Monday, April 16, 2012

[SC2] Additional Pages for Research Tree

Is it possible to create additional pages to the research tree for a single faction? By this, I don't mean additional tabs, such as Land, Air, Naval, etc. What I mean is, when you control more than one faction and open up the research menu, at the bottom right of the menu beside the faction icon arrows appear that let you scroll through Cybran/UEF/Illuminate LANSA research trees. My question is if it's possible to create multiple pages for a single faction, i.e., Cybran 1 (LANSA), Cybran 2 (LANSA), Cybran 3 (LANSA), etc?|||:?: How would you use that? If you don't mind me asking.|||Four possible ways come to mind:
1) Page 1 = SC2 research tree, Page 2 = Revamp research tree
2) Page 1 = Tier 1 research, Page 2 = Tier 2 research, Page 3 = Tier 3 research, Page 4 = Experimental Research
3) If you need more room to expand the research tree and shrinking the icons to make everything fit on one tab makes things cluttered and hard to read
4) Page 1 = Individual upgrades, Page 2 = Class upgrades
With regards to points 2), 3) and 4), this would make it a lot more easier to allow for individual upgrades for each unit and structure in the game.|||I asked mithy about this a week ago its not possible because of the UI.|||I wonder if it would be possible to create a separate icon in the corner that would launch a whole new research tree panel widget system...|||What about how your able to switch between factions when you have captured an enemy engie and built a research station?
It allows you to flip to the other faction research tree. Maybe if you find were this is located at, there might be something to point you in the right direction.
Hope this helps.|||This is all handled by the engine and/or compiled UI. There's absolutely nothing in lua related to research, aside from some extremely vestigial code in construction.lua.
You're welcome to try to create your own research tree, but it would be 100% separate. You'd need to create the UI from scratch and would need to re-create the majority of the research sim backend in lua (since that part is all handed by the engine). You also wouldn't be able to interface with the existing tree in any meaningful way. It might be possible to use some hacky workaround for one-way communication that lets your tree depend on research items in the actual tree (assuming researched techs are actually kept in a global table somewhere; I'm not sure about that), but not vice-versa.
And then you have to make it exploit-proof on top of all that.
Suffice to say, this is not a great solution, and would represent an immense amount of work. I don't think there are even any FA mods that have UI/sim interaction as extensive as what would be required for this.

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