Odd Adventures in Infinite Space v.002
By Explorer Bob, also called James Gryphon

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Development Timeline:

September 2009: Work begun on the mod
February 2010: 001 released, many changes later
September 2010: 002 work begins in earnest
November 2010: 002 released

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What New Things This Mod Does:
First of all, if you haven't read the 001 read-me, do it now. Seriously. I'll wait.

Done? Good.

All righty, so most of the changes originally added in 001 are still in force. That said, I have extended some changes and made some more alterations to things, especially weapons and ship balance.

¥ Chainguns do much less damage; 40 damage per shot (instead of 100).
¥ Moly cones do much less damage; 200 damage per shot (instead of 300)
¥ Many beams have been made more powerful.
¥ Missiles have been boosted, to do more damage; some are also faster.
¥ The Tchoraks have received a world-class nerf -- they no longer regenerate, their systems are now destructable, and all of their weapons are far less powerful.
¥ The Neptunium Railgun has been tinkered with.
¥ The Mantle of Babulon may now be donned or taken off, instead of automatically working.
¥ The hyperdrive now takes about half a year to recharge, but otherwise functions as in normal SAIS and WW, instead of moving 15/15, like in 001.
¥ The Time Trapper has been nerfed.
¥ The Tan Ru Demolisher bug that allowed the ship to fail to appear has been fixed.
¥ Changes have been made to the GUI and interface, intended to make it look more like SAIS.
¥ The Plasma Torch is no longer a short-range death beam.
¥ Various changes have been made to ships' armaments.
¥ The Melodium Conograph has been made less interesting.
¥ Planet, pilot, ship, and star names have been removed, altered, and added to the lists.
¥ The retreat buttons have been removed from the game.

In the last release, I mentioned several possible changes; here is how those 'campaign promises' were or weren't resolved.
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Changes (that were to come, maybe...)
¥ Variable relations - Ã&X
Variable relations was a pet project of mine, that was originally intended to go into the first release of Odd Adventures. I ran into difficulties and ended up canceling it so that it couldn't make it into the first release.

Several months down the line, I started work on the project again, and was able to successfully replicate my past success. Unfortunately, the concept has problems, and I was ultimately persuaded that it wasn't good enough to add into the current release. However, these reasons are more obsessive, having to do with the events' effects on other items and the rest of the game; in practice, the idea technically works. If you want to implement it into the game, download the Variable Relations .zip (available on http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44470&page=4), dump the lovemuk and hatemuk files into Odd Adventures' "quests' folder, add them to the game.ini file in the text section, and edit the "distribution.ini" file and add 1 to every EVNT section.

While it's true that I made both Odd Adventures and Variable Relations, remember that I didn't put it into the final release, so it's not really my fault if there are any bugs, or a distinct lack of fun, as a result of putting this into your Odd Adventures installation. ;-)

¥ Mirror rebalancing - X
As of the moment, mirror rebalancing has still not happened.

¥ New Mantle origin - Ã
I didn't actually give the Mantle a new *origin*, per se, but the intent of the change was made -- to fix the interaction bugs you can get by using the Mantle and talking to the Klakar. I believe 002 improves on 001's weak areas in this regard.

¥ Rebalancing - Ã
Done -- this is practically what 002 is all about.

¥ Difficult-to-capture creatures - X
I thought about it, but decided that it couldn't be done quite like in SAIS, and the ideas I had in mind seem to make things a bit more tedious than it ought to be.

¥ Unusual new allies - X
Not done, but I have one idea. Maybe it can be included in a future release.

¥ More fighter-sized items - X
Not done. Graphics are a problem for me, but more importantly, I'm not sure fighters especially need more stuff right now.

¥Ê...and more?
The extra SAIS GUI changes, I think, are rather nice and fit into this mold. 

Unlike the last time, I have few ideas for major changes after these. No, that doesn't mean that there definitely won't be another Odd Adventures mod -- just that I need time to get more ideas and stuff to implement into the game. Also, I'm limited in what I can do by my inability to procure unique graphics, so I can't create a lot of races and outfits like other modders have done. Hopefully that will change so you can see a greater variety of stuff in a hypothetical Odd Adventures 003.

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Feel free to take any of my stuff for your own mods. Please do credit me, though, especially if you directly copy items over instead of just adapting the ideas.
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Okay. This is the next release, and I said that I might write something clever for the game credits...but that "might" has turned into a "not". I feel just as against writing stuff now as I did then. So here they are, again:

Christ Jesus.

Digital Eel & all the staff mentioned in the existing WW credits - making the game and the elements therein.

The Weird Worlds forum members:
sgqwonkian - Ideas, inspiration, coding help
Lost In Space - Inspiration
clomaka - Posted on a topic I made once

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Please direct all flames to this mod's topic on the WW mod forums, or failing that, my address at consul.bob@gmail.com.

Thanks for downloading!