I had an itch to come back to Gmod again. Mainly due to SpaceBuild 2 which crapped on me the day I came back.
As soon as I loaded up my ‘Normandy’ ship, I got a shitload of lua errors. Mainly pointing to the Black Hole Cache and the Climate Regulator.
“Did Garry break SpaceBuild now?” I wondered, and wondered even more if I should try again to find the elusive SpaceBuild 3 (meaning I can’t find the addon version).
I happened to look in LS2’s info.txt and noticed the site ‘http://www.snakesvx.net/’ in the Author URL section of it, and decided to check it out.
Clicking the Forum link on the page, I noticed a section for SpaceBuild SVN Links. Quickly clicked on it and was greeted by live, active SVN links. Including the non-dummy version of SpaceBuild 3!
I quickly downloaded them all to folders I made, but wondered “how does it know you’re in a SpaceBuild map without the gamemode?” I got my answer after launching a sb_ map.
It senses if you’re using a SpaceBuild map (and now I know ANY map I load, loads SpaceBuild 3 and all of its folders) and activates everything.
I then noticed the old Life Support props don’t work anymore (obvious since I removed SpaceBuild 2 and all of its folders). The Resource Caches now have a new model.
And also, everything has to be hooked up to a Resource Node now. No more direct linking. It sucks, but I’m learning to deal with it.
Climate Regulators now require a new resource; Nitrogen. And ‘Coolant’ has been replaced by ‘Water’, forcing you to use water pumps instead of coolant compressors.
Now here’s the bad part. Air and Heat Exchangers are apparently useless on lava planets, and/or planets with high gravity or pressure.
I entered a very hot planet once, and died within five seconds in my shuttle. On top of it, the Resource Node, Atmospheric Probe, and Suit Dispenser that I installed are all exploding. I had to let Snake know that his forever Beta version of Life Support needs to be fixed in alot of places.
This problem was forced to deal with a Climate Regulator, JUST to protect the overly-sensitive LS devices from going BOOM.
Another problem is with the new Gravity Regulator. It seems to act just like a Climate Regulator. Instead it uses the coldness of space and still makes a ‘protective bubble’ around itself.
I managed to tweak the radius of both the Climate and Gravity Regulators with a simple Constant Value chip. This is pretty much what I want. To only have a bubble on the shuttle, but when you step out, you die without a suit.
But that has unpleasant side-effects, via the Atmospheric Probe. By turning on the Climate Regulator, the probe will use the data from it, instead of the planet.
The only option that I thought of to counteract this, is attaching a hydraulic on the probe and to the outside of the shuttle. When the shuttle hovers over a planet, the probe will be lowered into the planet’s atmosphere, and data will be recorded. If the temp is over 350k, then it’s too hot without a Climate Regulator. Anywhere below that and you’re fine. And the fact the probe will be brought back to the shuttle, it will remain in the regulator’s protective bubble and NOT explode. It’s a Win-Win.
I had to attach that new Gravity Regulator as I mentioned due to the probe being in 0G. After tweaking the regulator’s radius to only affect the probe and not the air around the shuttle, now I can lower it without it floating everywhere.
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After that I decided to watch a bunch of SpaceBuild 3 tutorial videos. Maybe learn a trick or two. And I have learned two things from this video;
1. Stop using the SmallBridge Part Snapper (or even Easy Weld). Use the Easy Precision tool that comes with the PHX 3 SVN, for seamless, gapless prop snapping.
2. Install and use Smart Weld. It’s more useful than it was before.
I did ‘1’ and rebuilt my ship before I realized I had to also use ‘2’, when the ship was all wobbly and shit. Plus I had a door that refused to move.
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Ok, well the next thing involved checking to see if a gm_ map with planets also worked, and does. So cool. I then loaded up my first ship design and wondered how I could redo it in SBEP, but managed.
On the second time I finally got it. I got the screens on and began writing down on a piece of paper what to put on the screens, then suddenly out of the blue, Gmod closes out with no reason why. Then Skype. Then Steam.
I start to panic thinking I must have accidentally hit the Power button on my keyboard. Then when my system looked like it was about to shut down, I noticed “Windows is configuring your updates”, and dropped my pen on the floor.
My hands turned into fists and my temper level went into the black. Windows just pulled a fucking “LOLOLO UPDATE!!!!!!!!” on me.
I was so mad at the time, but at least it wasn’t a system error. And since it wasn’t that big of a ship, it can be rebuilt. I just wanted to get this done before I do.