Some tweaks to Bineshi’s “Unleashed” mod

Hello All,

I’m fiddling with Bineshi’s/Nathan Kinsman’s Unleashed V94 mod and will eventually put the results up at the mods download page. For now, I’ll report in this thread various tweaks as they are coded. I’ll include code fragments for those who want to adjust their own local Unleashed installations.

I also solicit suggestions for features that might be useful. In addition to being incorporated into the Unleashed mod, these could be put into a stand-alone mod of useful new functions in EoC and could be used with the game as distributed, or could be co-loaded with other mods.

Here are new functions that are currently working, and for which I will post code fragments in subsequent posts to this thread.

a) “Hostile Pause”. The game will Pause (by playing the intro movie, looped [Cambragal’s suggestion; thanks!]) if a hostile ship comes within sensor range or if the player ship is attacked by a neutral
ship. This allows you to step away from the PC without fear of losing your ship while you are away. It also allows you to lurk in wait for something interesting to show up, such as a Marauder supply convoy to plunder, without having to stare at the screen for long periods of idle time.

A useful additional feature (not coded; thinking about how to do it) would be to set this to trigger not just on hostiles or attacks, but on the appearance of ships of specific factions. That would require a way for the player to modify variables inside the program during game play. The UniGUI interface might make this possible — perhaps it could present a list of factions and the player could select all factions on which to trigger the PAUSE function lf a ship of any of those factions were to show up within sensor range.

b) Toggle the Pinguin Auto-turrets off/on while leaving the state of the point-defense turrets alone.

I prefer to leave the anti-missile PD turrets on all the time, but to have the auto-turrets off when approaching a crowded station. They tend to shoot at some factions even if no ships have turned hostile yet.

c) Make the target cargo pod remote-loggable.

You can then Remote link to it and have it dock to your ship. This is a lot quicker than ordering the Pinguin to dock to a pod. I find it crazy that (for example, in Act 0) this large unmaneuverable ship is the one that has to position itself to dock with those dinky Yellowstone utility trucks. And it’s crazier when you’re trying to collect a pod by docking your ship to it. Jafs has a better way, and now we do too.

d) Single keystroke command to instruct target cargo pod to dock to the Pinguin.

These can be issued in quick succession, so it is much easier to fill up the Pinguin’s cargo dockports with pods now. This command also changes the pod faction to the player’s faction, same as when Jafs loads pods.

I’ll post the code fragments for these functions tomorrow.