What do you consider to be the White Whale of SMAC modding?

[Buster's Uncle]

"What do you consider to be the White Whale of SMAC modding?"

It all depends on what you'd like to be doing at the moment, doesn't it? 

At different times the answer has been .cvr modding, when I was making factions for zsozso's Middle Earth mod - that was going to have recon rovers in it, no matter what, and programmable interlude triggers when working on a GotM scenario with a heavy story element - which the GotM team tends towards.  When we wrote seven stories to go with "What Would Pravin Do?", it would have been SO nice to have been able to incorporate them directly into the scenario - but it just couldn't be done with the available interlude triggers.

Those are my two big ones.

[ete]

For me the biggest thing I'd love to be able to do but can't is give the ability to build specific units as a faction bonus. The way custom units can be defined allows for all sorts of cool things normally not buildable like Probe Planes or units with loads of interesting abilities at once, but allowing them generally changes the game too much. Being able to give them to factions would be pretty awesome, and allow for a bunch of diverse awesome factions.

This would likely be part of a general tech tree rework, allowing more techs and "virtual techs", i.e. techs that are automatically researched as soon as you have the prerequisites, do not count toward your total techs, and cannot be traded.  Then you could just make a virtual tech with prerequisite Disable (so it can't be researched), give it for free to the faction in question, and make it the prerequisite for the desired unit.

That could work, but has the major disadvantage of being stealable by probe. That means that making a faction with some amazing unit but other penalties overly vulnerable to probing, and especially exploitable by humans. Being able to define it directly on a per-faction basis without separate tech avoids those problems.

[Nexii]

Special abilities for native life.  Though I haven't given it much thought.

This actually can be done with just alphax.txt modding.

Basically, any predesigned unit with a psi attack (or fungal towers even without a psi attack) is considered native, with everything that includes...so if you give said units special abilities, you'll have native life with special abilities.  (Exception: Heavy artillery is hardcoded to not work with psi except with spore launchers; there may be other abilities hardcoded not to work with psi either.  But those will usually not be that difficult to change.)

Yea I should have clarified there, I meant being able to give native units abilities in the unit workshop.  I assume doing the above would give everyone stronger native units throughout the game (and alien faction also)

[Yitzi]

For me the biggest thing I'd love to be able to do but can't is give the ability to build specific units as a faction bonus. The way custom units can be defined allows for all sorts of cool things normally not buildable like Probe Planes or units with loads of interesting abilities at once, but allowing them generally changes the game too much. Being able to give them to factions would be pretty awesome, and allow for a bunch of diverse awesome factions.

This would likely be part of a general tech tree rework, allowing more techs and "virtual techs", i.e. techs that are automatically researched as soon as you have the prerequisites, do not count toward your total techs, and cannot be traded.  Then you could just make a virtual tech with prerequisite Disable (so it can't be researched), give it for free to the faction in question, and make it the prerequisite for the desired unit.

That could work, but has the major disadvantage of being stealable by probe. That means that making a faction with some amazing unit but other penalties overly vulnerable to probing, and especially exploitable by humans. Being able to define it directly on a per-faction basis without separate tech avoids those problems.

Sorry, when I said nontradable I should have specified "cannot be attained from one another in any manner".  No trading, no probes, no techshare, no techsteal, nothing.

[Sigma]

You may be able to steal code for "if faction name is x do y" from the Cult's late start, which is hardcoded against the faction text name.

It also shows up in the Caretakers' aversion to Transcendence.

This is something that I've always wondered about, and it seems like it would be a skeleton key for a lot of interesting functions. Is this part of the code at all understood?

[Yitzi]

You may be able to steal code for "if faction name is x do y" from the Cult's late start, which is hardcoded against the faction text name.

It also shows up in the Caretakers' aversion to Transcendence.

This is something that I've always wondered about, and it seems like it would be a skeleton key for a lot of interesting functions. Is this part of the code at all understood?

Yes; it's actually quite easy to implement for a given situation.

The problem is that each case would have to be hardcoded, meaning it could not be easily applied to custom factions.

[Ford_Prefect]

• Unlocking the Secrets of Caviar Editing

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=7866
Has been done partially by me.

[ete]

Sorry, when I said nontradable I should have specified "cannot be attained from one another in any manner".  No trading, no probes, no techshare, no techsteal, nothing.

That would be a good solution then. You may have to change a bunch of places to rule out each kind of tech obtainment, but yes, that'd be awesome if you got it to work.

[DrazharLn]

"What do you consider to be the White Whale of SMAC modding?"

It all depends on what you'd like to be doing at the moment, doesn't it? 

At different times the answer has been .cvr modding, when I was making factions for zsozso's Middle Earth mod - that was going to have recon rovers in it, no matter what, and programmable interlude triggers when working on a GotM scenario with a heavy story element - which the GotM team tends towards.  When we wrote seven stories to go with "What Would Pravin Do?", it would have been SO nice to have been able to incorporate them directly into the scenario - but it just couldn't be done with the available interlude triggers.

Those are my two big ones.

This is all very true. The number one priority for making better story driven scenarios (one of the best outputs from our community, IMO) would be more control over interludes.

Unfortunately, it's not immediately apparent how to do this in any kind of flexible manner. I was working on a prototype for calling other executables from AC2 (and got it working), but I haven't worked out a good way to pass data between the AC binary and an external one yet.

Whenever I work on this kind of thing, it just makes me think I should re-implement all of the AC engine in a more modern language and open source it. Then I remember that I'm lazy and have no idea how to do graphics programming.

something about non-tradeable techs

I think what Yitzi is getting at is that that capability (even to have entirely non-exchangeable techs) already exists. I did a mock up of something like that when I was toying with a custom tech tree for a GotM.

[Ford_Prefect]

Whenever I work on this kind of thing, it just makes me think I should re-implement all of the AC engine in a more modern language and open source it.

Hmmmmm.   

[Flux]

when I was making factions for zsozso's Middle Earth mod

Woah, wait, they made a Middle Earth mod?
I must scan the internet for traces of it.
Hmm. Can't find it. Oh well.
Although, it has inspired me to attempt a custom scenario with my own graphics. I'll see how that goes.

Anyway, I think something that one of our wonderfully talented people here could pull off if they really set their minds to it would be an eighth faction. Or perhaps less than 7? Although less than 7 may already be possible, I'm not really sure. I just do art and faction text files here.

[Buster's Uncle]

It never got finished - root around at WPC AC, circa early 2010-, if you're curious, and do whatever you can think of to try to contact zsozso -this goes for everyone- and lure him in out of the cold - I'm certainly game to resume work.

He IS a member here, and now we could at least paint a plane to look a little more like a Nazgul...

[DrazharLn]

Whenever I work on this kind of thing, it just makes me think I should re-implement all of the AC engine in a more modern language and open source it.

Hmmmmm.

I started planning it out once. I said "This won't even be very hard.". But you know, Hofstadter's law. Also, laziness.

More seriously, the main problem I was having was working out how to architect the engine to be as generic for modders as possible. I'd like to give that approach a good go, and then when it fails go the agile route and just try to work out how to do the minimum viable prototype thing.

Anyway, this thread is not the place. If you (or anyone else) is interested, though, maybe PM me and we should chat on IRC or mumble sometime. Or even start another thread.

[Flux]

It never got finished - root around at WPC AC, circa early 2010-, if you're curious, and do whatever you can think of to try to contact zsozso -this goes for everyone- and lure him in out of the cold - I'm certainly game to resume work.

He IS a member here, and now we could at least paint a plane to look a little more like a Nazgul...

I'll send him a PM, although if he doesn't come here anymore it won't matter.
I did a quick search of his username, and it's only mentioned 7 times here. Ever.
This is the only thread I found, and it isn't Middle Earth: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=8643.msg48348#msg48348
Hmmmm
I think I'll get to work on a Gondor and Elven factions tomorrow. Will be making a thread for it, I'm fine with starting from scratch. No sense in clogging this up with stuff about Tolkien's lore.

[Buster's Uncle]

Our search engine sucks.

Let me nip over and find the thread in question for you - I put a lot of work into what I did, and I hate when my work goes to waste.