Nexus Skirmisher > General Discussion

NEXUS Skirmisher rewrite

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SoulAssassino:
I think it would be a good idea if you continued your work with the skirmisher.

Just the stargate mod alone has about 200 regular day-to-day players, not to mention the people who drop by are around 1000 when we release something.
There is a Halo mod in production, altough it didn't go public just yet, but the author has quite many ships modeled.
OldDragon is making is Nexus: The Aurora Affair mod, which is great so far, and many of the community will love it.
So there is still community out there, and there are still a lot of people who would appreciate a new,  improved skirmisher to play their mods/nexus battles.
And the skirmisher is a very powerful tool for the players, makes our mods 100x playable, taking into account that a good mission takes a long time to script.

My ideas for it:
-The ship positioning ui would be a good idea, although i don't know if it's doable, maybe you could salvage parts of the mission editor.
-A bit more self-explanatory UI, as many people don't take the time to read the FAQ you post, or the one i write to the readme of our releases.
-The mission numbering is the thing that most people tend to frak up, and not just because the lack of reading the FAQ, i too make mistakes with that sometimes as i always forget what number i gave to my last mission. Maybe turning that into automatic would be a huge leap. (It detects what mission numbers are taken, and assigns a non-taken one automatically to the new mission)

I'll keep thinking about other useful (and sometimes crazy) things, and i'll add them to this post later, as these are the only ones that come to mind right now. I know that merging mods is unfortunately impossible as that needs a lot of copypasting of models and textures not to mention extensive edits of the tactictypes.ini

Arparso:
Hi, glad to see someone from the mod community step by :)

Ship positioning: As already said, that probably won't be that easy to do, although I'm currently experimenting with .NET framework 3.5, Windows Presentation Foundation and any 3D capabilities it might have.

More self-explanatory UI: Yeah, I know... the current UI is pretty horrible and I'll propably create a completely new design from scratch. I hate it... it's ugly, unintuitive and... well, ugly ;)

Mission numbering: Yep, a pain in the ass. I'm not even sure anymore, if missions really had to have numbers at all ... did anyone test this? If I'll ever release a new version I'll make sure to handle mission numbering automatically...

graviton:
Firstly I would like to thank you for all your work, Arparso, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE TOOL!
I've being using the skirmisher to extend the fun for years. But I still have trouble using it. There are some ideas in my mind, hope they are helpful for your re-write.
1) There must be an easy way to save/load/modify a skirmish.
In the current tool, it is impossible to load a already existed mission. Although a ship configuration save/load is very helpful, it still need improvement. Like to add some ready-to-load configurations as template. Create a fun mission requires many passes modification and calibration, lack of save/load means much more work force on creating a mission playable.
2) There should be at least some description for everything selectable.
It have took me restless hours to find out which is what... And to remember which slot can be configured as what is terrifying for most users.
3) Why the in-game configuration is not available?
I guess there must be some reason, but it will significantly increase the fun to begin with a lot of resource points. And it makes a created mission looks more like a mission.
4) Better UI would be good but not of critical necessity.

And there are more, but mostly things I think does not matter much.

Arparso:
Thanks for your suggestions :)

Save/load missions: Indeed a feature, that has been requested quite a few times already. I'll see, if I can come up with a reliable solution to do that.

Item descriptions: I actually got this already working in an experimental tool I never released to the public. However it depends on the mod authors to correctly name their ship classes and devices and supply the game (and the Skirmisher) with all this information. Not even the original game does this for every piece of equipment, so I don't know right now, if every mod cares about these details. Some classes or devices would be left without description or a proper name, I guess.

Ingame fleet configuration: As far as I know, the fleet configuration screen isn't available in single missions. It's only being used in campaign mode (and multiplayer), which isn't really available to your average mod out of the box. Even if it was - the Skirmisher just isn't meant to create campaign missions, so it wouldn't even work that way. I could try emulating this behaviour (or even the interface), though.

graviton:
Well... I guess no in-game configuration is not so terrible ;)
Another thing occurred me was the ability to modify AI, which would be good news for movie makers.
In the cinema mode, All ships AI are common, they would only fight with regular ways. But most times I would like to have a group of ghosts fight in stealth, or a ship loaded with missiles bombard its opponents. Something not useful in default mode, but of great use in cinema mode.
Oh, function to modify ship's fighters configuration is also needed.

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