I'd like some feed back on an idea I got when making a plugin acouple of days ago.

Jump Engines:

Basically instead of ships having a set fuel capacity when you buy the ship, the ship comes with a Jump Engine outfit that adds X number of jumps to the ship. Different ships could have different types of Jump Engines that do different things. Like one that has 7jumps but reduces speed by 10 or something alongs those lines. Now each Engine would have a time limit before it would need to be replaced (120days, 90days, ect). If the player didnt get a new engine by the time the time limit ran out it would blow up and disable the players ship. Each ship could only have 1type of Engine at a time, but they could be upgraded.

The only problems I have been thinking about is, will NPC ships jump out of systems if the fuel is on the outfit not the ship?
Will the player find this very annoying, to have to buy a new engine every X days?

Any contstructive critisim is welcome. I personally like the idea it sort of adds a new level of play to the game.

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Yandiyen Eye
Creator of:(url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ev_devilseye/")The Devil's Eye(/url)

Cool except the 'replace every X days' idea, that would annoy me, especially since it would be quite hard to remember when exactly you need to replace it, and if you are not in a place to do so, you would be just straight screwed. But I do like the idea of different engines. In fact you could have different 'power matrices' each of which would have different amounts of energy, different recharge rates, maneuverability/speed, and support for different weapons. It could be such that a fighter has 3 power matrix choices: low number of weapons, high speed; medium number of weapons, medium speed; high number of weapons, high speed. You could go further and say that to have graviton weapons, you must have an anti-matter power matrix (or something like that), but the idea is that some weapons could only be run off some power matrices. This would be handled much in the same way that licenses are. Finally you could have different outfits that would be a default package, so you have fighter x, you buy the fighter an outfit that gives you power matrix a, engine b, weapons c and d, and a cloaking device. These are some ideas I have been playing with lately, I think that they would be very cool.
Joe

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"Life is tough, but it's even tougher when you're stupid."
-John Wayne

Some very nice ideas...

The 'replace every x days' effect could be annoying, or it could be a good realism enhancement. A way to make it less annoying would be to have the engine start off at full efficiency, then every, say, 90 days have it be replaced with another engine that has slightly lower jump capacity, speed, and maneuverability (a similar effect to the carbon fibre degrading and becoming useless). Have this happen a couple of times, so after a game-year the engine can only be used in a very rudimentary fashion, with only slow speed and single jumps. That way the engine would need replacing but the player could see it degrading and make plans to replace it instead of being suddenly stranded.

Of course, you could have expensive engines that degrade very slowly, cheap copies of those engines that occasionally stop working entirely, and so on. Sounds like a good plan.

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(url="http://"http://www.mazca.com/")Mazca(/url) , Moderator, (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number;=9&SUBMIT;=Go&urgaylol;=yes")EV Developer's Corner(/url)
Go get your knife.

I actually had similar ideas too. Mainly do a Millenium Falcon bit; the star wars freighters come as hull shapes and you cobble together a ship around/in them. I do think I'll do this if I ever make a plug (it looks so blasted hard to make one). The engine as I see it would be mainly a power source for boosters and weapons ect. I much prefer wormholes and jumpgates as the means of travel.

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...your amazing.
"No, I am better than that."

Maybe there could be a warning system. On the legal engines, it would let you know when you have 10 days left before you need to replace it. Illegal ones might not have warning systems, or they might have inaccurate ones.

It makes me think of the Vell-os Tx strength levels, where most of your capabilities are a result of your telepathic strength and the ship may have somewhat weak characteristics if you don't have those abilities.

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Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
-Edgar Bergen