just how would I do it?

It doesn't seem like this has come up (my apologies if it has). So, what would be the best way to go about preventing ships from being able to jump into hyperspace w/o hypergates? I can only think of three ways (the third of which I'm not sure would work):

1. Don't let the ships have any energy/fuel, and don't sell any battery/fuel tank type upgrades. I don't like this one since I'd like to have the energy around to use for afterburners and weapons.

2. Just don't have links, and only use the hypergates. But wouldn't this mess up the map outfits? Also, I'd like to have some large ships that could jump on their own.

3. This seems to me to be the best idea, but I've got no idea if it would work. Just give every ship that you don't want to be able to jump a hyperspace distance modifying outfit (that adjusts the 'no jump' zone in a system) that increases the zone to the size of the system. To be really neat, it'd be nice to have it have a negative mass, so that you could sell it off (negative cost, too) only if you had a large ship.
   Or (this just occured to me), is there an easy way to set the hyperspace distance to the size of the system naturally? Then, it'd be a simple matter of creating (large) modifying outfits...

hmm...

thoughts?

Why not just make the distance outfit not sellable? If you really wanted to be able to buy a hyperspace engine, then you should make a hyperspace engine that, when you buy it, removes or counters the distance outfit. It's a neat idea, btw.

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me...of course now you'd have to install it on every ship by default -- not a problem, just you have to come up with a creative name for it.

Good luck!

You could call the default outfit "No jump engine installed", and upon buying a "Jump Engine", have it evaluate a string which removes the default. Upon selling the "Jump Engine", evaluate a string which gives back the default.

Of course, you'd have to find and change the STR#s which say "Unable to initiate hyperspace jump, not yet far enough from system center" to something more appropriate.

Lindley, on Dec 18 2004, 07:33 PM, said:

Of course, you'd have to find and change the STR#s which say "Unable to initiate hyperspace jump, not yet far enough from system center" to something more appropriate.
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"Unable to initiate hypersapce jump. You don't have a friggin engine, moron."
No? Well, if I did replace that, I'd have to make the hyperpace distance zero, so you could jump from anywhere. I don't want to be insulting the player that actually went through the trouble of buying a ship big enough to fit one the damned things, and the engine as well.

So, is there a way to just naturally set the hyperspace distance to the size of the system?

ZPhyrstar, on Dec 18 2004, 10:02 PM, said:

So, is there a way to just naturally set the hyperspace distance to the size of the system?
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Well, I thought you had this figured out already...my bad. My idea's a pretty clumsy one, but it probably should work -- just use an outfit to do it, and give every ship the outfit by default.

Firebird, on Dec 18 2004, 10:03 PM, said:

Well, I thought you had this figured out already...my bad. My idea's a pretty clumsy one, but it probably should work -- just use an outfit to do it, and give every ship the outfit by default.
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Yeah, I just thought that there might be a way to do it w/o having to use an outfit. Guess not. Oh well, no big deal.

Is it possible to enter a large enough number in the ModVal field to make the hyperjump radius greater than the size of the system? Remember, you need to make the radius equal to or greather than the distance fron the centre to one of the corners, since the system is square... I think.

What's the largest value the ModVal field can have? Is it a signed sixteen-bit field? That would make the largest value 32,767, but how long is the diagonal of the system? I suppose that one could time how long it takes to travel exactly horizontally from the centre to the edge, and knowing the speed of one's ship can use that to calculate the width. Or someone who already knows can just say what it is.

There was a topic about this once before. I forget what the outcome was but you can't use outfits because they're ignored by the AI ships and there's no other way to modify the radius. Also, I believe that as long as an AI ship has enough fuel it will jump out of a system, regardless of whether or not there are any hyperlinks out of the system.

(EDIT): From memory the system size is something like 12,000 diagonally. So yeah, if you give the player an outfit which increase it by 11,000 then it will prevent him from jumping.

This post has been edited by Guy : 18 December 2004 - 07:30 PM

Guy, on Dec 18 2004, 07:26 PM, said:

There was a topic about this once before. I forget what the outcome was but you can't use outfits because they're ignored by the AI ships and there's no other way to modify the radius. Also, I believe that as long as an AI ship has enough fuel it will jump out of a system, regardless of whether or not there are any hyperlinks out of the system.

Thats does it. Obviously, the game was designed to foil my plans. They've got it out for me.

You could still set the max fuel for all ships to 99 (100 is needed for jump), and just have the afterburner consume fuel very slowly.

Then, to let players jump, have a fuel tank outfit, but call it "Jump engines" or something, and check the "AI won't use" flag. Easy as the dessert of your choice.

Can't you set each ship to always have an afterburner and AI ships will use it if they have fuel?

Lindley, on Dec 18 2004, 08:38 PM, said:

You could still set the max fuel for all ships to 99 (100 is needed for jump), and just have the afterburner consume fuel very slowly.
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Set the fuel to 99!?
Brilliant!

To paraphrase a certain commercial...

That is pretty brilliant, actually. Plus, it has the added extra bonus that the Player Info box will say "Maneuvering Energy Only" which is exactly what it is.

Wow, that is a great idea, I really wish I had thought of that. It probably really would work, and I suppose you could adjust the energy drain of all your outfits/weapons so that 99 would be more than enough for anything (so you could vary stuff from 1-99).

The only issue, I guess would be whether the AI takes kindly to this. Apparently in the original EV/O engine the AI would never use up so much fuel that it went below 100 (it was either that or it never used more than 100) units. I suppose testing would show us if the Nova AI does the same...I certainly hope not, since this opens some really cool ideas, which I'm sure ZPhyrstar already came up with.

About the AI jumping if it has enough fuel, regardless of whether there are actually any links for it to jump use...

I was checking the nova bible, and you can set gov'ts so that their ships prefer to use hypergates and/or wormholes.

Now, how faithfully do the ships follow this? Do they just use the gates if its convenient (such as they're not under attack)? Since there'd have to be hypergates everywhere (otherwise, with no jump ability, your pretty much stuck), so the ships would always have the opportunity to use them.

Firebird, I don't think I've come up with too many great ideas with this, besides the obvious "it'd be cool if you had to use the hypergates to get around." I've got a few:

- Not much of an engine idea, but if we're talking hypergates and not wormholes, you'd have to have some explanation as to why the people in charge of the gates are allowing the pirates to use them (massive corruption, perhaps?)

- As the gates are the main means of interstellar travel, they make automatic choke points. When that battlefleet jumps in, you know where they're coming from. You could also keep someone from escaping, just hang around the gate and wait (assuming we can convince the AI not to cheat and jump out on their own).

- Not directly connected, but I'm picturing hyper egines to be huge. Too big for even your average capital ship to have. So, the ships with them would be kind of like the guild ships from Dune. Huge ships that carry capital ships with them for the jump. Now, I'm assuming that if you were in one of these ships and you had non jump capable ships, they'd still jump with you (based on escorts with less fuel than you keeping up well past the point when they should have hit empty). Explain that away as they're tagging along in your field or some techno jargon. The cool part, I think, is that you'd probably also have capital ship bays instead of fighter bays. Launching carriers from your hypership would be fun, and you know it.

Thats it for my ideas of stuff you could do with this. Anyone else got something?

P.S. Another idea just occured to me. How would you go about requiring using the afterburners to get around a system (gotta use this energy for something)? Would it setting the speed to zero work alright? What about setting acceleration to zero?

This post has been edited by ZPhyrstar : 19 December 2004 - 03:44 AM

ZPhyrstar, on Dec 19 2004, 12:42 AM, said:

- Not much of an engine idea, but if we're talking hypergates and not wormholes, you'd have to have some explanation as to why the people in charge of the gates are allowing the pirates to use them (massive corruption, perhaps?)

Forged ship registration signals.

Or all the pirates that use gates are actually privateers and under someone's employ.

Or pirates don't use gates at all, and only hang out at systems with convenient amounts of asteroids.

I know nothing technical, here; I'm just assuming that factions can be forbidden from using hypergates.

ZPhyrstar, on Dec 19 2004, 08:42 AM, said:

- As the gates are the main means of interstellar travel, they make automatic choke points. When that battlefleet jumps in, you know where they're coming from. You could also keep someone from escaping, just hang around the gate and wait (assuming we can convince the AI not to cheat and jump out on their own).

- Not directly connected, but I'm picturing hyper egines to be huge. Too big for even your average capital ship to have. So, the ships with them would be kind of like the guild ships from Dune. Huge ships that carry capital ships with them for the jump. Now, I'm assuming that if you were in one of these ships and you had non jump capable ships, they'd still jump with you (based on escorts with less fuel than you keeping up well past the point when they should have hit empty). Explain that away as they're tagging along in your field or some techno jargon. The cool part, I think, is that you'd probably also have capital ship bays instead of fighter bays. Launching carriers from your hypership would be fun, and you know it.

When I read this idea, the first thing that came to mind was the hyperspace network in Babylon 5. Assuming the goal is something like that, entry into hyperspace would be achieved by creating a vortex-like passage, either using a Jumpgate (for small ships) or a Jumppoint (for larger ships). Either way, the passage remains open long enough for support ships to pass through as well.

I tried a B5 TC several years back. Didn't get very far, myself, but one thing I did come up with was using a network of red-tinted systems as "the hyperspace network", where once you enter hyperspace, you lock on to the beacon of your destination Gate and head in that general direction. I never did figure out how to simulate jumppoints using that system, though. I had some vague idea about using NCB set strings, but nothing definite.

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P.S. Another idea just occured to me. How would you go about requiring using the afterburners to get around a system (gotta use this energy for something)? Would it setting the speed to zero work alright? What about setting acceleration to zero?
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Setting acceleration to zero just might do it....

Berkeley, on Dec 19 2004, 05:53 AM, said:

Or all the pirates that use gates are actually privateers and under someone's employ.

Actually, that idea popped in my head awhile back. It'd be a great idea regardless of what you do to fink around with the hypergates. For example, the Federation and Aurorans aren't technically at war in the standard scenario (judging from the fact that the Federation declares war in various strings). Yet they still keep invading each otheer and beating the crap out of each other. With this, you'd have 2 sets of privateers (call them the buccaneers for the Feds and the corsairs for the Aurorans) who raid their shipping and cause problems for them, and you keep the actual gov'ts at peace with each other, while still showing that they're not getting along.