MOD: Space Empires V - Babylon 5

[Captain Kwok]

Fyron said:
You could implement a directional armor system along the lines of Gritty Galaxy mod.

Which is fine if you are not interested in making an AI for the mod.

[Suicide Junkie]

Kwok; can the AI not work with named slots?

In GGmod, I have them all named things such as "forward edge", "forward", "core", etc.

[Fyron]

So long as you carefully craft the slot configuration file, I don't see why you couldn't have the AI add components in a proper ordering to get placed as needed. For example, simply put a loop of spaces around the edge based on how much armor you will have the AI place on that size ship, and add those armor components first.

[Captain Kwok]

This is what the AI can do:

It can add to the 3 default slots, Armor, Outer Hull, and Inner Hull. The function that adds components to a design will only accept the three built-in long constants that correspond to these types. So that rules out specifying custom named slots.

The AI can only add items to a design in two ways. Spreading from the top or the bottom, which really means start from the first slot or start from the last slot.

Of course, with a modicum of effort I'm sure better script functions can be provided by Aaron to allow more specific placement, but it can't be done well enough now to make the AI competitive with a GGmod type leaky armor.

[Fyron]

The slot placement is in the order they appear in the file, right?

[Captain Kwok]

The order would as numbered in the slot layout file.

[Fyron]

Then one could in theory carefully craft the slot layouts and design placement routines to program the AI to handle directional armor just fine. They'd need to always use the same number of armor components on each hull size. Certainly a lot more work than simple leaky armor, but doable.