Well, I thought it was long overdue to give everyone a glimpse of something that has been ready and working for some time. Thanks to the work of Shane Maness, the drones and AMP's of Epitpah are now improving the atmosphere of the game with their unique style and flare (or should I say 'beams'). The Drones and their 'mother ships' the AMP were originally automated mining equipment that was refitted for battle during the War of Dissolution. Once the war finished there was noone left who knew how, or perhaps wanted to, shut down the now quite deadly 'equipment'. So it has been left to it's own devices, essentially, terminating anyone and anything that ventures into the Epitaph system. Only the outlaw pirate faction, known as the Gargoyles, has found a way to avoid the 'Machines' predations.
So I present a little video showing the fate of myself whilst trying to venture across the system. Forgive the quality of the video clip as most of my time is bogged down in bug-hunting and actually making the mod. As always, here is a direct link to a slightly larger, though much higher quailty avi. Or you can go with the flash player below.
Progress on the wingman code rewrite, but not done yet.
The wingmen are getting smarter. One example is ordering your wingmen to attack a target. In Torn Stars they would have killed the target and then sat there without orders (typically getting shot up).
Now after the target is destroyed or flees combat they zoom into escort mode fighting with other nearby hostile ships until you give them a different order. (0)
It was a very busy coding week. I opened a can of worms by starting a rewrite of the player wingman code.
It would normally be crazy to start such a change this late, but a few factors prompted me to do it.
As JT surmized in the wingman commands thread, the wingmen were coded as mindless minions. The code was not structured to allow them any unique behavior. And that made it difficult to have them respond to the player correctly. I had one case where the wingman response said one thing while the wingman the total opposite. At that point I knew the code had to change. (0)
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