Mod Projects List

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by ColdSteel:
1) Asteroid mining. Mine them for resources. One way to do this would be to make a new ship class that uses the asteroid .x file model. Don't put any components on it except raw materials components. Give the ship a high hull value or some armor (crystaline might be good) to make it hard to destroy. When it's destroyed, it drops some containers (or 1 container maybe) with the materials. Pick 'em up and sell 'em. You could mix these "ship" type asteroids in with the regular ones so you'd have to hunt for them. You could even put some weapons on one and call it a belt miner colony defending its territory. Working in dense asteroid fields without colliding could be dangerous but profitable work.

2) Salvage derelict ship hulks. How cool would it be to find a derelict ship floating dead amoung the asteroids or in deep space. If we had tractor beams (or could mod them in), you could haul it to the nearest spaceport and sell it or repair it for use. One way to do this might be to use a icon (like a component icon) of a ship in your inventory to represent a towed ship. Maybe when tractored somehow count the ship as part of the inventory and give it a weight of 100? Not sure exactly how to do this one but it sure would be fun.

1 & 2 would probably be the easiest to do. You'd have to use a race slot for for asteroids and derelicts (call it "Objects" or something), and then generate 'ship designs' for them (as you have already outlined above). There's no way I can tell to implement towing, so you'd probably have to do the "blow up and sweep up" system on derelicts as well. That might be a nice way to introduce new alien tech to players, though...

3) Implement true trade routes (like Elite and Starflight2). This one is discussed in another thread here and SJ already had some good suggestions on how it could be done. More suggestions/ideas welcome.

More power to him, but it looks like it will be tough, and liable to cause all kinds of lockups and bugs if not done exactly right.

EDIT - I will learn to spell one day...

[ October 13, 2003, 20:13: Message edited by: General Woundwort ]