Aldebaran 2: Smax

[smacksim]

Edit 7/21/04: Note, I changed this from the version that was up from 7/19 -> today.

Aldebaran 2.0.7.a Full Download (Text and Graphics, a complete mod including a readme file)

Download, unzip, place the files in a Smax directory or use ModMan to swap the files (see notes below)

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I'm not putting up a 'text files only' version for this because the addition of the Colonists Faction requires the graphics to be there.

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Changes in 2.0.7: See above list, plus:

• Planetlovers and Universality Factions improved (Thanks Chaunk for pointing this need out)
• The Menu will now offer 8 Aldebaran factions and 2 Super AI. You can add the other SAI by hand if you'd like

The only exception to the above is that I didn't include Colonist graphics for the AI version of them. You simply copy the three pcx files and rename them colonist.pcx ---> colonistai.pcx, etcetera. I'm sure you can beat the 'normal' 7 Super AI already and need the challenge

Modman works really well. It's not yet packaged with a full auto-installer b/c Endgame is working on a last-minute kink that prevents complete hands-free operation. Look for this though with 2.1.0.

-Smack

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim
Aldebaran 2.0.7 Full Download (Text and Graphics, a complete mod including a readme file)

-Smack

I haven't downloaded it yet so don't know if you've changed it or not, but how about replacing "Mystery Food" with the "Cornucopia Machine"? I can come up with a blurb for it if you like.
Otherwise, I'll download tonight and start playing with it.
As far as the succession game is concerned, why either a green or eficient Faction is what I like best. FYI.


D

[smacksim]

Mystery Food Fight breaks out on Aldebaran

Mystery Food Fight breaks out on Aldebaran : newsflash on Darsnan's and Smack's debate

Oh no, the Mystery Food Fight begins anew! (Smack tosses a Xenobannana at Darsnan)

I'll try to explain myself a little more. As I got to changing things like facilities, I realized that while I couldn't change what they do, I could change how they were used, and maybe even how people thought about them. Satellites in Smac have always irked me. There just is no evidence or even suspicion that we'll ever grow food in space to eat on the ground, let alone produce minerals or energy. Now I know that the satellites in Smac are actually supposed to be on captured asteroids. That makes a bit more sense. In that case maybe they should have been called asteroid mining facilites, or meteor mines. Even so, it seems a highly unlikely scenario that material or energy would be worth harvesting from space junk or solar winds. Still, 'Satellite', especially when a ground base builds it, sounds like an earth satellite. A small, delicate piece of machinery orbiting earth.

So I thought: 'Where would we really go to find more space to grow food, space to grow energy, and sources of minerals?' We'd mine underground. Perhaps Chiron has incredibly extensive cave systems that gave them the idea. Who knows? But it seems more likely. The real crux of the matter was how to apply that scenario to the 'satellite' facilites in Smac. I chose Matter/Energy Transmission as the key idea. So food can be grown miles underground with light from surface collectors, or by chemo-phagy of underground minerals. The food then can be zapped back to the surface. Likewise, mineral production would increase because of the ease of transporting the raw minerals to centralized production facilities.....you get the idea. It's not a real answer to the Smac mystery of Satellites, but its a nice change I think.

The humor then comes from people's fear of eating underground food, much like people's fear of eating genetically modified foods today. Much of the underground food is based on fungus. Fungus-pops-icles, Fungus-Breadtrees, etc.. All such food is referred to as Mystery Food or Xenobannanas, or something else Pythonesque. As I said, I'm open to suggestions. Clearly 'Mystery Food' is distracting to some

I guess I don't yet get the Cornucopia Machine idea... I'm open minded on it though. Somehow reminds me of Smorgaasbord and all-you-can eat joints.

[GeoModder]

My 2 cents... Energy collectors are very much a possibility as a real satellite orbiting around Chiron, and transmitting back by a 'wave' beam to collectors on the ground.

Mineral collectors are indeed mined planetoids/small moons.

I once envisioned the Bulk Matter Transmitter as a electromagnetic canon sending mined minerals on a moon or something to whatever base desired (bringing it earlier in the game, perhaps as a replacement for the Living Refinery).

Orbiting food satelites is less of a weird idea then you might think. Upthere a 'balanced' food producing ecology is possible without interfering on Planet or the fungus, and ensuring an un-interrupted supply of it. Instead of all those satellites being launched you could always consider it the constructing city delivering the manpower which makes the orbital facility in orbit from material mined of planetoids/moons around Planet.

Btw, did you know that it is possible to link the ingame movies to whatever other Secret Project?

[smacksim]

I think it should be possible. There's the movie-lookup file that seems to match the movie filenames. I assume it's used. As we both know, there are quite a number of files that aren't used. I think the movies one is used.

movlist.txt goes like:

#PROJECTS
humanGenome, 0
commandNexus, 1
weatherParadigm, 2
merchantExchange, 3
empathGuild, 4
citizensDefense, 5

[smacksim]

Originally posted by GeoModder
My 2 cents... Energy collectors are very much a possibility as a real satellite orbiting around Chiron, and transmitting back by a 'wave' beam to collectors on the ground.

Maybe, but collecting what? The coolest 'collecting' idea I've ever seen as a design is for a Hydrogen scoop miles wide on the front of a near-light-speed ship. Apparently it's buildable, just would cost GDP of earth for a few years to assemble in space. When I was a kid after seeing one-way glass I thought: 'Aha! Why not put a sphere of one-way glass in space and all light coming in will be trapped. At the center you could harvest it'. Years later I read a dis-proof of that concept in some astrophysics magazine. A physics teacher had explained the two major problems to me back at the time of my 'discovery'. 1. There isn't a whole lot of energy to collect in space. 2. One-way glass is a misnomer for 'a tiny bit more one-way than the other' glass, with backlighting.

So I kinda lost respect for energy from just sitting in space collecting it.

[GeoModder]

Solar collectors in orbit around Chiron? Vast fields of solar collectors on Pholus and/or Nessus, although those might be to far from the planet to make the effort transmitting them. Your teacher is wrong, there is a lot of energy to collect from the sun. If it is worthwhile on Earth's surface, it is certainly worthwhile in space. The amount might not be so much as from fossil fuel sources, but it goes on and on for as long as necessary, which cannot be said from aforementioned fossil fuels....

And about your scoop collecting idea, helium³ can also be collected from a jovian planet's atmosphere, thus fueling your groundside fusion reactors by a 'cleaner' fusion process.

I'm thinking of a scenario of a moon in orbit around a jovian planet which is so far out from it's primary that orbital solar panels are not an economic option anymore. So instead He³ cloudscoop collectors roam the atmosphere of the jovian...

[Darsnan]

Re: Mystery Food Fight breaks out on Aldebaran

Originally posted by smacksim
Mystery Food Fight breaks out on Aldebaran : newsflash on Darsnan's and Smack's debate

Oh no, the Mystery Food Fight begins anew! (Smack tosses a Xenobannana at Darsnan)

And Darsnan tosses back all of his "rotten" xeno tomatoes he's been saving up!

Originally posted by smacksim
I'll try to explain myself a little more. As I got to changing things like facilities, I realized that while I couldn't change what they do, I could change how they were used, and maybe even how people thought about them. Satellites in Smac have always irked me. There just is no evidence or even suspicion that we'll ever grow food in space to eat on the ground.
So I thought: 'Where would we really go to find more space to grow food, space to grow energy, and sources of minerals?' We'd mine underground. Perhaps Chiron has incredibly extensive cave systems that gave them the idea. Who knows? But it seems more likely. The real crux of the matter was how to apply that scenario to the 'satellite' facilites in Smac. I chose Matter/Energy Transmission as the key idea. So food can be grown miles underground with light from surface collectors, or by chemo-phagy of underground minerals. The food then can be zapped back to the surface. The humor then comes from people's fear of eating underground food, much like people's fear of eating genetically modified foods today. Much of the underground food is based on fungus. Fungus-pops-icles, Fungus-Breadtrees, etc.. All such food is referred to as Mystery Food or Xenobannanas, or something else Pythonesque. As I said, I'm open to suggestions. Clearly 'Mystery Food' is distracting to some

I guess I don't yet get the Cornucopia Machine idea... I'm open minded on it though. Somehow reminds me of Smorgaasbord and all-you-can eat joints.

Or maybe SMorgansborg?
I like the idea of food being grown underground, and have even played with giving boreholes nutrients as the AI's will then be more inclined to use boreholes pre-placed on a map. I also agree that food would probably be more economically viably grown underground as opposed to via space supplied, and that said food would probably be fungus based.
From my observation a lot of the quotes for various techs and facilities have a more subtle approach to them, and are not necessarily what they appear to be at face value. Hence my thought of a "cornucopia machine". Translated from the Latin it simply means "horn of plenty" and is commonly associated with feasts and harvests, something that this traditional association can be used to advantage: from a marketing and sales perspective this would be a much more viable approach than naming the fungus-based food products "mystery food" (which food would you rather eat - "Mystery Food"tm or food from the Morgan Foodline's "Cornucopia Machine"?). The end result is the same - its simply how you package and market it is the difference. In the associated tech blurb maybe put something to the effect of "don't read the fine print on this one, because your gonna want to think that just maybe there are some things recycling tanks shouldn't recycle....".

D

[smacksim]

I nominate Darsnan to the:

Planetlovers Council of Gastronomic Integrity

It was a little known secret that certain business partners of Lindly we're gathering enormous wealth in order to launch a planet-wide retail market geared towards fungus consumption and Recycling Tanks foodpacks. In fact, it took several weeks for Syndicate spies to uncover the woeful truth behind 'Tasty Takies' and 'Lemonade Leavies', two products now linked with vast improvements in Recycling Tanks. Even harder to believe was the recent discovery that "Horn' a Plenty: Over Twenty", the tasty popcorn-like snack, is in fact deep fried planet pearls. Details at 11.....

[smacksim]

Originally posted by GeoModder
Your teacher is wrong, there is a lot of energy to collect from the sun. If it is worthwhile on Earth's surface, it is certainly worthwhile in space. The amount might not be so much as from fossil fuel sources, but it goes on and on for as long as necessary, which cannot be said from aforementioned fossil fuels....

All true. It's not worthwhile on Earth...yet. The cost of producing and maintaining solar cells is a net energy loss, or at the very least is less efficient than a watermill. And the sun is worth harvesting, of course! But not from some dim vantage point. The futurist measurement of a civilization's advancement passes through a point at which the civilization is only limited by the total mass/energy of their sun. Then of their galaxy, etc.. One day we'll harvest the sun, but I really doubt anyone will do it with expensive-to-launch, fragile, too-distant satellite-satellites. It's like trying to charge a train battery by pointing a mirror at a distant firefly. More juice, please!

Edit: Not that I like the futurist 'scale of advancement' much. But it is thought provoking.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim
I nominate Darsnan to the:

Planetlovers Council of Gastronomic Integrity

And Darsnan's first order of business is to launch a covert marketing campaign to topple Mystery Foods(tm) from its poissant niche!

From the ad campaign:

Picture a family sitting around a table and opening up their meal packets from Mystery Foods(tm). Just as little Billy is about to take a bite from a large beef steak, the announcer asks reprovingly, "now Billy, what would Grandma think about you eating that Mystery Foods(tm) steak, because you know it just might be her your eating....."


D

[Darsnan]

And now from the ad campaign for the new Cornucopia 3500(tm):

a camera slowly pans across a lavishly set dining room, candles casting a gentle glow in a room that wistfully beckons the viewers back to Old Earth. The announcer soothingly starts in:

"On tonight's menu: caviar, chicken cordon-bleu, asparagus flambe, a chilled French white wine, and for dessert a chocolate meusse. All of the delicacies and cuisines from Old Earth are yours once again with the push of a button."
A pause for effect as the camera continues to pan, before the announcer continues,"But to keep up the illusion, its probably better that you don't look too closely at the ingredients list....."

[smacksim]

Back to Development news:

The tech currently to learn to speak to Humans, if you're a Galactic or Colonist is Sentient Algorithms. I somehow swapped this around with what it's supposed to be. I'll fix it in place and re-upload 2.0.7 in a few hours. Its not game breaking, just annoying. Going to fix the (again) mismatched tech blurbs. Thought I'd already squashed this, but must of file-juggled incorrectly.

So what do you think of the new faction graphics? I did steal the base graphics and then heavily modified them in photoshop, so they aren't publishable, but it's a start.

-Smack

[#endgame]

ModMan 1.02 beta is in.

Swapping is currently disabled in favour of debugging messages, so I can pretty safely declare that anyone can use it.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118976

I need all the debugging messages it spits out, with the hopes of making 1.02 final super efficient (More so than +4). If it does what I think it will, I will only need to move the files that will get overwritten, rather than everything due to LFN bugs in Command.com's FOR statement.

Fingers crossed for the 9x/ME people out there.

[smacksim]

I'll give it a whirl as soon as possible. I'm file-juggling right now because:

Oops. I hadn't really finished matching each factions SE choices to the new model. That was easy to clean up. Basically I'd mislabeled 'Green' as an economic choice rather than a protocol choice. Found a couple other niggling faction mistakes too, and squashed them. It doesn't break the game, interestingly. It only makes SE choices a little weird. But that's history. The new textfiles will be up in a few hours.

I'm finishing updating the techlongs/techshorts/blurbsx files, which were buggin' me. I wanted all those original quotes I dug up to display by default (blurbsx), rather than upon clicking the little document or quote icons in the techs. So I swapped things around. Some of those quotes I found are pretty good

Also, little fixes to Colonists and Learning to Speak Chironian. After I test it thoroughly I'll post it. Could be late tonight. After that I'm really interested in playing with the new graphics that GeoModder imparted on me. Thanks. And of course, I'll continue working on the faction graphics. I found a great replacement pic for Zak. I really am enjoying the graphics work. I'll set up the succession game as well, and post it.