Multiverse Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

One thing that would be quite handy is if you made an auto-firing version of the cannons.

Let the aft gunners just fire at will while you manage the main batteries yourself
Otherwise, those aft guns don't see much use at all.


Tech issue:
Light shock cannons are superior to medium cannons. Smaller, but 10% more Dmg/s

[Campeador]

The 'auto-firing version of the cannons' is a good idea for the rear cannons. Especially since beam weapons do not do friendly damage like torpedoes and ‘point defense cannons’ (which are 'bolts'). But I would have preferred a setting witting the game so that it would have been player selected.
Pros: If set to auto-firing, they will fire automatically at the closest ship, you do not have to think about it, a good thing.
Con: If you are low on energy the rear weapons may be firing at a ship on your rear while you have little power to maybe deal with the ship you want to kill in front of you. Also usually you fire the front weapon then pass your target and hit it again with the rear weapons. The problem is when there are many enemy ships where auto-fire may attack the closest enemy instead of the most dangerous or the one you want. Also if your front is destroyed you may want total control of the weapon on the rear.
By the way the Hood Battlecruiser (which the player got to use on Multiverse 1) did have a special weapon on its rear (ABC high speed missile launcher) set on auto; a heavier version of the point defense cannon.
It is an excellent idea but I would have preferred a toggle button to be able to switch at will while on battle. Still I will do a practice scenario to see how it will behave on a battle.
Tech issue:
About the light shock cannon being superior to medium ones: On that one I actually lost the initial train of thought. For example the light cannon from the Argo being a battleship should be greater in size than maybe the heavy cannons of a destroyer, do more damage and have far longer range. My screw up is that I forgot about it and give them a linear progression from small to medium to heavy without making a distinction of ship class. Therefore without going into making too many changes I will simply reduce the light shock cannon so that it will be slightly less the Dmg/s of the medium. The same thing will happen between the medium and the heavy. For sure the heavy shock cannons will keep their present value; just the medium and light will be decreased accordingly.
In case someone notices, there is a weapon on the game where I was experimenting. That weapon will cause the greater damage at maximum range while at close range it will do little. (Not for the player to use, sorry)
Interesting thing to note: On the Multiverse you will find ships that are for example cruisers (300m in length) on their universe, yet they will be larger than the Argo (266m in length) a battleship. So there will be an apparent discrepancy in that respect, but each universe does its own scaling. But I did make all the ships of the game to scale (except the fighters). Thanks to Jeff Russell’s ‘Starship Dimensions’ comparison chart, great tool for comparing all the science fiction ships ever made to scale.
Thanks for the input, my update is growing, and so will the one for Multiverse 1 since they are all linked.

[Campeador]

Multiverse Mod 1 Update to V1.03
Multiverse_1-Enemy_From_Beyond-V1.03


Bugs that could crash the game:

Scan base bug – it was possible to not do the scanning and continue with the mission. That would have caused a crash later on. (Thanks ‘Enrico’ for that one!)
-- The FIX: Now the player won’t be able to get the next mission unless he does the scanning successfully.
There were some planets on the Star Fury system (the Beta sectors) where the player could land. Since the landing sites were not coded into the game this will cause an immediate crash when trying to land.
--- The FIX: The landing site of those planets was removed.


Bugs that could impact the game play:

Illumidas carrier with no fighters
-- -The FIX: The carrier has fighters now.
The Fazrah cruiser had only half the intended power generators.
-- The FIX: The Fazrah cruiser has two power generators.
There was the possibility of a starbase being destroyed at mission start due to collision as ships materialize. This will prevent the game to continue on.
---The FIX: This could have happen twice, the first time on the very first mission as the Fazrah attack the starbase. Now the mission has a time limit were the player is required to protect the base and emphasizing that the starbase MUST survive or that ‘failure’ is not an option. If the base is destroyed before the timer is out the player has to redo the mission. The player could have done this before without the change but now this issue is resolve in the first five minutes of the mission and not half an hour into the particular scenario.
Some weapons were rebalanced. This also includes the last minute change on the Argo’s shock cannons (Thanks ‘SJ’ for catching that one).
Some scenarios were rebalanced due to the minor changes on weapons that actually impacted the game play. --- The cause of this was the Mogami ‘Light Missile Type-2’ (not the Argo).
The Starbases were rebalanced -- There was really not much difference between small bases and large ones. Now smaller Starbases are naturally weaker than large ones.


Other Improvements:

The grammar was revised and corrected by ‘RasterOps’. Special Thanks! ---I did add some minor new changes on various txt files after RasterOps corrections, so if there are some mistakes I am sure that it was my doing.
Some of the new components, ship skins and pictures bitmaps were improved. Now the ships skins do not look as washed out as before and it also have better contrast. Special thanks to my big-bro John! ---This was done for Multiverse 2, so I am also applying it to Multiverse 1.
Added some degree of randomness on cargo items on ships, especially enemy ships.

[Campeador]

Multiverse Mod 2 Update to V1.01
Multiverse_2-The_Fourth_Dimension-V1.01

Many of the issues resolved on the update of Multiverse Mod 1 are transfer into Mod 2 also.

The principal ones:
Crash if player lands on unsupported landing site on a planet on the Beta sector. (Not the ones that follow the storyline) But in case that the player likes to wonder around it has been fixed.
Corrected the Argo's shock cannon small Dmg/s ratio discrepancy. (Only 'SJ' would notice a thing like that! Thanks)
Rescale some fighters that were kind of big as compared to the rest of the fighters in the game.
An error on the Main_BitmapEffects.txt -Wrong naming on weapon on a fighter. But since the AI operates those it never affected the game... But is fix now just in case.

[rstaats10]

Campeador, Great job with this mod. This is a lot of fun to play. I am not finished yet. I'm about 6 or 7 missions into it so far. I have not noticed any bugs myself aside from the occasional slow down when all the fighters battle. You have done an incredible job with this. All your mods are great though. The story line is just awesome. You continue to breath new life into Starfury and to be honest this Multiverse 1 and 2 surpass even the stock game in my opinion. Guys reading this should definately check it out. It's a lot of fun to play. I will post again when I have completed Multiverse 2. Thanks again for the great mod Campeador!!!

[Suicide Junkie]

Scan base bug – it was possible to not do the scanning and continue with the mission. That would have caused a crash later on. (Thanks ‘Enrico’ for that one!)

After three tries, I figured it wasn't supposed to be possible, so I left when I was told to after getting blasted by all the fighters at the warppoint...

Then I accomplished the scanning when I came to destroy it
Ended up doing 99% damage all on my own, only for my allies to come in and steal the kill at the last second.

[Campeador]

Version Update on Multiverse Mod 2
Multiverse_2-The_Fourth_Dimension- from V1.01 (02-18-08) to V1.02 (02-19-08)

This fixes a bug that I just discovered and it was very important not to wait.
The bug was introduced from version 1.01 to 1.02.
Power Reactor (100kT) was missing from some of the ships encountered on the 'Omega' sectors. The lack of these engines will greatly affect the performance of those ships.
Players that already have version 1.01 only need to transfer the 'Main_Components.txt' fron V1.02.
The cause of this was a last minute change on the name of the Power Reactor of the Arcadia of Multiverse 1 that would have resulted in an early story spoiler for Multiverse 2. I overlook to return the change on Multiverse 2 since other new ships were using these reactors.

[Campeador]

"After three tries, I figured it wasn't supposed to be possible, so I left when I was told to after getting blasted by all the fighters at the warp point..."

Wrong! It was very possible to do the scan. I did it many times. (I know, after doing it dozens of times testing the scenario it start to becomes easy) But I am sure that someone other than me has done it! It was so possible that that is why on the latest update the player will not be able to take care of it latter but when instructed.
I went back to check on the mission and it did specify to scan first then to get out.

Some scenario observations:
Every time you go to that sector the enemies will behave differently, so sometimes it will be more difficult than others. The three enemy fighters at the warp point will keep chasing you so it is better to take care of them early on. Last, speed is very important and your engines are slow, but there were plenty of enemy engines and armor that were better than yours floating around (not to mention repair cargo) from the previous battle on Minerva.

Players are resourceful but I had to have it fix because if the base gets destroyed before the scan was accomplish the mission would have remained in progress and that would have definitely cause a crash latter on since the game can only handle a maximum of three missions in progress at once which was going to happen later on.

[Baron Munchausen]

I've started playing Multiverse 1 and seen one oddity. The EDF destroyers don't seem to have textures. They are white silhouettes floating around, even though my own ship of the same type does have a texture. Could there be a typo somewhere? Or could I have not got all the files due to an archiver error while unpacking?

[Campeador]

This is an old occurrence from the original Star Fury game. It is usually the two ships following a third leader ship appear just white with no textures as you mention. Sometimes a ship, starbase and even your own ship shows invisible, a real annoyance since you may collide with it.
All that you have to do to fix this is simply save the game (right were you are at) and reload it, it should clear. If not keep doing it until it does. I suspect that it is video card/memory combo but I have tried the game on four different computers and from time to time it does happen in all of them. So I will tend to suspect more a bug on Star Fury.