A Ship Generator

[Sundowner]

Any other issues yet?

No rush Zortiander, believe me, i know about the work thing getting excessive.

Bank of England just changed it's base rate. I get the joy of sorting out letters for over 50,000 people.

Joy

I'm still playing with beta5, so far, those are the only thing's i've noticed.

Thanks for all the work you're putting into this.

Sundowner

[keronn]

Did I just miss it, or is there some (reasonably) simple way of adding your own stuff, like ship components and systems? Can such a system be included in a later version, perhaps?

Please?


Pretty please?

[Zortiander]

Yeah, I can do that, no problem. Will be implemented in Beta 6. You will have a textfile which will have to be formatted the following way:

Name SU_Cost Power_Cost Helpfile_Name

Is that ok for you or would you want to include any other information?

The Textfile will then be simply transformed into a list of which you can select the items you want to install. Any suggestions?

[keronn]

It sounds most spiffy.

Just to make sure I got the principle right, you'll have one textfile for warpnacelles and one for phasers and one for... And so on...

Or, all systems in one file, organised into the various lists they have to be in... After all, there has to be some way of indicating whether your homemade system is a new computer or a new warpdrive.

[Zortiander]

Well, in a way, yes. Here it comes:

you will have a letter at the beginning of each line, stating where you want to put it, e.g.:

m for missile weapons
b for beam weapons
c for cloaks
l for long range sensors
n for navigational sensors
s for lateral sensors
d for deflector shields
t for tactical systems
f for SIFs
o for other systems

For all other systems (that do not yet have a list), you will have to select in "Auxiliary Systems" what you want, but the type will be specified, for the other systems (with a list), the items will be added at the bottom of the list, in the order they are stored in the textfile.

In case you already want to write one, please observe the following rules:

- All items have to be seperated by spaces, except for the first letter, indicating where it should go
- If oyu want a space, insert a % instead
- you can enter decimal values in english format (a . to separate the decimal part)
- you have to enter a value for each part (0 if you don't want to specify anything)
- you can put an E5 or something like that behind numbers
- the sign $ stands for ship size as a numerical value, and has to be placed before the value to be multiplied with

Here is a sample line for the item "Custom Phaser", consuming ShipSize*3 SU and 10 Power, belonging in the beam weapons list and having as helpfile "cp.txt" here is the line:

bCustom%Phaser $3 10 cp.txt

Does this sound right? Its just a first approximation how it could be done and the implementation could take a bit. At least the automatic moving into correct lists, as most of them are modified etc. during runtime.

However, as the saving saves the lists as texts, you will be able to see your ship in all editors, regardless if the others have the same custom file as you or nor.

[keronn]

It looks very good... It shold be simple to use

The only thing I don't get is the "E5" thing.

[Zortiander]

E stands for exponent. e.g. you want to multiply a number by 100 you can put a E2 at the end. Basically E {number} means you will multiply the number by 10 to the power of {number}.

I was also thinking of putting another column in there: effect, so it would look like that:

{letter for category}Name{blank}SU Cost{blank}Power Cost{blank}effect{blank}helpfile name

The effect would be damage for phasers, protectionf or shields etc.

BTW, I fixed the phasers not being taken into account correctly and I will see to it that I get some of the above mentioned things till monday.

[Zortiander]

OK, some more updates, 'cause I was pretty much silent during the last time.

I am currently working very hard to finish a Thesis till the end of June and its [insert swearing here] not working at all the way I want it, which is very disturbing.

So, I am really sorry, but further updates will have to wait until somewhere in July when my oral exam over the Thesis has passed, too.

Sorry again to keep you wayting so long, but there really is no way I could sit down and code now.

Cheers
Zortiander

[calguard66]

It's cool man... we'll just dock your pay.

[Zortiander]

-> I'm on it again. Hope to finish Beta 6 till the end of the week *grin*. Sorry it took me so long. And yeah, I promised end of June now its gonna be end of July, but heck, university has reminded me rather painfully of its existence

Edit:
I have run into a serious problem related to my style of calculating SU and power costs with respect to ship size. Resolving this will need a bit more work from my part, so I have to delay the release of Beta 6 until Wednesday.

A part from that, I fixed some bugs and the custom object system is working fine all right.

Any other requests for Beta 6 or 7?

[Zortiander]

BETA 6
Ladies and Gentleman, its out. Not much new stuff, but some fixes and, most importantly, the custom stuff creator.

Files
As always the program comes in different flavours, all packed into self-extracting RAR-Archives with recovery record.
Upgrade: will conserve all your options (basically only changes the stsc.exe and adds the "docs" directory)
Full version: carefull, overwrites all your options
Full w/ sources: includes my Delphi programming sources

Fixes
- Problems with floating point SU and Power costs
- Flickering of lists on slow PCs when changing rapidly options

Known issues
- SIF is still being deleted after ship size change. Got the problem nailed down, though, will fix it asap

Custom items
I won't say much here. When you unzip the files, you will find a "doc" directory with a winword file explaining how it works. If you wish another format for the file, please contact me.

Upcomming
My vacation. I can deploy hot-fixes until Sunday midday if need arises, please post here or e-mail me (you got my e-mail under "info"). After that, I'll be off for about 2 month.

Thanks
To all of you for waiting so long and not killing me in the process.

[Sundowner]

Thanks Zortiander. I've been waiting for this I'll load it later & have a play. Cheers

Sundowner

[Zortiander]

Beta 6 / Beta 6.1
List of known errors

All issues stated here will be fixed / have been fixed in Beta 6.1,s cheduled for Sunday. If you find any other bugs / errors please post them here, or better yet e-mail them to me and I'll get upon it asap.
The current status of the problem solving is written behind the line with an appropriate colour code.

SU Calculation
- The cloaking device was not calculated correctly (missing "+" in SU cost calculation) FIXED
- The sensor arrays were not taking into account the options FIXED
- The SIF cost did not get updated on size change. FIXED

Feature Changes
- The SIF works perfectly now and was changed it design DONE
- Simple printing into a text file Partially completed (Hull, Personnel, Energy, Propulsion, Sensors)
- Some code cleaning DONE
- New Dialog for printing DONE
- Some changes to the labels DONE
- Redid the layout of the hull page a bit DONE
- Internal support for many new help itemsDONE

Incompatibilties
- SIFs from Beta 6 are incompatible with SIFs from Beta 6.1. This should however be the last incompatibility that I will encounter. NOT CHANGEABLE

[Zortiander]

BETA 6.1

Just a new exe-file, the changes are listed in the post above:

Beta 6.1 updated exe

Just replace the existing stsc.exe with this one.

Please be sure to delete all SIFs on your ships with this new version. They are incompatible

Notes on Beta 6.1
The simple printing into a text file hasn't got finished, its still experimental. It doesn't save the file, but you can copy paste it into notepad or a similiar editor and print it from there. Its just a quick and dirty solution to get your ship on paper.

I am away on vacation now for a month or two, so don't expect Beta 6.2 until then, sorry folks if it takes so much time.

What to expect in beta 6.2
- finishing the text file printing
- security systems will be implemented
- some additional categories for custom items
- a utility to create custom items (so you don't have to write the lines by yourself)

What is planned in the future
- finishing one day the HTML printing (grrrrr)
- an automatic update program (working on this one already)
- revamp the help file format (html maybe?)
- finish writing the help files (after revamp though)
- race dependant SU allocation (klingons pay differently for a bridge etc.)
- include race dependant SU for custom items, too

Time planning
I might have some more time during my next term, so chances are good programming will advance a bit faster. Priority number 1 are bigfixes of course, number 2 is doing the race dependant SU, number 3 is playing with things like an auto-updater etc. and printing comes last. You may ask why? Honestly, I don't like to code good-looking HTML so I postpone that as strong as I can.

[Sundowner]

Just a last longing look at one of my favourite threads.

Thank Zortiander, hope to hear from you about this,

Sundowner