[A17/B18] Orbital Hubs United - Dropships 1.2 (14.02.2018)

[Cpt.Ohu]

Add the ability to select the location you want to land you ship when touching down at non home locations

Unfortunately that's rather difficult to do. I'd recommend sending in one pawn for reconnaisance (by droppod or as caravan) if you want to be on the safe side.

So, how should fleets be controlled?

at first there is the matter of loading cargo to a fleet .. 

else I don't know yet .. what can they do allready ?

Right now fleets are only there for convenient launching of several ships from the same map. I don't even know if I'd enable shiploading for an entire fleet. I'd like to leave in more control in where which cargo goes.

Fleet parking would mean you can set a fixed fleet setup on your homebase, and be able to recall all ships to their exact position. I'm trying to work out how to do this properly even if Ship A is on another tile compared to Ship B.

[SpaceDorf]

First of, the changes for the current version of the ships are great.
The distance ring work great and are absolutely intuitive,
have you thought of coloring them ? The inner ring green, the outer one red ?

Less fuel and less range give me the feeling of having to work more for the use of the ship.
Which was something I wanted to write about anyway, because the construction cost for the ship still feels a bit cheap to me ( compared to the 40k ships that are a lot more expensive )

I have some ideas/wishes about fleet and ship control, but it's only half thought out .. I will write more later

[Canute]

Unfortunately that's rather difficult to do. I'd recommend sending in one pawn for reconnaisance (by droppod or as caravan) if you want to be on the safe side.

It is possible that you can add this feature into the dropship?
Before the dropship enter the map, it eject a passanger (maybe an invisible dummy) to the map as recon scout.
Or give the dropship a free 1 tile range droppod launcher.

Less fuel and less range give me the feeling of having to work more for the use of the ship.
Which was something I wanted to write about anyway, because the construction cost for the ship still feels a bit cheap to me ( compared to the 40k ships that are a lot more expensive )

I agree, the production cost could be alot higher.
And i wouldn't mind an AI core for the big one, as turret and navigation control unit.
But until you solve the problem with the landing spot at outpost, they need some more hitpoints too.

[SpaceDorf]

But until you solve the problem with the landing spot at outpost, they need some more hitpoints too.

Or Energy Shields. And at least six more gun slots for point defense.

But joke aside :


...

On Fleetmanagement

Synchronized starting and landing is of course the most important feature.
Assigning cargo to specific ships is more sensible than having a fleet loading option.
Although distributing the personell throughout the ships, or assigning pilots on fleet basis would be nice.

What else should a fleet be able to do ?

Fleet recall to special parking places sounds awesome, but also sounds like it needs a Management Menu to collect the ships, if they are spread out across the planet ( I like the epic description of that )

For setting parkingspaces the best method might be to create an invisible building identifiable by the ship that placed it. Similiar to a sleeping spot, since sleeping assignement only change when pawns sleep elsewhere, which is something the ship don't do
but the ship would need an ability to detect the map it is on.

Another thing that is always bound to fleets for me is Formation, a thing most 4x games have plenty of and rts games are severely lacking.
As implementation goes, Formations would present a possibility to set up the pattern in which the ships land, in contrast to how the ships are setup in the homebase. ( line, square, diamond, spear .. the usual )

The last one is more of a single ship management again, but could also be checked on at the fleet basis. I would love the option to set a "Standard Loadout" for a ship.
Most Quest Maps take a few ingame days to solve, so I always load one of my ship with food, some wood, backup fuel and whatever else a camp may need.

==========================================

On Landingsites

I tried sending trained boomrats as scouts via droppod but that did not work out so well,
because they are not pawns ..

The invisible pawn or built in pod-launcher sounds like a sensible method to scout the array
or drop a paratrooper from the landing ship on the map menu.

How does the droppod landing event create the map anyway, if it can decide to drop on the center or middle of the map. It must have a way to force reset the landing coordinates of the ship after map creation to something different.

[Davidus]

Having an issue right now with the dropships where the options to do anything when selected don't exist, rearranging mod order or restarting the game, or selecting previous saves does not resolve the issue either.

https://gyazo.com/ffbdfc81183f57497483e3794813dd68

Debug log
https://gist.github.com/ec85db2852eaf09f2ef7e63bc186dc62

[SpaceDorf]

Code Select Expand


System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at OHUShips.ShipTracker+<>c__DisplayClass20_0.<ShipsInFleet>b__0 (OHUShips.ShipBase x) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[OHUShips.ShipBase].FindAllStackBits (System.Predicate`1 match) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at System.Collections.Generic.List`1[OHUShips.ShipBase].FindAll (System.Predicate`1 match) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at OHUShips.ShipTracker.ShipsInFleet (Int32 ID) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at OHUShips.ShipBase+<GetGizmos>d__76.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at RimWorld.InspectGizmoGrid.DrawInspectGizmoGridFor (IEnumerable`1 selectedObjects) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

Reposting the interesting bit of the log

Are you sure you have the latest version of the Dropships ?
Or did you copy newer versions over an old one ?

I remember having seen this problem before, but can't remember the solution at the moment.

I just did remember .. having no world-object for the Dropship suggests a very old version, where the mod wasn't capable of creating a world-object when added into a running game.

I suggest removing all dropship related items from the mod .. deleting the mod completely and download the latest version for a reinstall.

[Davidus]

I didn't have any previous version of the game installed, currently running 1.35. deleted all the dropship files from my mod folder, and re-installed, but sadly didn't solve the issue

[SpaceDorf]

I didn't have any previous version of the game installed, currently running 1.35. deleted all the dropship files from my mod folder, and re-installed, but sadly didn't solve the issue

then I am out of Ideas at the moment, I can't see any mod conflicts I know of or anything.
Have you tried building the ships pointing to the right ? ( thats how I always build them, so maybe that matters .. )


@Cpt.Ohu : The Dropship uses LightWeaponSlots .. are there other slots planned or already included Medium or Heavy in addtion to the Bombing slot ?

[KLk]

when i attack a item stash with the ship it just launch it over the stash, then when i click visit the stash the ship just eat my guys

[SpaceDorf]

@cpt.ohu

I repacked the Firefly Ship so the textures and defs have seperate folders  to your original ships.

I would like to do this for the 40k ships as well, so they can be easily put into the Dropship Mainfolder as Additional Ships ..

I want to do the same for the Industrial Revolution Biplane and Airship but have not asked the Author yet.

when i attack a item stash with the ship it just launch it over the stash, then when i click visit the stash the ship just eat my guys

hmm .. I thought this was a 40k - Chaos only feature 

Can you describe this further ? The pawns just disappeared or what happened ?

[KLk]

@cpt.ohu

I repacked the Firefly Ship so the textures and defs have seperate folders  to your original ships.

I would like to do this for the 40k ships as well, so they can be easily put into the Dropship Mainfolder as Additional Ships ..

I want to do the same for the Industrial Revolution Biplane and Airship but have not asked the Author yet.

when i attack a item stash with the ship it just launch it over the stash, then when i click visit the stash the ship just eat my guys

hmm .. I thought this was a 40k - Chaos only feature 

Can you describe this further ? The pawns just disappeared or what happened ?

the ship landed in the center without load, with short range ship*

[SpaceDorf]

short range meaning the dropship ?
1000kg cargo, 8 seats ?
or the small one ?

I had this happen to me once too .. but only in an older version of the mod with the current 1.34 version I had no real bugs so far ..

[KLk]

short range meaning the dropship ?
1000kg cargo, 8 seats ?
or the small one ?

I had this happen to me once too .. but only in an older version of the mod with the current 1.34 version I had no real bugs so far ..

the mid, the 500 chemfuel, 2-3 seats, low range, and so on

[Cpt.Ohu]

when i attack a item stash with the ship it just launch it over the stash, then when i click visit the stash the ship just eat my guys

A few further questions.


x) Can you reproduce the error reliably? Meaning you can do the exact same thing and the error happens?
x) If so, do you have an error log?

x) Was it the ships first flight?
x) Was this ship from a savegame?
x) How did the pawns enter the ship?
x) Did you launch the ship from a map, or from the World view?
x) Did you load a save while the ship was in air and on the World view?

Just trying to narrow in on where the cause might be.

@cpt.ohu

I repacked the Firefly Ship so the textures and defs have seperate folders  to your original ships.

I would like to do this for the 40k ships as well, so they can be easily put into the Dropship Mainfolder as Additional Ships ..

I want to do the same for the Industrial Revolution Biplane and Airship but have not asked the Author yet.

To be honest, I do not want the 40k ships from the Corruption mod as a downloadable standalone. I specifically created the dropship from vanilla assets so I wouldn't have to include something like the Valkyrie for showing purposes.
I'm not a fan of just enabling 40k aesthetics without any substance. If you want to have 40k ships, I'd rather you make your own art.

Also the valkyrie is a combined effort from an artist and my base work, so he'd have to give his consent too.

[KLk]

when i attack a item stash with the ship it just launch it over the stash, then when i click visit the stash the ship just eat my guys

A few further questions.


x) Can you reproduce the error reliably? Meaning you can do the exact same thing and the error happens?
x) If so, do you have an error log?

x) Was it the ships first flight?
x) Was this ship from a savegame?
x) How did the pawns enter the ship?
x) Did you launch the ship from a map, or from the World view?
x) Did you load a save while the ship was in air and on the World view?

1 yes i could, at least is what i think, i will try to reproduce the problem today or tomorrow.
2 nope
3yes, was the first flight
4 yes, i've constructed it, saved and then launched it
5 regular way, from console, not manually.
6 map to worldwide
7 nope it was just a near flight over an item stash on his last day. I saved before the flight beacuse i had this same error before in the past versions