The Ramblings of a Mad Man

Since this engine, dev team and community seem open to ideas like the ones that haunt me, I though it might be a good place to share some of my thoughts on what I would like to see come to light in a space trading/combat/simulation. In these pages I will describe aspects of the game I think could be altered in ways to enhance the immersion, feel and look of I-War and Torn Stars. Please feel free to comment, discuss or dispute any ideas I may share.

Modular Multi-Purpose Freighters – Redefining the Freighter Concept and Design

After playing a few different Space Sims, including I-war 2 and Torn Stars, one thing has always seemed to remain a constant. Most of these Sims have had rather uninspiring cargo ships or freighters. I –War has two that seem to break that mold, the SNRV and the Mega-transporter. But since there is essentially but a single variant of each once you’ve seen one you have seen them all. What makes these two transport ships different then the rest are that they can serve a dual purpose. They can each transport other ships or pods, but each does it in a different way.

Before we get too deep in to this we need to also note the way cargo pods and ships dock to each other. Ships appear to only dock to standard docking ports, while cargo pods can dock to either a cargo specific port or a standard port, and I still remember a mod that allows pods to dock to pods, which opens up some interesting possibilities. It means that pods can be stacked, or attached together to form a larger pod, which I will call a super pod. Now there is nothing that says these super pods need to be formed in to cubes so you could end up building odd shape super pods to attach to different ships depending on their design.

Now Mdvally’s work on the Spewer Operation’s and Mega-Trucking mods has shown that the way mega freighters store pods is a little troublesome, in that if pods are stacked on other pods you first have to move the blocking pods to get at the buried pods to unload them. So while stacking or grouping pods in to super pods of varying shapes and sizes may look neat it may well be a lot of unnecessary overhead. So what other options do we have?

Well for starters let’s look at how mega freighters work. They are covered with normal docking ports which can dock any other dock capable entity, the most common seen entity being the mega-pods, but they could very well dock other ships or objects. The way I see it a mega-pod is just a box to hold a 2x2x2 super pod build from normal cargo pods or 8 pods, yet the ship database ways each mega pod is the size of 36 pods or a 4x3x3 super pod. Looks like we are have a lot of unused space which is difficult to load and unload, so what can be done?

What if we docked cargo pod pylons to the normal docking ports of a mega-freighter type ship? Each cargo pod pylon would be an elongated block about 1.25x the size of a pod. At each end is a normal docking port and on the 4 remaining sides are cargo docking ports. This would turn every normal docking port in to a 4 port cargo hold. Now here is the fun part. Since there is a second normal docking port on the cargo pylon it can either mount a 5 cargo pod or an additional cargo pylon extending the normal docking port to double the capacity, since we know docked objects can mount additional docked objects.

Limiting its Abuse

Now this could get a little silly if there were no limits imposed, we might see a Storm Petrol flying around with a stack of cargo pylons stretching off in to eternity. But how do we limit this? I see several things we can do to limit its abuse.

First every pylon and pod adds mass in its proper location, this means that additional weight is working against the thrusters reducing their effectiveness in maneuvering the ship and off center weight will affect the balance between center of thrust and center of mass. This would cause the ship to respond slower thus altering the ships feel as it would be in the real world and off center weight would cause the ship to yaw or pitch under acceleration, deceleration and maneuvering as it would in reality. You could even use this as a tactic in combat destroying a group of cargo on one side of a ship to alter its maneuverability and control.

Second every cargo pylon requires power to maintain its attachment to its parent object and child objects; this essentially means that cargo pylons are ship systems in addition to docking locations and to further compound the issue the further a cargo pylon is from its power source the more power it needs to remain attached, after all the stresses on a long string of cargo pylons when attached to a moving ship is directly related to the length and weight of its structure. So the larger the ships reactor the more cargo pods it can carry. This then also open new options in the game, one need only to disrupt power to a pylon to get it to release from its parent and release all its pods. I can see all you space pirates drooling already at this idea.

The last and final limit would have to be simply a hard coded maximum number of linked cargo pylons. So if we say limit the cargo pylons to a max length of 6 then no ship no matter how large could have cargo extending more then 6 pylons away from a normal docking port.

Additional Uses for Cargo Pylons

This same idea of linked cargo pylons could be used to build vast cargo storage areas around stations, as we know that the stations in I-War 2 are not physically large enough to store all the pods they spew and consume. With the addition of normal docking pylons you could also build large ship docking arrays. The options are many. When I have the time I will build a simple visual model to allow you to visualize concepts I have described.

The Next Step

The next step beyond all this is to then design a completely new type of freighter or for that matter any ship. Another member of the community (dezgard) is experimenting with ships built from docked sub-components, main hull, engines, weapons, command section, reactor, cargo hold, etc. This opens the door to dynamic ship design. If a freighter or any ship is just a collection of sub-components, then the player is free to choose different command sections, hulls, engines, etc and the ship can be configured as needed. So a freighter hauling a small quantity of high value good might look very different from a freighter hauling large quantities of low value goods. The first might be a command section, a short spine with 2 normal dock ports each mounted with 2 cargo pylons, then a reactor section and finally the main engines. While a larger freighter might have several hull sections, one or more reactors, and sections of docking port spine and one or more engine arrays. If we have multiple variations on each component type then the variety of ship designs can increase vastly without increasing the number of base ship types hard coded in to the game.

Just a few of my thoughts, there are more and I will share them later.


The cold hard void of space beckons me, but she will have to wait, for I am not yet ready to embrace her.

Some very interesting ideas. I wince at the idea of altering cargo pods too much. Simply because they are already so integrated into the game and it's systems that adjusting them would mean going back and changing too many things, all for a dubious payoff. The issues with Super Frieghters can be ignored (or we can use mdvalley's solutions) because they are of little importance in the game (compared to other things). However, the suggestion of linking cargo pods into storage areas or for alternate arrangement while transporting is good. I myself have thought of this before. In Unstable Space we already came across this idea when we were deciding how to have pods produced by player mines arrange themselves near asteroids. Having a script that made them 'self-arrange' into a storage area of some kind would be great, and could be used elsewhere (around stations or storage stations, or even alternate ships as you suggest).

I like the idea of modular ship design very much. Of course, that would require a new load-out for the game, something that we are planning for Traffic. A new load-out is a daunting coding task however. Grandpatrout and I have already tossed around the idea of modular ships for other purposes, mainly part of his functional-art concept. He envisioned ships constructed from several basic pieces. These pieces could be used in two situations: To simulate the 'construction' piece by piece, of ships at space stations, and to represent salvageable pieces of destroyed ships in debris fields etc.

In anycase, excellent ideas, and I look forward to hearing more, and or an illustration of the idea as you mentioned. By the way, what kind of skills do you have in regards to EoC modding, or are you mainly an idea man?

I am at this point an idea man but wish to be more. I just need to learn the skills neded to mod this engine as it seems to be a good base to test and experiment with. Do you have any suggestions as to a good source of info which I can use to start aquiring these skills?

The cold hard void of space beckons me, but she will have to wait, for I am not yet ready to embrace her.

Hmm...well it kindof depends on what skills you have prior to beginning modding. I started out with some meagre artistic talent and penchant for tinkering. From there I just taught myself what I needed to do what I wanted. Of course, I never got into actual pog coding. I suppose If I spent the time to learn it, I could do something, but for me that might be too large an investment for too small a payoff (maybe)

The really nice thing about EOC is it is extremely easy to mod. Many many functions are controlled strictly from .ini files. You just tinker with them and change a lot in the game. So that is a good starting place. If you have modelling or art skills, and or programming abilities, there are a couple of SDK's available on this site. They explain everything you need to know (nearly) about delving into those areas. Can't remember the exact names, but they should be in the downloads area.