The Quest To Spew

I’m not sure how the megafreigher works. I had a look in the ini files and the ship itself just has 30 cargo ports. The big pods have five ini files, two of which have one universal port, and all of which have a single port for attaching to the ship. I could just let them go for now... what else could I do? Have you done work on traffic yet? I have ideas floating around on how it could be implemented.

If a new traffic script will use megafreighters, then I’ll have to work out how those things work. So that’s my current project. I got myself a flyable one (sans megapods) and headed over to a station to buy goods. It turns out that they CAN dock a normal pod to those big ports (thirty of ‘em), but it looks darn silly.

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I wrote a simple script that creates and docks a megapod to my megafreighter, and hauled it over to the mine to see if the docking command would use it. Nope. Time to experiment.

At this point I am working through a prototype state engine for managing a trading group. Moving pods about is on the list but some other basics to deal with first.

Traffic is going to be a bit of a mission I think.

Joco.

I suppose I should state more clearly that megafreighters do not operate like their smaller brethren. You cannot order a pod to dock to one and expect it to go in the megapod. From what I gather, you have to work the whole loading/unloading process “manually�.

Not only that, there are five ini files for megapods. Looking over the only available PS script that utilizes megapods (Dante’s Inferno mission), there is a channel called, simply enough, “door� that controls the pod’s door. (I would have never figured that out on my own) Two ini files do not have this ability, so I’m down to 3.

Looking through the pkg files in Notepad, I notice that the two traffic scripts do not create any megapods (edit-find-“mega�), but iShipCreation does, and only creates the megapod_open_rotated pod, which is the one of the three that does not have a universal port in it. So this one is probably the pod to use.

Next step is to see what exactly the AI pods are doing when they load up into a megafreighter. The megapods have no cargo dockport, so it can’t be a simple dock. I whipped up a script that gives detailed order information of the target at a push of a key, but the traffic is being non-cooperative! The one time I witnessed a megafreighter pull up to a dock, it unloaded only, then went to another station, opened and closed each pod door, then headed off empty. Finally it got culled 10k in front of me while I was in formate with it, and caused my autopilot to do strange things and finally crashed the game.

So until I can see one of those things load, megatrucking will have to wait.

Woah! I just GOT Torn Stars and now yer making it cooler..! STOP that, I'll NEVER stop drooling, dammit...
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"What we need is: bigger f*cking guns!"
-Split Second

Cooler? Well the spewer code is more or less done.

When the other devs get the traffic scripts all written out, I’d be happy to write the code to make it use tSpewerOps. (Right now, my code has a bit of a kludge to account for AI ships. If the new traffic uses tSpewerOps, it will mesh much better with the player’s use of the spewer.)

There seems to be a lack of interest in getting the megafreighter pods working, so that project’s been shelved. What I really need to know to get it working is what exactly the relationship between the cargo pods and the megapods is. If it is childed (at what coordinates?) and how they fly in backwards to load (it’s not a dock command... I think). Once that info is out, I should be able to write megafreighters into tSpewerOps.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the AI traffic megafreighters don’t load at all... in which case, if I pull it off, I’d have one-upped PS. Hmmm... maybe I should restart the megafreighter program after all.