Amazing video Bounder and an ingenious use for Buffet. Not sure about the music though [haha]
It looks like you've got a very highly modded version of the game running there, though I'm not sure why the planet colour changed from orange to white to yellow
As for hacking the AI with new scripts, I'm sure AndyJ would know whether that was feasible or not. I'm guessing as they already follow their own AI routines, there may be a way of doing it??
That colour glitching only arises sometimes - i think it's the same bug the Frontier engine's had since FE2, where a slight change in viewing angle causes drastic changes in the ray tracing or something - it also only seems able to apply a single light source, which messes up the terrain lighting in systems with multiple stars.. but it is what it is, at least until Frontier find their mojo again..
And while the 'music'
is awful, my ship seems to like it.
For mods i just run SweetFX and BUFFET - which includes an automated ship replacement function; you set up a ship replacement list which tells it to replace any given ship that spawns, with any other ship or loadout. For the most part i leave the ship type and colour / reg alone and just buff their loadouts, prioritising logic and fun over the default mass/equipment limits.. so almost no ships fly without shields, combat and pirate ships have lots of shields, and those with better shields are also more likely to have better weapons. I also replace most of the fugly MK2 police vipers with the MK1 model. And the skeet cruiser too (i forget what with, but hey anything else!)
The kind of AI manipulation i had in mind was just a slight extension of what BUFFET already reveals about how the AI operate - it should be possible to create or join wings / squadrons, assign them simple objectives and targets...things like automated 'fuel rats' or
any kinds of response to the two currently-redundant 'HELP!' comms options, would also fall within that scope.
'Slight extension' of the functionality might include being able to command AI to hyperspace, handling the AI from external scripts and re-inserting them or their arrival clouds etc. upon player arrival in the target system.. so from there you'd be able to script basic missions that spanned multiple systems. Likewise, if you can read the system names from memory then you can define spawn conditions and other stuff for them..
Also, BUFFET currently lacks any spawn options - the only way i've found is to change police vipers to whatever you wanna spawn, attack a station then reset your legal status... but this only works in systems with bases..
On that note, AJ's included an FFE version - possibly Anisotropic or Nic's mod - that extends habitation across the galaxy, so if that could be implemented at memory level, it would be a cool option to offer as a user-defined variable, but also something for mission designers to play with.. unless it's also possible to spawn stations in working orbits automatically and on-the-fly - so again you could just define what stations spawned at which planets in a system. So something like solo 'power play' could be possible, or perhaps player-owned stations and bases.
Being able to raise the AI repertoire of combat manoeuvers would also be cool - especially with regards to getting them to use their turrets and rear-facing weapons. Ditto the mostly unused ship-launched fighters. You could then define different combat tactics and responses - Anisotropic modded the AI to weigh up whether they really needed to flee every missile when their shields are holding, and you could extend that fight-or-flight intelligence with just a few more simple rules for weapons etc. - so not only will pirates not attack unarmed (as in vanilla FFE), they'll positively avoid fights they stand no chance of winning.
Using only the addresses currently hacked by BUFFET, you could script basic random encounters of life around you - traders and police and pirates all doing their thing. Imagine coming across a band of pirate fighters with one or two larger turreted ships, attacking a turreted long range cruiser, and then passing by the responding viper squadron as you continue on towards base.. you could spawn mining ships in asteroid fields, interplanetary shuttles and lifters running short-hauls, transporters etc. running long-haul between systems - and larger numbers of both, esp. in higher population worlds. Deep-space flotillas of every authority and none, trade convoys and disaster relief convoys, and corporate craft in corporate systems and appropriate explorer craft in remote systems.. Remote outer systems and gas giants could be havens for outlaws, navy bases and firing ranges as in Eta Cassiopeiae and Facece could be populated more appropriately.
Elite's the original sandboxing experience, and playing around with BUFFET really engages your imagination and types of play options.. in the same way as OFP/Arma and Minecraft etc. But also, Oolite's a great example of the kinds of man-hours development you can galvanise if you can enable modders access to a few key variables, such as what spawns where and when..
Another bonus already featured in BUFFET is that it shows you a list of all ships in the current system, and their current targets - not as useful as FE2 which showed all ships as coloured dots in the system scanner, but still better than nothing, especially when you're seeking or avoiding combat. Slight extension of this functionality could include being able to see or read these ships current locations, and also target them as navigation or combat targets. Also, being able to assign
them independent navigation and combat targets (currently only combat targets can be assigned).
Ideally, it'd be great if BUFFET could be included as a kind of dev-mode built into the game.. encouraging this kind of crazy free-form play. Yesterday i found i'd accidently 'killed' my whole squadron - not sure how, but every one of them was left tumbling and unpowered / unresponsive - a cloud of dead ghost ships drifting through the middle of nowhere - each one slowly spinning on 3 axes, as if abandoned or in total systems failure.. but they weren't just floating and unresponsive - they were all
tumbling, which is a particularly evocative state and one that a mission designer could make great capital on.. Mary Celeste's, battlefield wreckage, piracy victims, medical / mechanical emergencies, both for NPC and players, the list goes on, and it's probably just a single byte to trigger this condition.. (presumably i inadvertently game them conflicting instructions or something)..
On the one hand it's a horribly kludgy way to develop any game (by hacking its own memory!), but in this case it's running in two layers of wrapper already, and we already have most of the key addresses mapped courtesy of BUFFET, as well as any other hacks (like Aniso's and Hell mod etc.)..
So the main work initially would be peek & poke - compile a list of known addresses, find missing necessities such as spawn triggers, for a basic API layer...
Presumably though this is far more work than i'm making out, dunno...
