Antares Mod preview

Ed Kolis · #1 October 8th, 2004, 09:25 PM

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=301782

Just a couple data files - and one is missing most of the relevant data - but maybe someday I and/or someone else will pick up on this and finally make the MOO2 mod for SE4 I've been dreaming of!

Atrocities · #2 October 9th, 2004, 07:21 AM

Cool work. How long do you exepect it will take you to finish the mod?

Ragnarok-X · #3 October 9th, 2004, 02:00 PM

Could you write a small summary of the mod ?

Ed Kolis · #4 October 9th, 2004, 04:24 PM

How long? Probably I never will... keep in mind these are data files I've worked on a bit, held onto for months while worked on other things, worked on a bit again...

Probably if I ever finish it it will be a mod for SE5 or even SE6

OK, a summary of this mod? How about this:

The Antares Mod is a work-in-progress mod which attempts to convert the game mechanics of Master of Orion II to Space Empires IV. Features will include a completely redesigned tech tree based on the MOO2 tech tree, quasi-Newtonian propulsion, scale mounts for special (i.e. non-weapon) ship components, "structural integrity fields" a la Star Trek Mod which function as leaky armor (simulating MOO2's "structural hitpoints"), a variety of specialized mounts for use on weapons, miniaturizing technology (as you research advances on a technology, instead of it getting more powerful, it gets smaller and cheaper like in MOO2; you must research a new technology to get more powerful items), Antaran attackers based on Devnull's space monsters, and more!

edit: added reference to Antarans

deccan · #5 October 10th, 2004, 08:20 AM

Hey, what are you doing working on an SEIV mod? Go back to that Dominion2 rogue-like!

Ed Kolis · #6 October 11th, 2004, 01:31 PM

Hey, I kinda got stuck on that roguelike - I'd have continued working on it but I came up with this idea for a universal Malfador data file manipulation library (to read and write files from SE4, SF, DO, and SE5), but that turned out harder than I thought and I never finished it... and then my boss told me not to bring my laptop to work anymore because the OTHER boss might get mad if he saw me messing around on it... then I remember about the MOO2 mod I'd started on a while back...

BTW, I was planning on releasing the Malfador data manipulator under the LGPL, but I wonder what my school would think about that given that I wrote most of the code for that during my free time at work (I work at school) probably they'd want ownership of the program and all mods created with it, to be used exclusively for research purposes by the University of Cincinnati

YOU HEARD THAT, YOU'RE MONITORING MY INTERNET USAGE RIGHT NOW, I KNOW IT!

But they're much nicer than that, aren't they... I think I need to contact the People for the Ethical Treatment of Software, who knows what kinds of "research" a university might put a program through

And speaking of creating mods with tools, most of the components in the Antares Mod preview I just showed you were created with my very own Templatizer

... which no one else seems to want to use

... really, it's a handy tool, if you want I can show you the template file for the Components.txt and you can see how much cleaner everything looks when you have only one entry for each component family!

Hmm, speaking of the Templatizer (will I ever stop?

), I need to figure out how to make it raise events such as "done working on entry #32, Phased Polaron Beam", so I can make a GUI Version with a progress bar... I'm getting kinda tired of the text interface I have set up; it doesn't do a very good job of reporting its progress - it is thorough, but it is a bit verbose!

I wonder, though, if loading the entire template file into memory before doing any processing will speed up the program? I don't think so, but it's worth a shot, and it would allow for a progress bar...

Aiken · #7 October 11th, 2004, 02:55 PM

Quote:

BTW, I was planning on releasing the Malfador data manipulator under the LGPL, but I wonder what my school would think about that given that I wrote most of the code for that during my free time at work (I work at school) probably they'd want ownership of the program and all mods created with it, to be used exclusively for research purposes by the University of Cincinnati

They can't, unless you have used the code from your actual project for this school. Check your contract. There should be a point about non-declaration, rights to code and such.

Quote:

And speaking of creating mods with tools, most of the components in the Antares Mod preview I just showed you were created with my very own Templatizer ... which no one else seems to want to use ... really, it's a handy tool, if you want I can show you the template file for the Components.txt and you can see how much cleaner everything looks when you have only one entry for each component family!

Great tool, indeed. But it's a dotnet, so effectively you library weight is 25 Mb. Quite big, don't you think? This also makes impractical to incorporate eee and templatizer to another project. In fact I will have to completely rewrite eee and templatizer in Python, do you mind?

Ed Kolis · #8 October 11th, 2004, 04:58 PM

Well, I don't actually do any coding at this job - I just brought my laptop along to have something to do when things got slow

Yeah, I know the library size is excessive, but think about it this way - nobody complains about downloading the equally huge Java library, do they? And Java has had way more revisions to download than .NET... I think they're up to 1.5 now (at least 6 Versions) while .NET skipped from 1.1 up to 2.0 (3 Versions)

Go ahead and rewrite it in Python if you want, but I'd advise you not to; it just seems like a waste of effort - not just your effort in rewriting old code, but both of ours in that any features one of us adds, the other will have to add as well in the other language.

However, if you think you can make the program faster by writing it in Python, by all means go for it! I think it's horribly inefficient (it uses TYPE REFLECTION and it's just a math parser for crying out loud

) and could stand much improvement, but unfortunately I don't know where to go with it short of abandoning object-oriented programming, which I am loath to do as it would make my code even messier than it is, and besides, OO is just how I THINK... I tried learning Erlang but it made absolutely no sense to me, representing everything as a list of arbitrary numbers and indices, I don't have the attention span to keep track of what they all MEAN!

Indices are one thing when you're working with simple BASIC programs and stuff, but when you want to do something actually USEFUL...

Ragnarok-X · #9 October 11th, 2004, 05:31 PM

Think about dial up Users. Im on 56k and it will take me a roughly 2 hours to get 25 mb, given i get the maximum inbound 4,5k/s

Aiken · #10 October 11th, 2004, 06:37 PM

Quote:

Well, I don't actually do any coding at this job - I just brought my laptop along to have something to do when things got slow

Then they cannot claim their rights to any piece of code you wrote.

Quote:

Go ahead and rewrite it in Python if you want, but I'd advise you not to; it just seems like a waste of effort - not just your effort in rewriting old code, but both of ours in that any features one of us adds, the other will have to add as well in the other language.

It's very easy to embedd python code in C. The most trivial example is to write:
#include <Python.h>
and now you can use Python api functions inside you C code.

Ruby and Python are great OO Languages, if you are looking for one and don't want to use Java (bleh

).

But almost surely python script will be slower than C bytecode, so I don't expect significant impovement here. But it's worth a try, I think. It's very easy to delete entire project folder afterall. Positive side is that this app could be much smaller, crossplatform and very easy to extend or embed.