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[Girlinhat]

How exactly do you upgrade ships?  I've got some money in my fabber, how do I put it to use and, for instance, install an extra shield on the exterior of my ship?

[Draxis]

You need external docking equipment, which that ship does not have, but basically you stick the part on a series of explosive bolts, or hull pieces with an explosive bolt at the end, such that the part will be at the end of the chain, and when a docking clamp grabs the chain, the component will be against a open hull connection. You then explode the bolt holding on the component to be added, release the connector from the docking clamp, and recycle it.  You could also just mount the component on a docking clamp directly.

[SuicideJunkie]

You've got a drydock on your mothership, so you can dock the fighter in there, and build a single shield generator.
Then dock the shield generator into the drydock in the right place next to your fighter.
When the fighter undocks, the shield will stick to the hull in the fighter.

Spacedocks can do the same thing; its far more convenient than explosive bolts scaffolding and clamps, and that's what you pay the premium price to get a dock

Edit:
If you mean to weld an extra shield on to your mothership, then you can still do it, just pretend the drydock is a giant clamp.
1) Load a copy of your ship into the designer
2) Add the shield generator in the place you want it (make sure its connected)
3) Delete everything from the ship except the shield and drydock
4) Place a hull 1 segment in the drydock to grab, then delete the dock.  (If you're building a hex shield, upgrade to a hull 2 segment and explosive bolt 2s.)
4b) For $20 more, you can add a capacitor 0 to the hull segment too, and the shield generator will have enough juice to stay enabled for the single turn before you weld it on and it starts to use the main ship's power.
5) Place explosive bolts to make the whole structure and shield generator connected
6) Save, build and dock the upgrade "ship"
The explosive bolts will collide with your hull and the edge of the drydock, and get knocked loose, but they're disposable and that's OK.

Or, since the drydock is so huge, you can just wing it, make a bolt string about the right length and then fudge the exact placement during docking.

[SuicideJunkie]

Girlinhat; you're soaking a lot of missiles in that unshielded aft section.
I'd suggest making a random turn so you at least get partial shielding against the blasts.

[Girlinhat]

While a decent idea, I've accepted my fate.  This ship was designed of no knowledge on how the game actually plays.  Now that I have some idea, things should run a little smoother.

I was also curious how you (SJ) felt about moving parts.  Specifically, rotators and telescopes.  They might work similar to ship rotation, adding amounts slowly until they're able to move a whole segment, which would prevent putting laser batteries on turrets to become ultimate anti-fighter, but would allow small laser turrets, slowly shaping vessels, and engine gimballing.  One thing in particular would be the ability to unfold a fighter, so that it can fit in a small bay, but deploy for combat.

On a similar note, what an ability to close a connection hardpoint?  Building missile rigs can get weird as you try to match up hardpoints so that parts of the missile don't stay attached, and if ship parts could move then being able to make hardpoints 'un-sticky' would help quite a bit.

[USEC_OFFICER]

While a decent idea, I've accepted my fate.  This ship was designed of no knowledge on how the game actually plays.  Now that I have some idea, things should run a little smoother.

I can't wait to see your next design, since I've come up with my own theories and I want to see how they compare.

Also, Draxis's free-for-all game is here if you're still interested. We're kinda waiting for you to join.

[Girlinhat]

Aha, there it is.  $60,000 limit yes?

[USEC_OFFICER]

Aha, there it is.  $60,000 limit yes?

Of course.

[Draxis]

To start a game, what is the GAM file that needs to be uploaded?  Just a blank one?

[SuicideJunkie]

You need to upload the PLR generated by the buildInitPlr script.
That script has been updated now, so you can set alliances and start positions arbitrarily.
If you don't explicitly choose one, there are reasonable defaults for the common player counts (2,3,4, & 6)

There should be a button for Upload Host PLR or something like that on the game page.

Also:
PBW will only start the game if all the player EMPs are uploaded too, even though only the master PLR matters.

[Draxis]

When setting player assets, is it valid to just put the host emp - "b12ffa1_000$.emp" - or do the indivudual designs need to be extracted and added?
Nevermind.

[SuicideJunkie]

The ship selection in buildinitplr is a regex applied against the EMP file names.

Super basics:
Letters and numbers match directly, period is wildcard.  ^ is the beginning of the name (so "^hi" will match "hippie.emp" but not "poochi.emp")

[Draxis]

On trying to download the turn file, a red box pops up saying:

Code: [Select]

Could not generate turn download file.
Is there any way to get more information on this?

Edit:
On trying to open the intial plr with the game, I get a whole list of
"Undef ships at *,*"
followed by a lot of
"Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at lib/perlgui/mapview.pm line 392"

I do not know if this is supposed to happen on opening a turn 0, but if not it may have the information

[ekolis]

You can't open a PLR file with the game client. PLR files are created by the client (or buildInitPlr script) and read in by the server.

As for the "could not generate download file" error, that usually happens when whoever's hosting the game uploads the wrong files for the turn. I'm not sure on the mechanics of starting a game with SJ as the autohost, so I'm not sure if that's a problem on your end, Draxis, or on SJ's.

[SuicideJunkie]

One of the most common reasons for being unable to generate a download zip is there being no files to zip up.

Bay12 1v1v1 is borked.
It looks like you uploaded the PLR renamed to GAM, which officially started turn 1.
And since its not actually a game file, nobody can open it as a game file.

I think I can fix this manually.

Edit:
Done.  You should be good to go now.
I've set the game to record history for a replay video later.