fleet operations mod without the avatars in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will to replace the Big station(s) or The Main Starbase(s) with the ones from "Star Trek Armanda 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire" in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will make The Federation defence platform(s) fire both Phasers, Pulse Phasers an Quantom Topedoes at the same time in a Future Version.

->: It would also be Great if You will increase the fire range of both The Main Starbase(s) / Big station(s) and the defence platforms for All races / players.

Now that You have 6 races to play with then please also create some 12-player maps, 11-player maps and some 10-player maps as well to Your new "Fleet ops Roots".

Anyway: Please keep up All Your good work at Your "Fleet Ops Roots".

Thank you!

About replacing the models with those from the Armada 3 mod... I would if I could, but that's a very complicated process with converting all the alpha channels etc... and the Fleet Ops engine wouldn't handle such high quality models and textures very well either I'm afraid...

The Starbases and Defense Platforms already outrange the ships (except for Artillery ships) by 30%, though in practice it's more like 20% for the Starbases because they're so big that some hardpoints will be far away from the enemy. I don't want to increase this further for balance reasons. These stations are supposed to be vulnerable to Artillery ships.

Regarding larger maps. I don't think the game supports launching games with more than 8 players (or AIs)...

posted on July 3rd, 2019, 5:47 pm

About replacing the models with those from the Armada 3 mod... I would if I could, but that's a very complicated process with converting all the alpha channels etc... and the Fleet Ops engine wouldn't handle such high quality models and textures very well either I'm afraid...

The Starbases and Defense Platforms already outrange the ships (except for Artillery ships) by 30%, though in practice it's more like 20% for the Starbases because they're so big that some hardpoints will be far away from the enemy. I don't want to increase this further for balance reasons. These stations are supposed to be vulnerable to Artillery ships.

Regarding larger maps. I don't think the game supports launching games with more than 8 players (or AIs

Thanks for Your answer / response.

Well ... I had to try.

If this is the case, then please Re-create Your "Fleet Ops Roots" with Your own Engine as i.e the ezEngine (http://www.ezengine.net) or the Unreal Engine (https://www.unrealengine.com).

I just wanted Your "Fleet Ops Roots" to be as Wild as possible.

posted on July 7th, 2019, 2:45 pm

It is so nice to see there is still something useful done with the fleetops project. Congrats!

posted on July 10th, 2019, 11:06 am

Congrats on the mod. Just make sure to ask permission next time, especially if it's indicated in the readme

posted on July 18th, 2019, 12:15 pm

Interesting concept.

I played around with it a little bit and have some feedback. Gameplay-wise it was a bit odd to have ships living for so long in combat, but that might just take more getting used to.

Cloaking seemed to be almost useless when cloak detection is this powerful, although some of that is just the fact that the AI builds so many scouts. It would be helpful to have some visual indicator of how far cloak detection extends; maybe put the tachyon pings back on the ships visually even if their detection is always active.

The Support Ship ability doesn't apply its animation to the Romulan Cruiser (Griffin model) but I was unable to determine if the buff was applied anyway.

I would prefer to be able to build mining freighters without a mining station, as this requirement slows down the opening seconds of the game when you would be building your starting miners.

RangedObjectAffector is a very stupidly coded ability (by the original Armada 2 team I mean) in that its range is 400 units plus whatever's in the odf. As a result, the visible radius when they mouse over the button is shorter than the actual radius. You might be able to set visiblerange = 800 to fix this, I'm not sure though.

There is a line that goes in weapon odf files that determines "when the ship is set to medium/high movement autonomy, and it fires this weapon or the player gives an attack command, turn the ship to face the target". This line seems to be missing from your weapons, as I noticed my Romulan ships facing away from the enemy and not turning to face them unless I gave a move command.

I'll take a deeper look at it in a few days, thanks for all the effort you put into this!

[JanB]

posted on July 22nd, 2019, 10:24 am

Last edited by JanB on July 24th, 2019, 4:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Thanks, Tryptic!

I'm working on a 1.1 patch that addresses some of the issues you raised and I'm looking forward to more feedback.

I played around with it a little bit and have some feedback. Gameplay-wise it was a bit odd to have ships living for so long in combat, but that might just take more getting used to.

That was definitely deliberate: I wanted it to be more like Armada 1 where ships felt less "disposable". Most ships still go down quickly when targeted by a Starbase, Dreadnought or a fleet, but yeah, cruiser level ships are supposed to survive for a while in this mod.

Cloaking seemed to be almost useless when cloak detection is this powerful, although some of that is just the fact that the AI builds so many scouts. It would be helpful to have some visual indicator of how far cloak detection extends; maybe put the tachyon pings back on the ships visually even if their detection is always active.

The 1.1 patch will have a detection range (using the visiblerange command) when you hover the cursor over the detection subsystem. Normal effects, like the ping effect are ugly because they tend to trail behind a moving scout. I've resorted to using a static overlaysod for sensor arrays (just a blueish circle, based on a modified, hexedited version of the effect_progscan.sod file) and there's an easy option in the patch to put this on scouts as well (you just have to rename a texture file). This is completely optional since it doesn't affect multiplayer compatibility.

Cloaking has been deliberately nerfed, especially against AIs that build lots of scouts and have spread out defenses. But... a human player will still have to choose to maintain vulnerable scouts and expend resources on sensor platforms against a cloak-capable opponent, and you can still do a lot of damage by sneaking even a handful of ships past a human-built defensive line, for example the BortasS with its ion storm ability or the Griffin with its antimatter mines... For the Klingons cloaking is mostly a way to escape after a raid, for the Romulans it's more of a viable overall tactic because they can cloak and decloak very quickly and because of things like the cloakenhancer, cloaked artillery and the ability to blind cloak detectors (Rhienn Class). The Romulans require good micro in any case, they're the hardest faction to play as and you can see this in Romulan AIs often losing against other AIs.

The Support Ship ability doesn't apply its animation to the Romulan Cruiser (Griffin model) but I was unable to determine if the buff was applied anyway.

The buff is always applied to all allied ships, but some models don't show it. This also happens with Dominion ships. It has to do with the lighting/specularity settings of the .sod files. Unfortunately I can't fix that.

I would prefer to be able to build mining freighters without a mining station, as this requirement slows down the opening seconds of the game when you would be building your starting miners.

This will be in the 1.1 patch.

RangedObjectAffector is a very stupidly coded ability (by the original Armada 2 team I mean) in that its range is 400 units plus whatever's in the odf. As a result, the visible radius when they mouse over the button is shorter than the actual radius. You might be able to set visiblerange = 800 to fix this, I'm not sure though.

This is fixed in the 1.1 patch (setting a visiblerange indeed works) for all the RangedObjectAffector effects.

There is a line that goes in weapon odf files that determines "when the ship is set to medium/high movement autonomy, and it fires this weapon or the player gives an attack command, turn the ship to face the target". This line seems to be missing from your weapons, as I noticed my Romulan ships facing away from the enemy and not turning to face them unless I gave a move command.

Which command is that? I haven't been able to find this in the guide. I vaguely remember experimenting with something like "turntofacetarget = 1" or something similar, but now I can't find it in the guide and I seem to remember that it didn't work anyway...

I'll take a deeper look at it in a few days, thanks for all the effort you put into this!

Thanks, I look forward to that so I can improve the 1.1 patch.

Btw, do you know a way to deal with the "no producer available" problem the AI sometimes (most games it won't, but sometimes it does) runs into when it wants to build a station and has idle construction ships but somehow can't seem to assign a construction ship to the construction process so the build list can't progress?

posted on July 22nd, 2019, 4:52 pm

Hi Jan. Just thought I'd comment on the "NO Producer Available" part. You may have already seen it, but from the guide here on FO:

NO PRODUCER AVAILABLE // There is not a ship or station available to build the desired item. If all ships and stations are not busy doing something else, there is something wrong with the Build List

Are you thinking you have a ship or station ready and resources ready and it's in place, but the game is just not building something for unknown reasons?