Alright, DU Essentials has all the resources necessary to make a TC. It has the RID 128 of all the resources (except the mission resource) and all the descs, #STRs, systs, spobs, ship IDs 128 and 895, and everything that's needed to run Nova without trouble. Basically, TCTC would have fit into this file in its entirety.

DU Data 1 will contain all the other descs, missions, outfits, ships, systems, spobs and eveything else that does not pertain to graphics. We may wish to split off one of the resources into its own section later on. (e.g. DU Missions 1)

DU Graphics 1 contains the rleD, PICT, spin, and shan resources. These are needed to drive the graphics for the ships, weaps, and other stuff for the TC.

Personally, I think that there's nothing more confusing than having everything in one file and having to hunt down the resources you're looking for. This way, we'll be able to look for things based on file names instead of random guessing. I'd like to point out that I gave you guys warning before splitting up the seed, so you forever held your peace when I made that particular post, apparently.

I just realized that the target and shipyard picts for the shuttle ought to be included in the Essentials file, as well as the Earth landing scene. Unless people have already started moving things around, I'll have to put that on my to-do list of minor fixes.

alright, EVWeb uploaded a copy of EnigmaTC for your scouring. ETC.hqx is the data files, BA2 is balance attempt two, a plugin for ETC that balances it properly. Feel free to use it as necessary. It has everything needed for a TC except missions, about half of which are planned but I couldn't code because the writers didn't make descs. EVWeb did all the balance work on this.
It should be possible to take any 3 gov't techsets and use them for the three different warring gov'ts planned for this plug. The ownership of planets on the map might need to be reconfigured for this to work so that the other (minor) governments have fewer planets, but still have full (or even detuned if necessary) techsets.

If we use most of those graphics it will severely cut our production time. It's kind of funny this TC died at the missions stage most vapor TCs die at Graphics whereas these are Brilliant.

actually, about half of the mission strings are planned, but the others need to be planned, and then writers need to desc-ize them.

May not be a good idea to use the resources verbatim (I don't think a "Groovies" govt would fit with our TC's theme, for example), but there's certainly lots to be used and looked through. Same with Visitor's ideas.

I can see us using the Obeza, Confed, and the Order ships for the three governments.
and Visitors text files are definetely useful.

The groovies are a fringe group, the Chictoriat was one of the larger governments, but it might have to be knocked off or severely reduced. Maybe an organized pirate guild? The Guild are sworn enemeies of the Chictoriat, they can also be a fringe gov't. There can be a mission string about those two battling. I'm not sure how the groovies would fit in.

Even if the descs are changed, the tech sets are balanced and usable in their current form.

Heh. High praise. Thanks guys; I just hope you can get some use out of my dusty old docs.

In any case, if I dig up anything else that I think might be useful, I'll be sure to upload it. And, as always, I am available for beta-testing if you need me.

Balanced as they are now, they'll have to be rebalanced anyways since it's not going to be the same universe and there are some (like me) who are going to want to create weapons, ships, etc. rather than relying purely on donated material. And even if we did use donations only, balance would need to be made between different sources, such as between Enigma weapons and those from the recently uploaded VA_Mod (which gives us over 40 weapons total between the two, a number of which I'm sure are similar). This is a new TC and the universe will probably be built up from scratch. Donated resources, such as those in Enigma, will undoubtedly be used to the greatest extent we can use them, but I have a strong feeling not everything will be used from any one large donation.

In other news, I uploaded a file, after doing some housekeeping, that some ideas I have for general structure of the layout. The biggest thing in there is pirates disguising themselves as merchants (among other possibilities) and the use of a police force to combat them while military vessels focus on the actual war. I think it could add quite a bit just seeing it in action. I'll probably throw together some placeholder stuff into a plug so I can show the concept in working form.

Also, we need to have the main factions determined. We've been discussing this for awhile already and have quite a few ideas. I'm going to drop a deadline for main factions on Friday, mainly since we already have plenty of ideas, and should hopefully have three factions chosen by Monday. Once we have the factions down and a few systems made for them, I'll make an update to the Seed with submissions thus far. Exactly how to use donated resources isn't entirely clear, mainly since we have so many more than I anticipated. I'll work out a system and inform everyone when I got something figured out, though I'm open to your ideas as well. If nobody else suggests a good idea, I'll try to have something by Friday.

This post has been edited by JoshTigerheart : 29 October 2008 - 03:42 PM

I'd suggest picking any two techsets from enigma for pirates vs police, as they are pretty well balanced in the hands of the AI at least.

In regards to your final note on the Pirate concept, Josh, why not have the best of both worlds? Instead of one group of disguised renegades, have two--one which is apathetic when blatant pirates tick off the Military (lets call them "Indifferent" Disguised Pirates), and another that will not hesitate to rush to their morally-bankrupt allies' aid ("Bold" Disguised Pirates).

Furthermore, for the interests of testing, it might be useful for the disguised pirates to maintain some sort of distinguishing feature, so that they can be easily identified during development. Obviously, you'd want to set them back to actually being "disguised" afterwards, but for the proof-in-concept, it might help if people could see how each faction behaves (having ships last longer in a firefight, and a placeholder IFF outfit might be of benefit too!).

If you do use the graphics, please note that I was working on an enhanced set of the same graphics, so if you would like me to finish it, please inform me, although it might be a little while before I finish the enhanced set of graphics. All custom graphics found in ETC were made by me, with the exception of the Enigma logo which was made by Pallas. I don't really care how they're used, I just would like to be credited.

Sure thing; we can use the graphics we have now as placeholders until you get them enhanced.

@-visitor-, on Oct 29 2008, 05:33 PM, said in Open Source TC:

In regards to your final note on the Pirate concept, Josh, why not have the best of both worlds? Instead of one group of disguised renegades, have two--one which is apathetic when blatant pirates tick off the Military (lets call them "Indifferent" Disguised Pirates), and another that will not hesitate to rush to their morally-bankrupt allies' aid ("Bold" Disguised Pirates).

Furthermore, for the interests of testing, it might be useful for the disguised pirates to maintain some sort of distinguishing feature, so that they can be easily identified during development. Obviously, you'd want to set them back to actually being "disguised" afterwards, but for the proof-in-concept, it might help if people could see how each faction behaves (having ships last longer in a firefight, and a placeholder IFF outfit might be of benefit too!).

Both of those can easily be done. Disguised pirates could be labeled as "D. Pirate" or "P. Merchant" or something else to identify them in the targeting screen during development (when they aren't going after the player). I'm not sure what you mean by placeholder IFF outfit though. Do you mean a IFF Decoder or IFF Projector? If the former and if you're referring to the concept plug, it isn't necessary because nothing will go hostile against the player in it, who has no weapons nor can buy any. If one or both of those "If"s are wrong, then I don't know what you mean by that.

Here's a concept; what about an IFF decoder that decodes and uncovers these disguised pirates through the use of duplicate dudes, govts and bit-wise operators? Buying the outfit would allow the player to hunt down these disguised pirates, and could become part of a mission string.

@lnsu, on Oct 28 2008, 07:22 PM, said in Open Source TC:

alright, EVWeb uploaded a copy of EnigmaTC for your scouring. ETC.hqx is the data files, BA2 is balance attempt two, a plugin for ETC that balances it properly. Feel free to use it as necessary. It has everything needed for a TC except missions, about half of which are planned but I couldn't code because the writers didn't make descs. EVWeb did all the balance work on this.
It should be possible to take any 3 gov't techsets and use them for the three different warring gov'ts planned for this plug. The ownership of planets on the map might need to be reconfigured for this to work so that the other (minor) governments have fewer planets, but still have full (or even detuned if necessary) techsets.

awesome... now i can stop sorting thru my flashdrives... and now i have to download EVNEW... anyone got a good Mac>Pc convertor they'd suggest?

You've already got one; it's the plug-in converter included in the Nova application folder, but I don't know why you'd have to use it because all our development files are already in .rez, WinNova's and EVNEW's native plug-in format...

oh... hides face i feel like a fool now... its been that long since ive dabbled in dev work for evn... damn navy life..

plus im sitting here racking my brain trying to remember the title for the dropbox password... i REALLY need to replay the storylines

@jacabyte, on Oct 29 2008, 06:32 PM, said in Open Source TC:

Here's a concept; what about an IFF decoder that decodes and uncovers these disguised pirates through the use of duplicate dudes, govts and bit-wise operators? Buying the outfit would allow the player to hunt down these disguised pirates, and could become part of a mission string.

Possible, but it'd be somewhat complicated. Assuming we have a dude for bold disguised pirates and indifferent ones as visitor suggests, we'd have to duplicate them and have four dudes for each type of hidden pirate. That'd eat at least half of a system's allotment for dudes if you don't make copies of the systems. It might not be worth the effort. Feel free to edit the concept plug to give it a whirl, though make sure to do it with a local copy so the rest of us aren't downloading every unfinished save you make.

Rather, I was thinking of the reasons the police "know" who to shoot at are similar to the reasons today's police know who to pull over. Suspicious activity, reports, witnessing the crime, vehicles who's license plat equivalent match a list of suspicious vehicles, etc. Story-wise, the police wouldn't know who's a criminal and who isn't anymore than the player would when everyone is just flying around. But, in-game-wise, they'd always know because of how the engine works and there's really no way around it. Otherwise I'd have them sometimes disable the targets, board them to arrest the criminals (this part could be simulated easily as is), and then fly on instead of always destroying the targets.

@robtom, on Oct 29 2008, 06:33 PM, said in Open Source TC:

awesome... now i can stop sorting thru my flashdrives... and now i have to download EVNEW... anyone got a good Mac>Pc convertor they'd suggest?

The plug-in files are distributed as .rez files (or should be) since Windows can only convert one way and only can edit .rez, where as Mac users with Mission Computer can convert both ways and edit either.

Sorry for the double post, but I got it regarding donations.

But first, was DU Essentials supposed to be deleted?

Alright, here's my idea. Donations will essentially be a pool of resources to which the developers on this project can draw from. No resources will be added to the version control files directly. Rather, people can copy the resources from the donations and modify them if needed for use in their submissions. If they use a resource from a donation, they need to make note in a log, perhaps their own or maybe a separate "Donation Log" (after a moment of thought, the latter might be better), indicating which files the resource(s) came from and what the ID(s) were. Once the resources make it into the version control files, they'll be removed from their respective donation files to prevent accidental re-usage. Donated files will be deleted once they no longer have any resources.

Thoughts? Opinions?