Shrooblord

Is that the case? I swear I've built ships and deleted the root blocks many times afterwards in the build mode.I believe one of the Loading Screen Tips informs you about this. But yes, in Build Mode, you should be able to destroy the root block with Safe Mode turned off, and the nearest block attached to it will become the new root block. I say should because I've had three separate instances of my ship plain blowing up when I deleted the root block, the game deleting all blocks "chained to it" in the process. Sadness. So far, I've discovered that it's probably(?!) safe if you delete the root block, but there's another block attached behind it, yet if the root block only has blocks attached on its front face, you die, no save. But I'm a little fuzzy on that since I haven't experimented too much with it, the matter altogether is rather confusing, and you can imagine me not wanting to find out whether or not a certain deletion blows up my ship and sends me back home crying for repairs. In general I'd say it's best to never touch your root block ever again after you begin construction, but I get how that's kinda a moot point given that you wouldn't anyway in a perfect world where everything you imagine ends up working out design-wise as you expected, but that's not how the cookie crumbles. I digress. I turn my root block into a Flight Recorder using the Transform Block tool, then encase it in Armour Blocks or something similar, and then start my actual design of the ship, with any ship I build. That's pretty much my MO. ;) P.S. For those interested, the more technical explanation to why deleting the root block could lead to the whole ship exploding in a great fireball is because data about ship designs is stored in what in the programming field is called BSP Trees. Think of these like hierarchies. If you've ever seen a family tree, those things: one thing is the "origin", and from that, multiple things are attached and branch off into numerous other things. The root block is, quite literally, the root of this BSP Tree, so cutting it down fells the entire tree. It makes sense programmatically, but I haven't quite figured out yet what the "attachment rules" are, i.e. when a block is considered a "child" of the root block and when it is considered a "neighbour" or "cousin" I guess (if you want to keep with family naming schemes): blocks placed in front tend to be children, but not always. Blocks placed behind tend to be cousins, but not always. I haven't the foggiest about the rules concerning left-right and above-below placements. Again, this could use some proper experimentation / code sniffing to find out the exact rules, to better inform the community as a whole and prevent this sort of problem from happening again.

Certainly. However, after updating to your newest version of the OoSP Mod, it seems to have migrated to solely your resourcetrader.lua script files, and has disappeared from the vanilla lua files. Here's the relevant part of my server log where the data is printed: 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: currentProductions -> v: table: 00000000176265C0 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: tradingData -> v: table: 0000000017626A20 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: policies -> v: table: 0000000017626D40 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: sellsSuspicious -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: sellsIllegal -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: buysIllegal -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: buysSuspicious -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: sellsStolen -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: buysStolen -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: buyPriceFactor -> v: 1 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: activelyRequest -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: buyFromOthers -> v: true 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: deliveredStations -> v: table: 0000000017625EE0 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: activelySell -> v: false 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: soldGoods -> v: table: 0000000017626AC0 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: sellToOthers -> v: true 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: boughtGoods -> v: table: 0000000017626DE0 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: sellPriceFactor -> v: 1 2018-02-04 12-26-01| k: deliveringStations -> v: table: 0000000017626520 2018-02-04 12-26-01| could not execute function 'ResourceDepot.onRestoredFromDisk' in '"data/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua"': 2018-02-04 12-26-01| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:150: attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (a nil value) 2018-02-04 12-26-01| stack traceback: 2018-02-04 12-26-01| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:150: in function <.\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:142> 2018-02-04 12-26-01| 2018-02-04 12-26-01| scheduled save for sector (-81:-161), 0xa64e040, entities: 240 2018-02-04 12-26-01| could not execute function 'ResourceDepot.secure' in '"data/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua"': 2018-02-04 12-26-01| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: bad argument #2 to 'insert' (number expected, got string) 2018-02-04 12-26-01| stack traceback: 2018-02-04 12-26-01| [C]: in function 'insert' 2018-02-04 12-26-01| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: in function <.\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:75> 2018-02-04 12-26-01| 2018-02-04 12-26-01| saving sector (-81:-161) 2018-02-04 12-26-02| player events roughly every 16.57 minutes 2018-02-04 12-26-02| sector (-81:-161) saved to "C:\Users\Shrooblord\AppData\Roaming\Avorion\galaxies\The Shroobiverse\sectors\-81_-161" 2018-02-04 12-26-02| could not execute function 'ResourceDepot.secure' in '"data/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua"': 2018-02-04 12-26-02| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: bad argument #2 to 'insert' (number expected, got string) 2018-02-04 12-26-02| stack traceback: 2018-02-04 12-26-02| [C]: in function 'insert' 2018-02-04 12-26-02| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: in function <.\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:75> 2018-02-04 12-26-02| 2018-02-04 12-26-02| Player Shrooblord moved to sector (-81:-161) server time taken for change: 20ms 2018-02-04 12-26-02| scheduled save for sector (222:-189), 0xf79d850, entities: 306 2018-02-04 12-26-02| saving sector (222:-189) 2018-02-04 12-26-02| sector (222:-189) saved to "C:\Users\Shrooblord\AppData\Roaming\Avorion\galaxies\The Shroobiverse\sectors\222_-189" 2018-02-04 12-26-02| scheduled save for sector (-81:-161), 0xa64e040, entities: 240 2018-02-04 12-26-02| could not execute function 'ResourceDepot.secure' in '"data/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua"': 2018-02-04 12-26-02| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: bad argument #2 to 'insert' (number expected, got string) 2018-02-04 12-26-02| stack traceback: 2018-02-04 12-26-02| [C]: in function 'insert' 2018-02-04 12-26-02| .\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:78: in function <.\mods/oosp/scripts/entity/merchants/resourcetrader.lua:75> Thanks for looking into this.

I may not preach them as heavily as you, MOTHAFUCKINBEAMCANNONS, but I do agree: some rad combined laser thing would be awesome. Maybe we can build custom turrets at some point with a user-defined nozzle width, and make sure it's a laser. Then it should surely charge up with one of those epic "collecting energy before discharge" charge-up sequences. I too am a big fan of those. The anticipation is real.

Storyline spoilers ahead.

Hah, indeed. So wait, one could completely replace docking altogether with "be closer than X meters for this to work"? That's rather neat.

Oh, well, yes. The backup default files are a year old. Expect a lot of things to have changed. Better change them back to current-update vanilla files if you want to uninstall this. If you have other mods installed and didn't first back up the files in question, you'll need to rename your data / scripts folder, run Steam Integrity Verification, and painstakingly reinstall aaaalll the mods you had installed, except this one. (This is why we need a mod manager - that whole process is rather gruelling depending on how many mods you have (lots, if you're me)).

Strange. By adding your mod, the bug has quadrupled in frequency as opposed to before. I guess I can try and compare the old version against the new and see what was changed, in order to try and pinpoint the source of the problem. Maybe I've done something silly to my own resourcetrader.lua anyhow that is causing the table.insert to fail. I'll investigate and report back.

Hey. The Mining Drone is equipped with Mining Lasers only, so trying to salvage anything with it will only damage that wreck's hull without returning (much) material. You'll need to try and build a quick temporary craft and mount some Salvaging Lasers on it if you want to salvage the wreck. Or perhaps you meant "salvage this" as in "save this situation"? Sorry, no. If it is as you say and the root block of the ship was destroyed, that's all the game looks for to see if the ship gets destroyed. Well, I say that. It's one of the death conditions for a ship. Another is the "total hull integrity" also known as a ship's healthbar. If that gets depleted, or your root block itself gets destroyed, the ship blows up, no save. The best you can do at this point is salvage the wreck and modify the design to better protect the root block for the future.

Oh, yes please. I don't know why you can move items with quick-insert right-click in all other menus, but not for the Alliance window

Ah, so it does work for AI ships? Interesting. Thanks for the info. All my findings are based on player ships, after all. Funny that there's a difference there.

Having looked a tiny bit at how Wayleran modified the original code, it seems like the amount of goods Traders pick up is not currently dependent on which type of goods that is. That is to say, unlike players, the AI ships don't transaction with money of their own, so they have no limits on what to buy. Therefore: they buy a random amount every time, and that random amount is set-in-stone for the whole operation, rather than based on which type of goods it is. That's a little shoddy, I agree, but it works very well for simulation and you don't super notice at first until you start paying attention. Anyway, I modified Wayleran's Economy code to better suit my needs. I nerfed the maximum down 30%, which is still pretty decent, but not as extreme as the original modification. I'll leave these two forum posts here for reference:

I have performed the installation steps you mention, but I run into a different problem. Whenever I boot the game, and periodically through playing, I'll get error messages in Console that table.insert is being used wrong, all to do with the resourcetrader.lua. See this bug report I made for the vanilla code. Your code is triggering this same behaviour four times per execution. Basically, table.insert expects two arguments. You can pass it three, but then it expects the second to be a number, which it's not, so the code freaks out. Please read the original bug report. There's a link to a question on StackOverflow and everything where this is explained in further detail.

I have seen this behaviour too three times now, all three times on my multiplayer server, but never in singleplayer. I wonder, are you flying an Alliance ship? I've seen a lot of other bugs crop up in mods I use recently to do with Alliance vessels rather than normal player ships.

I can confirm this does not work as you would expect. I am currently in the process of rounding up my "Automatic Docking" mod and making it ready for release, and after heavy experimenting, I now know a couple of things about the docking mechanism in Avorion: As soon as the method Entity(stationIndex):startDocking(Entity(shipIndex)) is called, more commonly seen in-code as station:startDocking(ship), the tractor beams are engaged. The tractor beams will tether to you from any distance as soon as the method is called. However, they are purely visual until around somewhere in the region of 0.75 < x < 0.25 km, where x is the distance between the ship and the station's dock. Only within that "sweet spot" x region do they actually activate. Once activated, all ship script processing and actor ticking seems disabled, except player input like turning the camera - the ship follows. However, scripts no longer appear to be executing or ticking at this point until the tractor beams have disabled again. The tractor beams successfully grab you and instantaneously set your velocity to 0 if you are going up to around 2500-3000 m/s when they engage, and you are within the "sweet spot". If you go much faster, it seems you go too fast for the tick update to register you were actually in the grab zone before you're already past it. The effect: you shoot past the beams and they tether to you, but cannot grab you. The beams' code itself is not exposed in lua. It is defined somewhere on the C++ side of things (hard-coded). We cannot get to it, modify it, or even look at it. This is why I answer in estimates: the values are simply unknown, and after much, much testing with many different ship designs, sizes and velocities, these are my best guess. Therefore, modifying tractor grab distance ("sweet spot") or tractor pulling/pushing speed is impossible at this time.

Well, no, I didn't mean that. If you modify the server INI file, surely you aren't writing code like "scale enemy DPS from 100 to 500 from 0 to 500 Sectors from the Core", right? You're writing "difficulty = 1" or "difficulty = 3". That doesn't actually mean anything at all, until it gets interpreted in code. So what I'm saying is: is there a way to affect the scaling automatically, by emulating how scaling differs between the different difficulty levels, to simulate the effect that Wayleran is getting in his games by editing the difficulty setting manually? I.e. can we make dynamic difficulty based on location in the galaxy a bit more well-balanced?

Oh, yay, that's good! Is there a way to search for Efficiency, too?

Hahaha awesome. I'm putting this in my music folders, after I chop it up into distinct tracks! I love the music from the Tron: Legacy film (like I love all Daft Punk music), which fits the space theme very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj043rJr31E There was a nicer video of the Deluxe Edition with supreme audio quality, but it got removed from the site. I also like the soundtracks to all the Command and Conquer games for Avorion, which kinda makes sense given their shared spaciness and sci-fi theme.

Is this based on one of the Personality Traits that Factions have, I wonder? I've never paid much attention to those, but I have seen that they can make a lot of difference in-code. For example, Paranoid Factions will have way more strict patrols looking out for ships carrying Stolen, Dangerous or Illegal Cargo.

My zippy ship did have both Inertial Dampeners and lots of forward-facing Thrusters, I must admit. As far as I could tell, yes, they were following my on my heels quite doggishly. But I'm not sure if what's good enough for me is good enough for you - maybe our experiences differ there.

Thanks. I changed both to range from 25 at minimum to 350 at maximum. You may think that's got a high variance, which is true, but I felt like it more accurately represented trading behaviour: sometimes they'll want a little shipment, sometimes they'll want lots and lots. Meanwhile, it's still nerfed the maximum from vanilla down 30%, which I felt was fair without impacting my income too, too much.

Update 1.1.2 BUGFIX: You can now rename ships at long range. If you own the craft or have the appropriate Alliance permissions to modify a ship, you can now Interact with any ship in the Sector and use the item Rename Ship. /!\ NOTE: A new file, mods/RenameShips/scripts/player/shipRenameMigrator.lua was added in this version, which needs to be added to the config of ShipScriptLoader.lua. See the updated installation instructions in this forum thread or README file included in the download. EDIT: Immediately noticed a mistake I'd left in the code. Fixed. Update 1.1.3 BUGFIX: shipRenameMigrator now prints the correct amount of ships into Console when entering a new Sector.

This is a completely different discussion, I know, but has anyone been bugged, ever, by the fact that Trade Posts only give you a randomly generated subset of goods it can buy and sell? Wouldn't it be a lot cooler if we could choose which goods it sold and bought, and at price ratios? I mean, say you have a production chain for wheat and cattle going in a Sector. It would be nice if you could set up a Trade Post that bought and sold related goods to tie into this. Now it's just rolling the dice to see what you get, which has its charm, but also doesn't make much sense. After all, you built the Trade Post. You are the owner. And it's a trade post. It doesn't have a specific production chain or factory layout to have to convert should you want to change goods production, no. It has a Cargo Bay, and it has merchants on board. They should be able to theoretically switch their merchandise on a day-by-day business, were it not that economy doesn't work like that, but still. You get the point.

Well it's nice to set up trade routes and the likes because NPC traders are attracted to use systems linked with Gates for their routes. It would also be plain convenient for fleet travel, for travel if you jump in and don't want to wait 180 s until your Hyperspace Engines are back up (and yes I know you could install 4 -25% Hyperspace Cooldown SMUs on your ship but do you want to outfit your entire fleet with something like that??) and also just... for the cool factor. As soon as I saw hyperspace gateways, I thought to myself how cool it would be when I finally got the ability to build those. But you can't, and that made me sad. I'll look into how the Entity Debugger spawns them in and see if I'm able to hack them into the game somehow.

I like the idea of being able to find players by using Scanners. Currently you can already cheese the system by using the /whereis Player command, but that is very immersion-breaking and also quite cheaty. Maybe there could be an Intel Satellite that gathers data from all linked Spy Satellites in its network, which supplies anyone who requests data from it a feed of currently known locations of player (and other?) vessels, at a price. This also could turn into a cool game of hide-and-seek where the hiders who don't want to be found take out a Spy Satellite, or spoof one of their signals by hacking them, or something like that. The Intel network would of course need some way of counterplay to this, and replenish lost or broken satellites or build new ones over time. Players could also build networks like this, or sell their own ships' scanners to feed into this network for some compensation in return. I've seen cloaking technology on the roadmap. I wonder if this would be the FTL-style active camo, with a cooldown, or passive cloaking that would allow you to chill in an asteroid field while offline and go undetected by casual griefers.

Heh. Cool. Would players be punished by helping the Xsotan? I assume all other people in the Galaxy wouldn't take too kindly towards the one who endangered their lives more by breaking down the Legendary Barrier of Protection. And you know what they say: word travels fast in... interstellar... galactic civilisations... uh What do you gain for taking down the Barrier? I can't imagine there are many players out there who would ethically want to take down their own galactic shield just because... it makes the game more intense? OK, maybe there would be, but just "it makes Xsotan stronger" can't be the be-all-and-end-all of it, right? When you asked "what's in the Outer Rim?", my mind did immediately jump to "maybe visitors from Outside", coincidentally. Another cool idea is what Leia in the latest Star Wars movie references, that being allies scattered in the Outer Rim - civilisations like the ones from Operation Exodus who have fled the stage of galactic warfare, but are recuperating and slowly rebuilding forces until the day... that one day that brave Rebel Scum hails them and comes to get them to fight the Empire the Xsotan! Perhaps there could be a lot more interesting stuff going on in the Outer Rim. It's a very underpopulated place, after all. Might be an excellent hiding spot for someone who wants to conduct business that is... less than perfectly legal. Perhaps this shady business practise has hidden Gates from all kinds of places in the Galaxy back to its Sector, so it can do trade and other business with these folks more easily.