Droid Engineer Archive

This was originally going to be a reply to the Combat Droids Y/N thread but
it got a little....long. Btw, these things are all part of the official or unofficial
trilogy. I'm not just making this stuff up. Oh and these all have chassi that
we've never seen in-game before. This thread was greatly helped by The Essential
Guide to Droids by Daniel Wallace, published by Del Ray books. I recommend it
to anyone who wants to solve those "what droid am I" riddle threads
lol. Thanks also to ultra-creative "emperor_palpatine13" for bootlegging
what looks like the entire "Essential Guide to..." series on his/her
geocities page.

These are all just ideas. I'm not saying that this is the way it HAS to or
SHOULD be and that I'm not going to play ever again unless this happens exactly
as I've dictated. If you see anything you like, please say so. If you see anything
you hate, please also say so. In both cases, please keep in mind
this took me quite some time to think up and to write as well. I didn't just
decide to make yet another post about what sucks and what needs to change about
droids... at least I hope I didn't! I did this because I
love droids and what they could mean for SWG and I hope you will all add your
input for the same reason.

Human
replica droids (like Guri from Shadows) that I could make with the help
of an Image Designer and a Tailor and maybe a Weaponsmith too for anyone who
wanted to shake those nasty Imperial tails or Jedis who wanted to get the hell
away from BHs. Can anyone even calculate the possible income from a droid that
specifically helps Jedis not get dead? It'd be freakin awsome. Might even be
a good starting point for player bounties actually working.

NR
1100 Slicing droid for smugglers to augment their skills or possibly take
care of some sort of hugely complicated job that basic tools can't take care
of.

For city and personal defense: Imperial
Mark IV Sentry Droids floating around Imperial-controlled cities. It could
let some of those billions of stormies not have to spawn all the time and give
us some variety as well. Also, if made and sold to a Player City's mayor, they
could put them on patrol with the militia and have them be designated as player
city spawned MOBs that's default behavior was the same as the ones in NPC cities.
They would could also let out an alert of some kind if opposing PA/faction members
came within their sensor range. Whether the alert would be email, tell, channel,
system message or auditory I'm not sure atm. Along these same lines are the
501-Z
Police Droids . Same thing as above, and they could be a step up for player
city defenses. Ulban
Arms Warden 10-24 would also be a good droid to add to be the next step
up from the Police Droids. Very scary and tough. Nobody would be asking for
BLLs to be a combat droid after these guys were introduced.

For BHs, some assasain droid types such as the scarab
and the E522
I think would both be good for their hunts. The first is small enough to possibly
sneak up on an unwary Jedi/Player victim. They could have a limited range and
maybe not show up on radar. They could also possibly have video feedback on
them so a BH could scope out the situation before he ran into the crowded cantina
to take down his mark. The balance for this would be that droid engineers could
program different states to be inflicted rather than have them instantly kill
or even damage the target. I'd imagine BHs would appreciate the ability to dizzy/confuse/bleed/poison/etc
a jedi before they engaged them. The 2nd assasain droid, the E522, is more of
a mech like everyone wanted the BLL + rocket launcher hands to be lol.

Of course, for general combat the X-1
Viper Automadon, SD-9
and SD-10 war droids would be the best of the best. No way we'd need to
call more than 1 droid with one of these guys out. Too bad they don't show up
in the chronology until Dark Empire II. Oh well. Neither do arakyd probots lol.
Anyways, the precursor models to the SD-9 would be possible. Maybe some old
Mandalorian
Bassilisk war droids could be used in some sort of reworked state utilizing
more modern technology of the times.

For all those medics and scouts out there we also have Scavenger
Droids. These floaters were originally designed for scavenging parts of
downed Imp. ships, but I'm sure medics and scouts would appreciate their scavenge
ability becoming useful/efficient. Perhaps the droid could regulate what sorts
of thigngs were found from scavenging rather than it being random. There is
also the much larger 87-RM
which. These things are basically big dumpsters with arms and tools that would
be able to collect resources like the collectors we have now, but it could be
a variant that's programmed to follow the concentration to it's apex, collecting
along the way, until it finally stops and creates a waypoint and unloads itself
to start collecting. Later, a crafter could just hop on his/her speeder or hop
a shuttle to get right to the concentration rather than have to dismount every
few seconds. Also, it would be good if a crafter wanted to just walk outside,
call a 87-RM, point it at a resource and let it go. Repeat 3 or 4 times, do
some crafting and wait for the droid to report. You could even make it say to
find concentrations that have to be greater than or equal to whatever percentage
you want and it would auto-avoid city zones but not no-build zones because of
player cities or creature lairs. Video feedback to your datapad on the surroundings
would also be a good convenience. Other types of droids that would be good for
this are the FLR
Logger droid (guess what he does lol), 11-17
Miner droid, CD-2
Harvester and Decon
3 agricultural droid.

For surveying only, we should have the LIN
Demolitionmech (that upside-down bowl from Episode IV) that would basically
be a all-in-one survey tool. Only Surveyors (or perhaps an elite of survey if/when
it is considered) would have certification to use them, since only they would
be able to understand the data being produced.The droid would allow them to
survey for multiple types of resources at a time and have 2 3 or 4 percentage
maps in its UI while also extending the range past the current maximum. This
droid could hold half the survey tools, making people need to buy two if they
wanted to do everything. I'd imagine people wouldn't need to survey every kind
of resource, so people would usually just buy one OR if they did need two, they
could easily have one be for inorganic and the other be organic resources.

For repair purposes, Treadwells
and LEs
should be the second and third level of repairing things with repair tools being
the first. Vehicles, weapons, armor, other droids, everything. Having a tool
would be good, having a tool + skill would be better, but having a treadwell
would be even better and having an LE and everything else before that would
be the best case for repairing things. Vehicles repair systems would have to
be reworked or they could exclude them from the system. The present one works
fine anyways. Either way, Player city garages should have to require an at least
1 LE chassis and 1 WED chassis (yes, add these) to craft like how Player City
shuttleports require 3PO
chassis to craft.

Of course, we crafters also need some help with our collectors so the EG-6
Power droids will need to be able to cut power requirements ether totally or
by a %. The % would be higher the further up the survey branch of artisan you
were or if you were a Master DE and/or a Merchant of some level or another.
Architects should be able to add EG chassis to make this an innate ability and
also add the EG to the placed collector visibly. It would be fixed there however,
since it is after all only a chassis. The alternative would be to buy a real
EG droid and bring it to your harvester and bind it to the harvester until you
decide to move either at which point it would be stored again. If anyone wonders
why the EG shouldn't just walk to the harvesters itself, the reason should be
obvious: they are goddamn slow that it would take forever. Also their feet are
not made for anything but flat terrain so they'd fall over halfway there etc
etc. BLLs should be able to be sent out to fetch hopper contents (as long as
it fit their hopper, which would be determined by a new module or experimentation).
Of course we also need a droid to add power and maintainence, right? So we have
the MN-2E
maitnainence droid (floater) that could do just that. It'll go to the collector,
access the status window and show you what needs to be done. It would also have
a hopper (governed the same way as the BLL's)
that you would have to load with power resource units, but credits would be
wired directly from your bank like it is for when characters go themselves.

For merchants, there are droids such as the SoroSuub
Memory droid which could provide an alternative to emails keeping track
of purchases and possibly provide you with a video feed to all your shops. They
could auto-capture stills of people buying things if set to do so and not take
them if certain parameters are set (such as same person buying within x seconds,
same type of item being bought within x seconds, etc etc) to avoid hard drive
clutter. We could also set it to either notify us by email or not per sale,
daily summary, etc or we could access the droid ourselves and view lots of things
such as types of items sold over time, names of customers, when they bought.
All that information that comes via email could be broken down and stored on
this droid making it much easier to work with. The precursor to this droid would
be the SCM-22
stenographer which would just present all the aformentioned data in a list rather
than be able to work it around like the Memory droid can. TT-40
Library droids could take the place of, or augment, READ ME files being placed
as 10,000,000c items on vendors. They could be programmed with an ad-bark that
would encourage people to access it's datafiles which could hold up to say 5
or 10 items (vendor style) that the owners could type in whatever they wanted
their customers to read. Both of these would need require merchant skill to
be able to place but would need to be bought and customized by a DE. After that,
they'd handle just like vendors except we'd actually be able to MOVE THEM. damn
I hate that. lol CZ
Comm Droids could also be the precursor (skilltree-wise) to the library
droid, adding some variety.

I think it's really a shame that there is no inter-city NPC transportation.
These things should be all over large cities. The Robo-Hack
is an automated taxi that could, instead of the game laying down a line of green
and yellow to the nearest trainer, offer to drive you there shuttle-style for
a small fee. This would be a good way for people without their own vehicles
to move around cities faster. I know from my entertainer experience that a run
from one end of Theed to the other can be murderous without some wheels. The
run from the cantina to the enterainment guildhouse is bad enough.

More on cities. More eye-candy droids would be great. I enjoy seeing the atromechs,
EGs and BLLs and that's great for Mos Eisely but bigger cities should have more
interesting droids. 12-4C-41
traffic controllers would be fun to place at various intersections that the
Robo-Hacks would use for the visual effect of transporting players or just as
animated scenery. They could also replace 3PO droids at starports to add some
variety between starports and shuttleports. Or perhaps make player city shuttleports
use 3POs and change NPC cities to use only 12-4C-41s..... There is also a droid
called an automated
sabbac dealer, which might make casinos more interesting to at least look
at. Maybe players could start their own little casinos either in their homes
or make them player city buildings. Could be a good place to start if the devs
wanted to add a KotOR sabbac minigame at some point... Systems control droids
could be required/optional components for town halls or maybe factories reducing
maintainence costs?

For hospitals, we already have 2-1Bs,
but MD
medical specialists and FX
medical assistants are not present. These could both be added as cheaper
inferiors to the 2-1B surgical. Lets be honest. Every bump and bruise doesnt
need a surgeon to take care of. Perhaps the FX and MD could hold a small amount
of low-level stimpacks that would, of course, have to be bought from a medic.
The components for allowing such an ability would also have to bought from a
medic. Whatever the case, we'd get two more chassi to mess with. These could
be used as components for player city hospitals as well.

For residences, Gyrowheel
1.42.08 recycling, Guardian,
ZZ-4Z,
U2C1
Housekeeping, SE4
Servant , R10
Household and TT-8Ls
would be great additions if nothing more than to create some variety. I know
I'm only one of several people who want to be able to greet people who come
to my house with that eyeball-on-the-end-of-a-stick method that Jabba utilizes
so well.

That's all! Yay! Thanks for taking the time to read all that. Sorry about the formatting. Damn HTML editor. I'm going to go lay down and nurse my hangover now....

Message Edited by JediKnightMark on 02-22-2004 05:46 PM

Message Edited by JediKnightMark on 02-23-2004 11:41 AM

/applause

Nice pile of ideas. Maybe we'll even see some of them.

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Horoto wrote:

are there stairs in your house?

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This is exactly what could be a droid invasion , nice and great works !

But why it is always player who made so great works and nevers someone from the DEV team ,,,
maybe because they do not know the difference between a R3 and cool clear dome R2 ...
or maybe because they do not have any interest in droids ...

It is amazing what droids could do ... why the one i see are so dumb and have a short circuit draining their power and mind ...

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HawkCormyr wrote:

But why it is always player who made so great works and nevers someone from the DEV team ,,,

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JKN,

Man, you put a lot of effort into something that willgo so un-noticed by anyone who would have the power to actually consider your kewl ideas.