Hello everybody,
    One of the things that has been frustrating me (and several others as I see around the forums) is that when you browse the quests in a station, there is no indication of what race the target ships belong to.  It sucks trying to raise your faction standing with the EMD by accepting quests on their behalf only to get out there and discover you must destroy four of their ships for a 17% decrease in standing! 

This mod attempts to alleviate this by letting you know who you will be having to mercilessly gun down.   At the end of every mission description (for missions involving attacking other fighters) there is a "Target affiliation" tag.  Hopefully this will help you make more informed decisions about who to accept quests for and should make managing faction standing a bit easier.

Disclaimer:  This is my first mod (ever) and is not guaranteed to work correctly or be completely accurate.  Obviously I do not have enough time to test every single of the 2000 quests in-game to see if the tags are correct.  The ones I did try were working, though, so hopefully they all took.  Please let me know if you come accross any discrepancies in the missions (finding ships that don't match the description, for example).

Instructions:  unzip the file into the \Data\Quests\ folder and say yes to replace the "quest_database" file (you remembered to make a backup first right? ).  That's it.  Enjoy!

Link:
http://www.box.net/shared/yymatpqdq4

Also, I might begin to undertake to revise some of the mission descriptions.  I want to clean up the text and cut down on repeats and at least try to make the quests sound more varied and interesting even though I will not be changing any of the goals.  What I want to know is if this is something people would be interested in.  I don't want to waste the huge amount of effort this will take if nobody cares.  Let me know!

Later

EDIT:

File updated with fixed EMD targets having UF affiliation tags in the descriptions (see EDIT 2 below).  Just download and replace the existing file.

EDIT 2: (7-7-07)

This mod WILL NOT work correctly if you play as a UF character.  The EMD/UF tags seem to be tied to player race and the mod descriptions place them as EMD targets that will actually be UF for a UF player.  There's nothing I can do to fix this so hopefully the devs will do something about it soon.  If you want to play a UF character, I recommend NOT installing this mod.


Edited by Jorin - 08 Jul 2007 at 00:56

Excellent work Jorin, thanks. Does it work ok in current games, or is a restart required? (I'm guessing it does, just making sure...)

Edited by Goffik - 16 Jun 2007 at 21:10

Thanks to everyone that tried out my mod! 



Same here, but I don't know if I'll be able to do anything about it...  The most I can so right now is change and add text.



Thanks for pointing these out.  I'll try to work on them and see what went wrong.  I thought I had all the race codes figured out.  Hopefully not all of the EMD/UF missions are screwed up...  If anyone thinks they know what I did wrong, I'll gladly take help figuring this stuff out.

Later

P.S.  Sorry for not getting back to you all sooner.  I was out of town for the weekend.

EDIT: 

Okay, I've been looking into it, and the only conclusion I can find is that since EMD and UF people both draw from the same name pool, something got mixed up (in the game not this mod) and there are no UF targets!  Every quest I took that should have had a UF target was EMD when I got there.  However, since I was only able to check a few of these, I need to got confirmation before I change the mod...  So, if anyone has come accross a quest where the target IS the UF, please give me the quest name and system and I'll try to figure out where the discrepancy lies.  It would suck if there were no UF bounty mission targets at all.  Thanks!

Well, I've confirmed that there are no UF targets for bounty missions.      Even quests where the descriptions specifically say the targets are UF are actually EMD fighters when you get there.  I have no idea how to change this (yet) so in the meantime I've updated the mod so that their affiliation tags read correctly (EMD) and changed the description text to match. 

Specifically, the mission is "Double game" where the game says you should be tracking UF targets if anyone wants to confirm this.

I'll continue to work on finding out how to get the game to spawn UF ships for missions that should have them.  Furthermore, if any devs read this, perhaps this is something you should look into and fix with a patch or something.

I ran into a couple problems today.  I was in Draco and accepted a couple quests supposedly to destroy EMD targets in Draco.  One quest was about a prison riot and fleeing EMD ships to destroy, and the other was "Bandits of Mist".

Unfortuately, both turned out to actually be UF targets!


Edited by joebd80 - 03 Jul 2007 at 22:38

Yep, I've confirmed it further.  Playing as UF I have found that every quest I take that says the target is EMD turns out to be UF when I arrive at the destination.  A couple mission names I managed to scribble down:  Cowardice, Plug It All Off.

To test it out I created a new game as a Chulta Olirion and the two quests I attempted correctly said EMD targets and had EMD targets at destination.  Weird.

Yeah, it  must be tied to player race...  I got the same thing when I tried as UF.  It seems that if you play as anyone else, they show up as EMD.  I hope the devs fix this in a patch, there's nothing I can do to get it to work right...

Goffik:  if you want to test, go into your pirate character's profile file and change your 'diplomacy' values to 100.  Then everybody is your friend!   You could always write down what they are now and change them back after you try a few things.  That's what I do.