Skirmish documentation: player selection

One of the missing panels from the previous post was the Players tab. Here, you can specify the various player settings for your skirmish game.

You start with an empty list. Press the Add player button to add the first line, which will be always the same player you play in the selected campaign. Click the button several times to add more players. It will randomly add the other players from the campaign, each uniquely. Once all players from the campaign was added, the subsequent players will be randomly chosen.

You may click on the Name checkbox to select or deselect all lines. Individual lines can be selected via the checkboxes under the Name column. Use the Remove players to delete unnecessary lines.

You can customize the race by clicking on the labels under the Race column. It will bring up the following dialog:

The radio button list shows the available players and their race from the selected campaign.

If you click on the small ship icon, the icon selection panel will show up:

Here, you can change the ship icon of the player. The player's color will then be determined from the average color of the ship-pixels. These icons are taken from /starmap/fleets/ resource directory. If you want to use your own ship icon, create a set of directories as /images/generic/starmap/fleets under the game directory, and place a relatively small PNG image. The PNG may be transparent and translucent.

The next option is to set the AI the player will use, clicking on the abbreviated label, the following selection panel will be shown:

You can select the difficulty level where each AI player will operate. The Trader AI is treated specially here: the player won't receive planets and its ships will move between your and your allies' planets. AI's other than Pirate will ignore such ships in the galaxy. The other special AI is the Pirate. Revolting planets may join them instead of the neighboring empire if they are present in the skirmish, additionally, other than maintaining the well-fare of its planets, they occasionally attack traders (within radar ranges of course). You usually have 1 day to rescue the trader, who will grant you random amounts of money or random equipment as reward.

You can also customize the player's Traits:

Currently, only 7 basic traits are developed and functional. See Issu #642 for ideas about upcoming traits.

The final option is to specify the group number by clicking the number under the Group column:

Here you can assign a group value to the player. By default, the Add player button creates separate groups for each player. The group logic dictates that you are in constant alliance with the other players, which means you can't attack them, can't declare war on them, diplomatic negotiations will play out favorable, and you share the line-of-sight with their radar and vice-versa.

The last remaining GUI features on the Skirmish page are the Load and Save buttons and dialogs. My best estimate is that I'll be able to implement them tomorrow along with the modifications required to play a skirmish game and save/load a skirmish game.