Hello Modders, So I have a request/challenge, I put the challenge because this probably will be a challenge, for you all. This game is amazing and I love playing it with my friends. I love how Macro this game is and how you can pretty much automize everything in this game. But there is something that is very needed, we need the ferry system from Supreme Commander! For how easy it is to select a large amount of units and send them off to destroy a base, we should be able to set up factories to load the air transports with units and have them unload them somewhere else and then come back to get more. I remember creating a great transport system to have units constantly being moved to different places in Supreme Commander. And if a modder or team of modders does this, could you please make a multi-unit transport while you are at it, we really need that too! Please modders, make it happen! I have seen what you can do! You made a Community Expansion! If that can be done, I believe this can and should be made/implemented. Cmdr_Firezone38
Have you used teleporters? A single combat fabber in a air transport can build one quickly, or a orbital fabber or air fabber. Once setup they serve the function you require but much more reliable (air can't snip your units in transports) and between planets. You can rally factories to the teleporter and then rally the other teleports to send the units out. Also you can use use area commands to load and unload groups of transports. The thing i miss more form supreme comander is factories assisting other factory's.
Probably technically possible, but the only guy who could even attempt this would be @cola_colin, and I don't think he plays anymore.
Yeah, I use teleporters, and I really like them don't get me wrong. But when trying to move units fast to different parts of the planet early on in the match or when dealing with a single planet situation I believe air transports would be very useful compared to now. I have never used them before in PA for a strategy that has won me the game or changed a situation, but in Supreme Commander I used them all the time and they helped a lot, just because of the simpleness of having the ferry system. Plus I like seeing it happen. Are you meaning when the lines would connect to the different buildings? I remember I would have power plants wrapped around my factories and my factories right next to each other. The only time that was bad was when getting attacked and they all got destroyed because they were right next to each other, lol.
Ubermap, PA Stats, The original implementation of the global PA Chat, A tool to rescale PA units, I made a crude map editor when there was no map editor, ... generally things that are technically challenging and seem cool. The first versions of Ubermap worked by reading PA's memory to get their data. Fun times. I haven't looked at modding PA in quite some time, but my memory tells me that some APIs to control units and stuff were added at some point. Those may allow to implement factories assisting factories in a pretty straight forward way, no crazy hacking required. You'd basically just have to track when a user gives the command to assist and then take over control on the factory in question, monitor what the assisted factory is doing and copy over the build activity to the assisting factory. The "new" API may have functions for that. Similar to my response to factory assisting a ferry system may be quite possible using the "new" UI mod APIs. You'd have to track that the order has been given to a transport and then poll for units in the pickup area. If you can find any, pick them up and send them to the target. The unit control API may have those commands. EDIT: Yep from the documentation of the worldview sendOrder function in worldview.js it may work with load/unload commands. Probably has never been tested, so may fail due to bugs. But may work and is straightforward to implement. To work reliably you'd have to enable updates of all units at all times (i.e. more bandwidth requirement) and also manage tracking of the given commands of a given game in a way that survived a random restart of the client.
I have never modded before, so I wouldn't know how to do this. Got any suggestions on where I can learn what I would need to know to do this?
Have you written code before? Preferably javascript? Implementing ferry will need programming knowledge. In my signature is a link to a UI modding tutorial. That may be a little outdated by now, but might still be helpful. Specifically that tutorial talks about using the old mod manager. I think that has been changed since the community patch. Haven't tracked where the info on how it changed is. Probably somewhere in this forums.
Yes I have programmed before. I have worked with C++, Java, GML, and some Javascript. I will check that link out. It kind of seems like once Legion was released Modding kind of stopped.
The API I was talking about is in worldview.js, you can find that file in media/ui/main/shared/js/api inside the PA directory. If you have specific question on anything just ask
