Droid Engineer Archive

Last night while trying to fall asleep, I was thinking about why we couldn't color our droids. I played last evening before going to bed and made all sorts of cool droid chasses, with different colors, beautiful!I put them all over my shop for decoration. Yet we can't get our droids to come out this color. I am a software engineer, so I thought, why does this happen?

Here is my theory:

1. Notice when we make the droid chassis, and they show up in our _inventory_ with the good custom colors, not in our datapad, and they don't show up as deeds.

2. When we make the final droid, it becomes a _deed_ in our inventory.

3. When we tame the droid, it comes out into the world, then we store it to the datapad.

4. So why don't the droids come out with colors? Connecting the above three facts, the problem is that the internal data structure for the deed has nothing in it to store custom information about the droid colors. It is a generic data structure used to represent everything from houses to harvesters to droids.

5. So ALL color information about the droid is lost when the chassis gets put into the final droid, because there is no place in the droid deed data structure to store the color data that is contained in the chassis data structure. It just gets thrown out.

6. Result: The devs had to make some stock droid color for each droid when it was tamed, since none of the data was transferred from the chassis. For R2's, they decided Red and Gray for unknown reasons. For R4's, they chose gray and white, etc.

7. This problem could probably be fixed in one or two days by the droid/crafting dev, but it is a lower priority than many other bugs, so it never gets done.

First off I realize we all eat sleep and breath DE but man you got issues

Secondly, I think you're right. I was thinking the same thing last night while cracking out a Probot. Looking at the deed rotating in my finish product window I was thinking ...of course its got no color ...deeds cant be colored doesnt have the flag for it, so where does that data go? When you think about it the use of colored droids adds a bit of information to the server (which they may not have the space for). I mean, when you make the chasis It has properties (name of item etc) they had to add a new bit to it for color ... when you "tame" an item there's no correlation to the acutal item you made ...just a cookie cutter from the Probot source (of course with some flags for what modules, armor etc you put in it ...)

Anyway, Yeah seems like it'd be fairly easy to fix, just add an attribute for color on the deed (since they have to store other module data anyway). What worries me more is that they obviously never made even one colored droid before this went live ...I mean how could they? NO droid colors work on the final product.

-Kralis

MDE Bloodfin

I figure it's a 50:50 shot. Either the field/attribute for color isn't in place in the deed, or it's simply not being propagated from the chassis component to the appropriate fields in the deed.

There is nothing theorical about it. They stated in that they were working on droid coloring for the 'Big Patch' but never got it working 100% so they didn't put it in. Everything else, fading customization, coloring frames is just leftovers of the half implemented system.

IMO, the best thing to do is to do away with the deed system completely. Make droids like pets, where they just are an inventory item until you "tame" them. "Tame" is a bad word... it's not like there are wild droids running about the countryside... but I digress. If the droid were an item, as a pet is, there would be less confusion as well. Plus it seems that the custom coloring would be more likely to stick if this sort of system were in place.

Well I can understand them wanting to move quickly to get new stuff out (after all how many DE's are there left ? 12 maybe 13 of us). But to "half implement" a system is just poor ...is there no change control for production systems?

-Kralis

Master DE Bloodfin

---

duncje wrote:
IMO, the best thing to do is to do away with the deed system completely. Make droids like pets, where they just are an inventory item until you "tame" them. "Tame" is a bad word... it's not like there are wild droids running about the countryside... but I digress. If the droid were an item, as a pet is, there would be less confusion as well. Plus it seems that the custom coloring would be more likely to stick if this sort of system were in place.

---

I think that instead of 'taming' a droid, you should have to put a DE-crafted restraining bolt into it, thus locking to droid to you.

hehe Oh dear lord ...teaching customers how to "tame" a droid is tough enough ...now you want us to use bolts and stuff?

-Kralis

Master DE Bloodfin

If you hover your mouse over teh slot where you place the chassis in the schematic it says that any experimentation etc will be lost in the "refurbising" process or something to that effect.

so, I doubt coloring the chassis will have anything to do with the final combine even when colorization goes in (hence the need for a "tool" to do it)

---

Stegalin wrote:

If you hover your mouse over teh slot where you place the chassis in the schematic it says that any experimentation etc will be lost in the "refurbising" process or something to that effect.

so, I doubt coloring the chassis will have anything to do with the final combine even when colorization goes in (hence the need for a "tool" to do it)

---

Which leads naturally to the question: "Why can I customize and experiment on a chassis at ALL?"

I suspect they knew people would want house decoration type droids.

To add, Specifically in the text of that tooltip it says the chassis and the components in the chassis's experimentation doesn't matter.Mostcomponentes have a number, I forget what it's called atm, that seems to go from -9 to possible +9 (haven't reached that yet) when experimented on. I've heard that this effects the CF chance in some way, but don't have evidence of it myself. The Chassis however does not have this number... which leads me to believe that the chassis is not taken into account during the final combine (if the quality rating[?] affecting CF chance is correct).

This probably isn't the place to state it but I just wanted to say thanks to all the DEs still out there, I personally think the pokeman creature taming is something they could have done without in SWG and still and always will regardless of how broken they are buy Droids.

Tesshu - Gorath

I wonder if you could run a stat off all the clusters to find out how many DE's there are what percentage of the community that would be ...might be interesting.

-Kralis

Master DE Bloodfin