About the custom planets...

Published on December 18, 2007 By Zyxpsilon In Modding

I'm presently trying to complete the X-Worlds' set of planets for every some 40+ races and i do have a few more comments/questions to share before i step further more into the entire design shema(s).

1) Is there any way to integrate any of the five "extremes" (Barren, Toxic, etc) INTO a race's system?

2) Although i found it somehow odd, it boggles me to be restricted with the Rings "formatting" and appearances. The 32x32 files seem to take the first row of pixels only. Any chances this limit could be altered? There's huge potential for variety if the entire grid can spread as is in orbits; example - true small asteroids, colored "dots", waves, etc.

3) The Homestar definition (names and code-reference) gets flawed at first since the customrace.xml line doesn't get carried out from (or even, within) the customplanets tag. Slightly annoying, but this needs to be modified, i guess.

4) Observation; If a custom system has the maximum of five pre-sets it COULD happen that the last is discarded when certain conditions are met - Smaller maps, being one. Would it be possible to enforce Majors' planets creation priority against Minors or remaining "empties"?

5) The Raw format for terrain completely eludes me. I was able to use a workaround solution by copy/paste processing mines onto a faketemp file, but the sizing routine of my drawing-prog always ADDS header bytes to the valid (73728kb) 384x192 greyscale/8b... thus screwing up the readouts. What would be your recommended software (and other important settings) to properly create such files from scratch?

6) Is it absolutely essential to keep the previous defaults INTO the new customplanets.xml and list our stuff via append only? I understand that mix&match races could require the pre-defined sets, but would the huge numbers of specific planets added by my mod break a certain undefined memory limit? As a result, making the available planets that remains (in the twilight of procedures) useless!

7) 24b/png textures ONLY!! Why? I can show you some beautiful graphics for the XW-Aliens planets which would certainly be good enough at lower resolutions... and take a huge chunk of zipped bytes right off the ever-growing package size & making room for other things. Not that important, but if it could be possible, i'd find some reliable use for the new/alternate format.

I guess, i'll stop this list for now.
Please, i need some answers before i proceed with the remaining work on X-Worlds.

- Zyxpsilon.

Comments (Page 2)

kryo

on Jan 04, 2008

The ring values are a bit of a mystery even to me, and last I was aware the game largely seemed to ignored them anyway, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep over that.

Zyxpsilon

on Jan 05, 2008

Gosh, you're absolutely right. I'll just create whatever looks best, apply all to a "formal/standard-like" map size (probably medium or large) while calibrating the rings to be what i feel should be okay and be done with it.
Rather than bothering too much with precision or overwhelming perfection. Must be my left-brain edgy mood swings acting up again.

Still, it has got soooo strange yesterday afternoon that it really pushed me all hyped-up on crywolf behavioral tendencies.

What was fun though is the whole analysis process, testing every single instances of some wider rings grid against a number of smaller to bigger planets.
Quite the ride, in fact.
Thanks again.

Now, back to **real** work and designing steps.

- Zyxpsilon.

LogicSequence

on Jan 05, 2008

Yea those darn ring values don't work. Haven't ever worked AFAIK. They're just random, sometimes you'll get rings inside a planet, or half so.

DSep

on Jan 05, 2008

with galciv2 ide you could put rings on custom maps

LogicSequence

on Jan 05, 2008

You can do that any time, you just can't define the rings' outer and inner radii, as the variables are ignored.

dystopic

on Jan 05, 2008

1) DA supports a tag for picking the special environment types in CustomPlanets.xml: . Just add that tag to the planet definition, and give it a value from the following list:

HabitableByAll
HeavyGravity
Aquatic
Toxic
Barren
Radioactive

That will make the planet the type you specified. But I believe that homeworlds themselves will ignore any planettype tags (you can set it on other planets in the home system, though).

Kryo,

the last time i tested this, the behavior was a little... odd. if i tagged a planet with one of the extreme types, it'd work, but for some reason it'd cause other planets to go missing. after testing, i found that if i made a planet extreme, any planets listed after that one (in the same system) wouldn't show up. (so if it was the third planet, the 4th and 5th wouldn't appear). if it was listed as the 5th planet, it'd work just find--but this eliminates the possibility of having two extreme planets in the same custom system.

don't know if that was ever discovered, or if it still works that way.

LordZarth

on Jan 05, 2008

Maybe it was because you (if) didn't add the new tags to the others, saying 'HabitableByAll'? Random guess.

dystopic

on Jan 05, 2008

that could be it, i s'pose.

Zyxpsilon

on Jan 06, 2008

Maybe it was because you (if) didn't add the new tags to the others, saying 'HabitableByAll'? Random guess.

Gee, gotta try this too, since i also couldn't place a second "extreme" in my custom system(s) while guessing it might have been caused by a code-built normal function. Thanks for the info!

Tactical wise, it is certainly a tricky situation where some indirect (mostly for Toxics or HeavyGrav, since Super-Adapters get two of the other types by default) racing towards researching the proper colonization ability can prove to be quite "fun"... specially when the only remaining 17+PQ on a map IS actually right beside your Homeworlds and becomes a wealthy target for neighbors! I found out that most AI do have the habit of trying to pick available planets inside my systems asap, anyway. Might as well make it harder to many/all/few or simply hand-over the ability (at level 2 or 1, btw) right through some xml editing to the custom race in question.

Lots of possibilities, in fact.

- Zyxpsilon.

SIR NASTY OF TANG

on Jan 06, 2008

Maybe it was because you (if) didn't add the new tags to the others, saying 'HabitableByAll'? Random guess.

so you`ll have to tag each of the 5 planets on Habitability !!

then they should show ??

Nasty

LogicSequence

on Jan 06, 2008

Won't make a difference

SIR NASTY OF TANG

on Jan 06, 2008

well i was going to post a pic !! can`t get IMAGESHACK to come up

but i got Toxic and Mars Barren mercury but the other 2 planets come up wrong !!

testing in DA BTW

get the pic

it`s like the game stop reading the file after Mercury !!!

SIR NASTY OF TANG

on Jan 06, 2008

Won't make a difference

Just does not work does it !!!

if you use PlanetType on the first four planets it does not read all planet info !!!

if you use it on the last planet it read the info

it seem to stop reading info after it hits Planet type

maybe you found a BUG ???

Zyxpsilon

on Jan 06, 2008

Hold it, i think i figured it out - almost.

The whole idea behind "extremes" is that a random value is applied to any given map AT creation time. Once the maximum quantity is recorded by the function (probably as fixed integers, btw), the code starts distributing the pool on random targets, somehow. When it encounters a custom system, it possibly skips the current procedure calls to concentrate on "empties" until there's simply nothing left to allocate. As a result, if your race happens to be the last to be accounted for, and the extremes total has already been reached, the feature "stops" the process since the max-ratio slot is filled.

Maybe, this explanation is wrong though. So, any SD coders would care to chime in on this issue to illuminate us all on these strange events and/or principles?

- Zyxpsilon.

Zyxpsilon

on Jan 07, 2008

Hey, guess what... ONE more thing.

Is there a way to "control" the clouds overlay?

An Option to delete their use directly from the XML custom systems?
Must they absolutely be a 256x128x32b "grey-scale/alphablended" or would a different type (even with colors!) be considered valid by the code?

I realized some of my planets are (somehow) pretty nice as is and i wouldn't want to mess around too much with the perceived graphics with unwanted atmospheric interference!!

Although, right now, i can't SEE any of them - i will eventually, when i get to buy a DX9 compatible VidCard, maybe in March.

Really, i'm serious - not everything in the Universe has similar features to Earth.

- Zyxpsilon.

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