Shrooblord

This is a cool idea. I like it when the game kicks my ass (recently was caught with my pants down when transferring my fighters to another craft and having lowered shield, bam, full Xsotan fleet on my two ships in Build Mode; boom boom, wrecked haha). However, have you tested how this affects AI ships? Do they become unbalanced / unstable because the ship-generating algorithm isn't expecting these nerfs? I'd like some insight on your part into how you think this will affect enemy balancing, too, because if the player gets nerfed, but so does the enemy, then we're basically still playing the same game with different numbers: since players know they can whack in more generators, they can work around this, but I'm guessing the AI doesn't know this. But maybe I'm not giving the ship generator enough credit. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to know. ^^

That doesn't seem to do anything either. I was outside of my captained craft with my mining drone, selected it, and used "/haulgoods start" but nothing happened. Am I doing it right? EDIT: Nevermind, it works now! After trying to activate this again, I decided to manually trade with a station, but as I approached the docking port, I was pulled towards it with light beams while I was still pilotting (I gotta say, being beamed up by a tractor beam while immobilised is freaking scary), automatically attained 50 displays and was immediately expelled from the docking port. When I hopped into my mining drone, the ship lay still doing nothing, but then I gave it the UI order to Haul Goods, and off it went! Very cool. I'm now watching my little ship zoom around the Sector making trades. Very cool. Not sure what I did to "fix" the issue though; maybe you just need to try a couple of times before it works? EDIT II: This is fantastic. One of my favourite new things now is editing a ship in Building Mode while it's in the process of hauling goods. It's a nice change of background, and also I'm making money while doing something else: excellent! :D EDIT III: I figured out how this works: [*]have a Captained Ship with a Cargo Hold, and either be in a Sector with profitable trade routes, or have cargo you can sell; [*]use the command /haulgoods start. From this moment on, that ship is considered a "hauler"; [*]now you can enter and leave the ship as you will, piloting itself or letting it do its hauling duty. When you are not piloting it, you can give the Haul Goods command through the UI Orders interface. This doesn't work as the ship isn't considered a "hauler" before you use /haulgoods start (as evidenced by the error message response /haulgoods status gives you if you have not called /haulgoods start on that ship yet).

I am myself someone who is mostly in your shoes also; I have just a couple of days ago entered what I think of as mid-game: I now regularly have just about enough money to make meaningful trades - in the past I had to ignore trade stations and try to make and raise money some other way because trading just wasn't very time-efficient for me - or perhaps just not my playstyle: whatever. I have now settled in a part of the galaxy that is I guess around two-thirds of the way towards the core, where there's Xanion floating around regularly in asteroid fields, but have never encountered Ogonite or Avorion yet. I feel this place strikes a good mid-game balance between power, financial wealth and resource availability, without having the drawback of super crazy powerful foes. Yes, things are tougher to beat here, as they have shields and plasma weapons and nasty things like that, but my resources are also amplified, so I can reliably defend myself. I've just set up a little Sector with four Asteroid Mines, and they're doing very fine as you put it. But I have noticed in my travels that, indeed, factories and production chains seem a little... dormant? They'll often be pretty much stocked up, yet out of produce. Whether this is because there's constantly trader ships taking away the goods before I can get to them, I don't know, but I hope it's not a bug in the economy system as you put it: I'm just setting up the foundations for my own little empire now, and a kink in the roadworks mid-way up the economic tech tree would be a disaster for my progress towards that. Your point about the economy needing a little touch-up I agree with. Right now it feels a little stagnant, for however many factories and production lines and traders are going about, not much seems to change. Sure, there's a resource shortage sometimes, and constantly Bulletin Boards lighting up with this and that fetch-or-deliver quest, but other than that nothing much happens. There's no areas of mass-production where many many traders flock towards to go and get goods, and pirates prey on to raid convoys; there's no "droughts" where productions grind to a halt and factions look to other means of forwarding themselves in desperation; the rising and falling percentages of trading goods against some baseline seem a little arbitrary, and don't affect each other. ---- But ultimately, yes, you'd expect factories to constantly pump out goods all over the place; after all, that's what factories do. But balancing, as you put it, is in everyone's best interest. I'll be interested to see where this game goes in the near future, especially with regards to economy balancing/reworking.

Right? The Xsotan supposedly caused the galaxy to fracture into rifts of spacetime madness and killed off hundreds of ancient civilisations, fracturing what's left into thousands of independent factions, and now they're... scouting around? They just hop in with three to ten ships and... pew pew a little. Where are their devastating war fleets? Where are their strange wormhole warping shenanigans? Why aren't they spilling forth from the cracks in spacetime and/or creating more of them if their actions are what caused the galaxy to rip apart? Where are the crusades of fighters and warships against the Xsotan, seeking revenge against the alien threat that decimated the galaxy? Or maybe all of that was a mistake on their part and now they're looking to make amends with everyone, but as soon as someone else spots them, they open fire, so the Xsotan are forced to defend themselves... tragic. But none of that is apparent or even hinted at while you actually play, which is a little sad given the sheer potential of super-cool plots and game mechanics you could think of with this source material. You've got a great setup going, with an interesting villain and a strange playing field, but where do you go with it? I'd like to see more... stuff happening with regards to the Xsotan. I agree with all of this wholeheartedly. But the very final sentence is somewhat of a personal preference, I think. I do agree that the player is OP as fek, but there's some satisfaction of the power fantasy that is tailored towards by being so powerful you can take on a Pirate fleet. I like building a massive, scary capital ship that others can basically do nothing against, but I agree that there should be some repercussions. People fear you, so they build armadas together and try to take you down with all of their strength combined. Or maybe they like having you around as a protector, and give you some tax to help defend them against the Xsotan scourge. Meanwhile, your efforts do not go unnoticed by Xsotan, and they start to raid your bases with more and more powerful fleets, trying to hit you where it hurts. Additionally, a rivalling faction with a strong economy challenges your capital ship with one of their own, a massive monstrosity of equal scariness that should make sure an epic space battle ensues.

I would love to see something like how FTL battles work: target shield, target turrets, take out their engines, etc. etc. I love tactically weakening enemy craft, but right now it's near impossible to actually destroy firing turrets even if you focus a full 18k omicron at a single turret for over a minute. The only way to take it out is by destroying the block it's attached to, but I'd honestly enjoy it if a turret could get shot off. It's cool to do as the player, and it adds some tension and drama if it happens to the player. Boarding mechanics would be cool, but I agree the ship combat should probably be improved first. The point Cyka made about resource economy not supporting your loss of resources in a big battle is very valid, and one I've dealt with in different ways myself while playing and inevitably crashing into some asteroids (watch the road when you're driving, kids). I like the idea about shields facing a certain direction, but I'm not entirely sure if that would add to the gameplay value of combat, or subtract from it. It may become a little too micro-ey for how Avorion plays right now if you suddenly have to keep an eye on all corners of your screen; but maybe that's exactly what you're advocating for. I don't know: but personally I wouldn't enjoy it too much, I don't think. I find the game very nice to play as a meditative / empire building experience, and random battles up the tension. But as it's been said here, it becomes a little obvious that the battles follow you around wherever you go, and don't necessarily occur mostly anywhere else in the galaxy. It's a stable steady-state board that never changes until you, the player, is around to observe it. Then suddenly the curtains rise and a set of actors play out something dramatic for you to enjoy, retreating behind the facade when you leave. While inherently there's nothing wrong with that, it does make the game feel more dynamic, and the galaxy feel more alive, if there was something going on inside it that the player doesn't necessarily immediately witness; suddenly your neighbours are becoming hostile, because they're jealous of your resources, or because of rising tensions at their other borders with another set of empires looking out to kill them, and you're simply in their way, or maybe they don't like so much that you're also trading with their mortal enemy; one empire gets assimilated by another empire and suddenly you're dealing with another faction than you were previously; the Xsotan, mysterious as they are, conquer a couple of systems and do... something strange and terrifying... with what they've taken over; civilians are on a tour or trip or pilgrimage of some kind and are escorted by a band of hired Corvette defenders from another faction; destinations of said journeys are galactic phenomena you can randomly encounter in the universe, such as holy sites or strange abandoned temples, old planet homeworlds that are being returned to after the nuclear winter that ravaged them and forced their faction to leave has died away, a wormhole or black hole tears apart a faction's homeworld and now they're on their way back with some powerful and alien new technology to fix the rifts in spacetime; Pirates wipe out an entire faction and gain a foothold in a larger part of the galaxy's economy, so trading is affected. These are just some (silly) ideas, of course. EDIT: Some more interesting combat mechanics could include tractor beams that can immobilise you like docking stations do with freighters (or if you're familiar with the Haul Goods mod, with you); ships devouring other ships à la opening up a massive cargo hold and capturing ships inside it, then dissembling it for parts (ew, devoured alive); incapacitating warp drives like some ships already do, so escape is not an option; incorporating AI escaping using their warp drives when things look dire; reinforcements... I could go on forever with ideas...

Quick question: with the current version of Avorion having "keep-alive" enabled on Sectors while the player is not inside them, is this mod still required to have Out-Of-Sector production? Is production exempt from the "keep-alive" functionality, or is OOSP now functionality that is incorporated into the base game itself?

I'm not sure about the production blocks, but the Build Mode tooltip does state that they should increase the speed of production for factories, so yeah, give it a try! I didn't know that Asteroid Mines themselves don't count as "ships" to "stay-alive" a Sector. Good to know, thanks Blaine. I did find that my Asteroid Mines get attacked infrequently by Xsotan and Pirates even while I'm not there, so I'm not sure how safe it is to just leave them after killing all the hostiles while you were inside the Sector. The attacks aren't nearly as often as when a player is active inside the Sector, but still, good to keep in mind. I've also found that attacks on ships in a Sector while you're not there too are far heavier than when you're around. It's almost as if the shields are dysfunctional while you're not there to look at them; I've come back to well-armoured and heavily shielded ships in tatters after seeing one "your ship X is under attack!" message, while when I'm in the Sector they can survive an armada of Pirates and onslaught of Xsotan without even getting as much as scratched. Might be a bug, but something to keep in mind for now, too. For your other questions, Rookar, to get Stations to sell goods, I've found that enabling the "actively request traders to come pick up goods" is a good setting to have ticked ON in the Trade Goods UI window, and that undercutting the price ranges of nearby sellers works really well. I've set my Silicium, Zinc, Gold and Silver mines to -26%, for instance, and I still make 100k+ on trades with those goods. There's about 5 trader vessels in my Sector at all times with those percentages, so that makes me a happy mine running overlord capitalist scumbag. ^^

Thanks for checking. I thought as much, but the confirmation definitely helps narrow down the search. So we know we must be able to change the game information for particular galaxies by editing the AppData folder, since that's the only place where this information gets saved. Good. Okay so, I've tried hacking into it using Cheat Engine while the game was running, and I've tried rummaging around the "non-v" file with a hex editor. The hex editor meddling was ineffective because I couldn't find a single pointer that made any sense. All the byte data is garbled nonsense, so I'm guessing it's compressed or encrypted in some way that makes it harder to read with a hex editor. I'm not nearly experienced enough in hacking game files to know what to do with those kinds of files, so my search on that front ended there, for now. Cheat Engine was more interesting. When you search for a string of a Sector name - one of my neighbours' Sectors is called "Unforgiving Bulwark V", so let's roll with that -, you end up with a small amount of results, around 8 or less, more depending on whether you're currently in the Sector or in a Sector whose Gate leads towards it, less if you're in an unconnected part of the galaxy. What's interesting is that you find the memory addresses that point to these locations when you inspect the client as well as the server process. This makes sense, I guess, but it's something to keep in mind: we may need to direct our attention to the server process as that's generally in gaming terms what governs what goes; it's the boss, and clients are the interface between the boss of the game and the player. I digress. So editing Unforgiving Bulwark V into something else, like "Unforgiving Bulwark X" or "My Friends" had an interesting set of results: [*]While in the Sector, the displayed name doesn't always change when you change the value, but sometimes it does. Yay progress! [*]While the Galaxy Map is open, the name doesn't change. If you reopen the map, the change has occurred. [*]Whatever you do, the name displayed on a Gate leading towards the Sector doesn't ever change. Perhaps this is information that is read from the "non-v" file when you load the Galaxy, and is never accessed again. Then again, editing the value in memory would presumably change this value too, but my test results are inconclusive to this being the case. [*]When you jump from Sector to Sector, those eight values get narrowed down to two or three, as the other addresses all change. [*]When you change the value of these remaining three addresses, the Sector name gets updated. However, jumping to and from the Sector may change it back. More on that later. [*]Sometimes when you change the value of the memory address pertaining to the Sector name, then jump to that Sector, the game crashes. I'm guessing there's a mismatch in what the game expects and finds, or something being looked up in an array with an index that doesn't exist. Or anything else at all is going wrong. Who knows. :P [*]Every time you scan for the value of the address using Cheat Engine, the value is listed as the value you scanned for, regardless of edits made; this is very weird to me, but maybe I'm just not getting something when it comes to how memory searching works. [*]If you change the name into something that has more characters than the original, the change is put forward. [*]If you use less characters than the original, the change is put forward, but the remaining characters "beyond" the amount of characters you provided are also put forward, so "Unforgiving Bulwark V" becomes "My Friendsg Bulwark V" even though I entered "My Friends". No amount of adding null byte characters "0x00" to the actual memory addresses seems to change this; in fact, as soon as you try to introduce those null bytes to shorten the string length, it gets changed back. [*]Sectors currently controlled by a faction, which therefore already have a name, can have their name changed. Uncontrolled Sectors with coordinates for names, or Sectors controlled by you, the player, never accept the changes you make. The name is changed while in-game, but when you save and reload, the name is changed back to the original. This is unfortunate, because it's exactly this which I want to achieve. :P [*]Your best bet for trying to get the name to "stick" when you reload the game is to change all the memory addresses, quit the game so it saves, and restart Avorion. However, some scenarios still change the name back to the original, while others do not. I'm not sure yet what exactly causes this to happen, but my guess is that memory adresses changed while the game is running doesn't actually reflect back into the stored "non-v" file in the AppData folder; in fact, the name I'm assuming is stored inside there somewhere may very well be write-once-and-only-ever-read, if you know what I mean, so short of editing the file directly somehow (getting around the compression/encryption therefore) may very well mean that we can't edit the Sector name at all after it's been generated. Sadface. While not completely conclusive, I feel like I've learned a lot already about how this system works. Now if only I could crack open that compressed/encrypted "non-v" file, I think I'd get a lot more insight into the matter... I'm going to pause for now and actually play the game again for a bit. ;)

Okay so the Sector data in the AppData folder for my Sector looks like this: which is pretty cool. Notice how the player's own faction is factionIndex 1, which is good to know. I was fearing it would be a "random" number like the 2000150 of the faction who has some traders over in my Sector. Also good to see that the Sector is actually considered controlled by me, as indicated by the factionIndex="1" at the top in the <view> tag. What intrigues me are the entries <wormholes/> and <gates/>. Sure enough, for Sectors that have a wormhole or gate, this information is filled out: So I decided to add some entries for my own Sector: <gates> <coordinates x="-79" y="-163"/> <coordinates x="-77" y="-161"/> </gates> I included my own coordinates in those Sectors' files. I decided to modify the factionIndex for one of these Sectors, too. They were neutral Sectors before (factionIndex=""), so I put my "1" in there. I restarted the game, and here's what happened. Nothing! The game could not be fooled. It reverted the XML files back to their state before my edits, and even changed them a little based on the fact that there were now Xsotan inside my Sector. So if these files don't actually store data in a way that is meaningful, or at least without changing some other data somewhere else, what are they for...?? ---- That aside, I never found the name for the Sector stored anywhere. For each Sector, there's an x_y and an x_yv file, i.e. -77_-162 and -77_-162v for my Sector in question (no file extensions). The "v" files are readable XML, as displayed throughout this post. However, the "not-v" files seem to be encrypted or binary data. When opened up, they're all gobbledey-gook. Too bad. My search continues!

You're a champion! Thanks so much for this~! Ah, that's too bad. I'd find a community full of modders providing bugfixes very helpful if I were creating the game!

Hey, I installed this mod, but whenever I click on "Haul Goods", the ship just sits there and does nothing. I made sure to be in a system where there's trade happening, and checked with the Trade Module to see if there was anything to be traded profitably (there was). Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?

Hm, too bad. That sounds very manual. If that's the only way, I'm guessing it's gonna be hard / unfeasible to try and include this functionality by modding it in. I'll keep looking around the code though, just in case. Thank you for the suggestion. I'll check it out!

Yes, pathfinding issues are likely to arise due to the highly variable nature of the 3D space Avorion has to work in. The inertial properties of the ships you mentioned are another hurdle I hadn't considered. But I'm not sure I know what you mean? I've not encountered big pathfinding issues myself; do you have an example? EDIT: Lol, the second I mention I've never seen something go wrong, I see my ship starting to spin about wildly on its axis after giving it an Escort Me order. Probably not a pathfinding thing, but still, typical. xD EDIT DEUX: After reading your post I've been paying more proper attention. I'd forgotten the fact that ships get "stuck" when another ship or an asteroid is inside of their "safe zone bounding box" about 0.2 km away from them. And that ships actively pilot themselves into those situations and then don't know how to get out. Yah, that kind of stuff needs some looking at. ---- More related to the OP, I had this same issue yesterday. I did some quick Googling and there were some Steam discussions that suggested it should "just work", with some people thinking the AI ship needs to be facing towards the jump direction, like the player does, and others saying that wasn't necessary at all..... so I tried jumping around some more, and it did "just work". My tips for trying to get the AI to follow you: [*]Tell the AI to Escort Me. Fly away for a bit and confirm they're following you. [*]Jump from the ship with the shortest range; this way, you ensure the other ship will have the range to reach the destination. [*]Wait a while in the arrival Sector. Sometimes it takes the AI ship a couple of seconds to get there. I've noticed that when missing my ship, I sometimes jump back to the Sector we just came from, only to find it gone there: by that time, it has arrived in the target Sector and now I'm the one playing catch-up. [*]Wait til all ships in your fleet have their Hyperdrives charged up. In the current build of the game, you can see Hyperdrive charge progress as a dark blue vertical bar on the right-hand side of a friendly ship's light green "selection square". If you can't see a bar, that means the ship's Hyperdrive is charged. [*]You can jump before all ships in the fleet have had their Hyperdrive charge up. However, then you'll have to wait a while in the target Sector before the others catch up. They do eventually come, in my experience. Keep in mind though that ships can only follow you one jump away: if you jump to an intermediary Sector, then to another target Sector, the fleet ships will only ever jump to the intermediary Sector. [*]If at any point you Transfer into your AI ship and back to your own ship again, you need to remember to give the Escort Me order again; making an AI ship player-controlled removes all its orders, and doesn't reinstate them once you jump out. That's a mistake I make sometimes when trying to fleet jump. Incidentally, Wormholes and Gates work the same way: you need to wait after you've arrived to give the AI ships time to physically move into the warp area of the Wormhole or Gate.

Ah, cool! You wouldn't happen to know how hard it would be to make that bugfix compatible with 0.15? Sounds like a good one to have. (Or maybe we should just wait until the bugfix gets integrated into the core code, if someone's already done some of the work for the devs to do so. :P )

Hiya, Just founded my first couple of asteroid mines and stations! Whoop whoop! However, the Sector name is "-72: -193" (guess where it is on the Galaxy Map). Is there a way to rename the Sector, like all AI-controlled Sectors have? Names like "Ephemeral Alpha", "Sanctuary of Hope" and "Final Graveyard" are super atmospheric and cool, and I'd like to have a cool name too, rather than being the odd one out who numbers his Sectors rather than naming them. :( Or is there maybe a mod out there somewhere that does this? Did a quick surface scan search myself, but didn't find anything.

This is what I feared. I tried index-searching all the scripts for keywords I hoped would match, and did some manual snooping, but nothing. :/ Interesting. I've had this happen too from time to time; now I understand why. Too bad if it's hard coded; I'd love to be able to tweak elements of the game like this.

It looks like the functionality added by this mod is now in the base game, correct? Either that, or another mod I have installed is also adding the previously missing stations (like Shipyard, Equipment Dock, etc.). While I have this mod installed, the only item in the list when clicking "Found Station" is the Crystal Farm, and clicking Transform does nothing. If I comment out the pcall in stationfounder.lua, effectively deactivating this mod, then all the Stations appear on the UI (and also the icons have changed). My only question is: could this be because of another mod I have installed, or has this functionality been added to the base game? Is this mod broken?

I ran into an issue while using this mod: I can't seem to sell my ship to a Scrapyard. I click the button "Sell", but nothing happens. Is this a bug caused by the mod?

Hey there, I've been plotting through the game files that are available to us for modding, but couldn't find what I was looking for: I'm trying to write a simple mod that would extend the time needed to be out-of-combat before the action music fades out and is replaced by background music again. I want to do this because too often I find myself skipping from one end of the battle into another, or just dart in and out of combat, and the music stops and starts, changing tracks twice. Also when my fighters are out rampaging through a sector, I'll have track switch-overs every 15 seconds or so. This gets a little tedious. I noticed that there's a certain time of not being in combat after which the music drops away. How is this time determined? I'd like to find out so I can try and overwrite the default behaviour. Thank you for your help, Shrooblord

Hm, that sounds like a good enough idea that it warrants me taking a snoop around the game code and seeing if I can't try to mod that in. As you put it, it doesn't sound too hard to do, but the results would be phenomenal. But who knows... there may be... unforeseen obstacles to try and cross to get this functionality working. :P

I agree. A hotfix is in order at least until proper functionality is in place. Otherwise, you're getting punished for using the actual mechanics of the game. Seems illogical.

This concerns me. I haven't been playing well enough yet to get to this stage, but I have been meaning to, over time. That the result would be that I suddenly curvestomp the entire game worries me a little bit. Already I can just "sit there" with my mothership and eat bullets all day because of my massive shield and hull capacities while my fighters pick off targets, but at least it takes a while to whittle down the enemy swarms. If players are able to craft deadly turrets, I feel it's at least a little fair if the enemy AI can, too, especially at later stages of the game (i.e. closer to the core). If not exactly as capable as player turrets (since enemies come in swarms and you, the player, may very well stand alone), at least they should approach some % of viability to the overpowered turrets a player can build, as you put it. ---- Thank you, OP, for bringing this fact to light: now I more properly understand why it's so damn hard to fulfill the "organize X goods of type Y within 30 minutes" missions. I must have tried fifteen of them and only ever succeeded one, just barely. I never seem to be able to find the resources they're looking for, even at the other end of the galaxy (wormhole travel). I guess that's sort of the point of these missions, but you'd expect to find something at least. And yeah, very very occasionally, you find a couple of the items they're looking for, but not nearly enough. And I'm guessing the 500K cap is why. As an anecdotal aside, my most recent attempt at this mission was a complete joke which felt like the game had a sense of sarcastic humour: just one minute after I failed the mission to collect 30 antigrav units, I ran into a pirate swarm which dropped, I kid you not, 59 antigrav units upon blowing up. Wtf. xD

Indeed: I've noticed that having repair turrets won't heal your own ship, which makes sense to a degree. However, I'd expect fighters to be able to heal other ships, i.e. the mothership, or at least other friendlies. I admit I'm not familiar with how the AI chooses its targets, but presumably there's a flag or a list of entities somewhere that distinguishes "enemy" from "neutral or friendly", right? Otherwise all your automatic turrets and fighters would also target non-hostile targets, which they don't. I wonder how hard it would be to make repair fighters choose from the "other list", i.e. pretend that the "friendlies" list is the "hostile" list when it comes to choosing targets. But maybe that would be bad practice to code it like that. I'm not sure.

I've been playing with Fighters lately and I gotta say I bloody love 'em. Their vanilla behaviour is already pretty good, but enhanced with mods like CarrierControl, they're a dream boat. I have a question about fighters equipped with a repair turret, though. As it stands now, in Attack stance they swarm around enemy craft as if they were equipped with "normal" damaging turrets, and actually shoot their repair beam at the enemy craft, healing them. In Defence stance they swarm around the mothership that spawned them, but don't use their repair beam to heal the mothership. This is strange behaviour. I would expect something like the following set of rules: [*]Fighters equipped with repair beams don't swarm around enemy craft. If anything, they try to avoid them. [*]In Defence stance, healing fighters hover around the mothership and try to repair her, repairing nearby friendlies as a secondary objective if the mothership is already at full health (or within a 95-100% margin for less "hot potato" targeting AI). [*]In Attack stance, healing fighters actively seek out and chase hurt friendlies, using their repair beam to heal them up. [*]In any case, repair craft never target enemy craft. Do you agree? What do you think of this behaviour? Any thoughts or additions?

Hi forum! I've been away from this game and from all efforts surrounding this game for a while now, including the community. I had some personal issues to work out, but I'm back now and would love to get right back into helping translate this lovely game. ^^ I see some progress has been made on the Dutch translations – good! I'd like to try and discuss some style considerations with y'all translators: 1. Formal Language Most of the English used in the game is quite informal, natural and almost friend-like. To that extent, I suggest we translate into Dutch to match this style of language. I know "you" is translated into "U" a lot when translating to Dutch, but "U" is formal and definitely not as friend-like as "jij / je"; I would suggest translating the uses of "you" to "jij / je" rather than "U". Any thoughts? 2. Use of Articles Please review the first post in this topic about the proper translation of the "the" article into Dutch; simply choosing "de" or "het" over the other may cause problems with certain words, and switching around grammar structures to try and avoid articles in the Dutch translation is, while a work-around, not always an available alternative, so we should consider how to handle these. 3. Translation of "Towers" I've had some trouble thinking of accurate translations for the word "tower" in English. You see, what works in English is that you can say "gun tower" and "repair tower" and thus summarise both by saying "tower" as a general denomination. Unfortunately, we do not have this luxury in Dutch. I've conceded to translating most instances of 'simply' "tower" as "toren", and have seen DeathTech in the translation project use "geschuttoren" for "gun tower", which I rather like. It would be nice to have an effective translation of "tower" that doesn't feel as 'hacky', though, while maintaining the ability of denoting both 'fighting' towers and 'utility' towers – you see, simply translating all instances of "tower" by "geschuttoren" will cause confusion because not all towers ARE fighting towers, but some are utility, like repairing or mining towers. So a more generic translation is required, hence "toren". Thoughts? 4. Consistency is Key I am constantly cross-referencing my own translations I've already made to keep translating certain words the same, when applicable. This is absolutely necessary, because otherwise confusion will arise when conflicting terminology is used. When working together on translations, this means we need to reach a concensus about how to translate certain phrases. So if you disagree with how a certain term is translated, please let's discuss so we can actually effectively change the translation board-wide rather than key-by-key. 5. Leenwoorden Words like "upgrade" and "tooltip", especially technical or 'computery' terms have been integrated into the Dutch language insofar that they might be considered valid 'translations' if left as-is. If not, this can cause some awkward word-shuffling when trying to find a proper Dutch equivalent of these words when not directly available, without choosing a word that 'sort of fits the bill' but is rather lacking in a proper, full and complete translation of the original word and its intended meaning. "Upgrade" especially suffers from this problem, where "opwaardering" as I've seen DeathTech suggest sounds very nice, but we might get away with leaving it as "upgrade", since everyone will know what we're talking about already. I'm a little torn about this issue myself, seeing as I do like properly translating as much as I can, but I don't like incorrect language nor improper or incomplete translations, when an English word that's been integrated into the Dutch language also just fits as-is and isn't too distracting. Please discuss. 6. Full Verbs Phrases like "Buy from Merchant" where "buy" is a full verb used as a short-hand for an action the player can perform can be literally translated as "Koop van Handelaar", since "buy" can be seen as both a full verb and a first-person conjugation of the full verb. However, phrases such as these are in practice most commonly translated as "Van Handelaar kopen", i.e. also used as full verbs in Dutch. This is mostly a stylistic thing I'm used to seeing in Dutch translations, and I suggest we stick to that paradigm simply because it sounds a little less clunky. Besides, that is the proper grammatical way to create shorthand sentences in Dutch, so in my opinion that is simply the better option. I'll add more points and hope to dicuss with all of you what you think, and make a nicely translated game! :)