PigDog4, on Dec 19 2004, 03:09 AM, said:

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.
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The only problem I see with this is that the outfit gives the player immense amounts of maneuvering energy, assuming that it gives you a reasonable number of jumps. We had a discussion a few months ago about this, but I don't remember what happened. The general idea we were playing around with was super-massive tractor drones which hold you in place to keep you from jumping. This has the unfortunate side-effect of not allowing you to move easily (or at all), which isn't exactly what you want. Nice ideas here, though!

Don't forget that the A.I. ships don't have to have the exact same outfits or stats as the ships available to the player -- I do this a lot in SFA, where I have a duplicate of the ship that's available to the player but with different outfits and statistics to simulate just these kinds of behaviors from the A.I. ships.

You can make it so that the player/AI ships have the exact same stats despite having stat-boosting outfits easily. You just need to have two outfits, one that boosts the stat, and one that cancels. When the player owns the ship, he will suffer the penalty of selling the outfit, and will go slower then the AI ships.

Thus, say you have a varient of a ship that is supposed to be faster then the normal one... 550, say, to 500, but you can sell the extra engines if you want (and set the ship's speed to 550). Give it a +50 speed outfit, and a -50 speed outfit. The AI will ignore both, and go 550, the speed that you gave the ship. The player will use both, and go 550 too. This has the added benefit of allowing the player to capture ships without giving them great advantages they shouldn't have.

The only problem with this method is if you make lots of weapons/items have an effect on a ship's speed. Then you just end up needing a lot more outfits...

Okay, Part 1 done.

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The only problem I see with this is that the outfit gives the player immense amounts of maneuvering energy, assuming that it gives you a reasonable number of jumps. We had a discussion a few months ago about this, but I don't remember what happened. The general idea we were playing around with was super-massive tractor drones which hold you in place to keep you from jumping. This has the unfortunate side-effect of not allowing you to move easily (or at all), which isn't exactly what you want. Nice ideas here, though!

I don't really see a problem with this. The hyperjump ships are supposed to be really big, and thus are probably slow. Slow ships will move slowly, only slightly faster with an afterburner. Hyperjumps also could be made more useful while having the number of jumps low by having lots and lots of hyperlinks, wherever possible without lots of confusion.

Croikle, on Dec 20 2004, 05:51 AM, said:

The only problem I see with this is that the outfit gives the player immense amounts of maneuvering energy, assuming that it gives you a reasonable number of jumps.

Personally, I don't see that as a problem. If you've got enough power to go hyperlight (or open a jumppoint, or whatever), it makes sense that such power could be diverted to sublight maneuvering if the captain so chose.

Lindley, on Dec 19 2004, 01:42 PM, said:

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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Holy Crap, that's a great idea!! I think I'm going to try that!

Link hypergates and jump routes from "realspace" systems to one or more of the "hyperspace" systems. In the hyperspace system are whole bunches of hypergates which link to specific "realspace" systems. That way when you enter a hypergate, you have to pick which direction you're traveling in. Capitol ships have jump engines (more than 100 fuel) so can bypass the gates and jump in directly via the jump routes. The jump engines won't look right, but it's still pretty cool!

^It would have to be multiple hyperspace systems (perhaps one for each sector), because otherwise you could go anywhere in almost no elapsed game time.

I could give you what I got to the last time I tried this if you like. Not much in the way of content, but I did get some hyperspace systs mapped out, and even a few normal-space systs around the Sol sector.

This post has been edited by Lindley : 20 December 2004 - 08:57 PM

Actually, I just figured out another way to fix the problem I brought up: you can just have different versions of the various fuel-consuming outfits which drain fuel much faster, and replace the old ones with the new when you get jump engines. Still, if we're supposed to be able to use all this extra jump power for subjump travel (as the shared fuel system dictates), this isn't really a problem.

Lindley, on Dec 21 2004, 01:53 AM, said:

^It would have to be multiple hyperspace systems (perhaps one for each sector), because otherwise you could go anywhere in almost no elapsed game time.

I could give you what I got to the last time I tried this if you like. Not much in the way of content, but I did get some hyperspace systs mapped out, and even a few normal-space systs around the Sol sector.
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Wow, thanks Lindley. That would save me having to do a lot of busy work. I can't tell when I'm going to get started on this (my life is rather hectic right now) but I'll let you know. Do you want to e-mail me the file? My address is in my signature...

For explaining why pirates would be allowed to use hyperlinks. This reminds me of the Sci-fi series, Andromeda. In this universe, ships use slipstream drive technology to get to one system to another.

This post has been edited by Coraxus : 21 December 2004 - 09:03 PM

It's not a problem. The file is just sitting on my hard drive at the moment, not helping anything that way. And I doubt I'll go back to it, since my Firefly TC is taking priority.

Lindley, on Dec 19 2004, 07:42 AM, said:

Setting acceleration to zero just might do it....
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this will not work. I actually created a small plug to test this. setting accel=0 will make your ship unable to move. using an afterburner will make you still not move, only faster. accel must = at least 1 for the ship to be able to move. speed must also be 1 or more for obvious reasons. using an afterburner will still not help the situation of speed=0, as the afterburner multiplys your ship's speed* by like x1.2 or something, so speed = 0 will again cause you to not move. setting speed and accel to 1 are good ideas; for all practical purposes you will not be able to move, but because of the multiplying property of the afterburner, you will move at a speed less than 10 withthe burner on, not very fast. there are adittional problems associated with inertialess ships; fly a javelin and use the telekinetic boost and turn a few times to see what i mean. i had been wrassilin' with this idea for a plug of my own, and am sad to say i can't figure out how to make it work.

all of the assertations in this post are backed up by either my test plug, or my actual evn experiances or both. i say this because i don't want people to think that i am just posting random crap.

*if you don't belive this, try aurora carrier w/ afterburner vs. pirate valk 4 with afterburner

This post has been edited by darth_vader : 22 December 2004 - 02:12 AM

ZPhyrstar, on Dec 19 2004, 08:42 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?)
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As people have said...probably not a problem. If I remember correctly, in EVN at least, the hypergates were just controlled by a bunch of codes...so if you got the codes it wouldn't be a problem.

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).
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Yeah...of course it would be worlds cooler if we could actually give positions for dudes, at least in missions or something.

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

- 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.
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Yeah! No reason why you can't make the player ship a special one, in the same way your tachyonic ship in the Frozen Heart is special.

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

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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Well, either one should probably work, I'd imagine. The only thing is, again, I'm not sure the AI would take kindly to this, as I would think that it's been programmed to move around normally, and even when it's got the "use afterburner" flag checked, it probably wouldn't use it as much as it should for the purpose of getting around. It'd be an interesting thing to try though.

Really though, that's the idea I had in mind -- I figure it'd be interesting, since when you're in combat you'll have to keep an eye on that fuel, and make sure you didn't run out (and it'd give you incentive to disable every darn little ship so you can take energy from it).

Firebird, on Dec 23 2004, 06:44 PM, said:

Well, either one should probably work, I'd imagine. The only thing is, again, I'm not sure the AI would take kindly to this, as I would think that it's been programmed to move around normally, and even when it's got the "use afterburner" flag checked, it probably wouldn't use it as much as it should for the purpose of getting around. It'd be an interesting thing to try though.

Really though, that's the idea I had in mind -- I figure it'd be interesting, since when you're in combat you'll have to keep an eye on that fuel, and make sure you didn't run out (and it'd give you incentive to disable every darn little ship so you can take energy from it).
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A hostile ship will use an afterburner continuously, if it has one. I'm not sure if it actually uses up the AI ship's fuel though. I think it just increases it's speed and acceleration permanently, in which case it would also be able to move around if it wasn't hostile.

darth_vader, on Dec 22 2004, 03:10 AM, said:

this will not work. I actually created a small plug to test this. setting accel=0 will make your ship unable to move. using an afterburner will make you still not move, only faster. accel must = at least 1 for the ship to be able to move. speed must also be 1 or more for obvious reasons. using an afterburner will still not help the situation of speed=0, as the afterburner multiplys your ship's speed* by like x1.2 or something, so speed = 0 will again cause you to not move. setting speed and accel to 1 are good ideas; for all practical purposes you will not be able to move, but because of the multiplying property of the afterburner, you will move at a speed less than 10 withthe burner on, not very fast. there are adittional problems associated with inertialess ships; fly a javelin and use the telekinetic boost and turn a few times to see what i mean. i had been wrassilin' with this idea for a plug of my own, and am sad to say i can't figure out how to make it work.
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What if you bestowed the ships with several afterburners.. would they add together or just act like one would?

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The only problem I see with this is that the outfit gives the player immense amounts of maneuvering energy, assuming that it gives you a reasonable number of jumps.

Personally, I don't see that as a problem. If you've got enough power to go hyperlight (or open a jumppoint, or whatever), it makes sense that such power could be diverted to sublight maneuvering if the captain so chose.

You might also make a different afterburner for the really big ships to have that uses energy much faster than a standard afterburner would.

Funnily enough, I've been drafting an idea for a TC which uses this very concept however I quickly realised the time problem. To counter this I was going to have systems seperated into cluster (much like the way the fed systems are arranged in star clusters) with hypergate jumps used for long distance travel between star clusters, and "Personal Wormhole Generators" used for jumping between the stars in a cluster, this still allows for reliance on hypergate for main travel, but allows for time flow using short distance travelling. Also, I've been looking at creating 'one way' jump gates/Wormholes to be used as entry/exit ports. but have yet to figure if this is possible.

Arrange the "hyperspace systems" in a grid of isometric cubes. Maybe 6 systems wide by 6 long by 2 deep, so you get 25 sectors of space in which to put the "realspace systems.

I have a question though: If the player's ship has 99 max fuel, and he or she asks an AI ship to refuel it, will the player's ship's fuel go up to 100 (ie, more than max)?

If I want a player to rely on hyper space gate, I'd rather go with disconnecting every hyper link to each systems so they're isolated and are only connected by hyperspace gates.

This post has been edited by Coraxus : 13 June 2005 - 08:45 PM

This is all along an idea that I had just posted (to think all I had to do was read down a little further)
Anyway, the idea was a closed system of starsystems using only hypergates.

My problem was initially other ships jumping in but now, I have certain Warships using my HGs only to hyperjump out. (No jumplines, so that was strange) I set the ships to 99 fuel. Now the ships jump in and cruise out of sight, presumably because they don't have fuel for hyperjump.

I think I am going to Shelve my idea until something better comes along.

(quote name='Mispeled' date='Jan 4 2005, 08:22 AM')
What if you bestowed the ships with several afterburners.. would they add together or just act like one would?
Personally, I don't see that as a problem. If you've got enough power to go hyperlight (or open a jumppoint, or whatever), it makes sense that such power could be diverted to sublight maneuvering if the captain so chose.
(/quote)
You might also make a different afterburner for the really big ships to have that uses energy much faster than a standard afterburner would.
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(/quote)
I am not sure if afterburners "stack." Will have to test.

You could pretty easily make bigger ships have bigger afterburners with the Contribute and Require fields. However, Nova provides for that in a roundabout way: A heavy shuttle and a Fed Carrier both have 4 jumps. However, it would take a lot more engery to push that big carrier into hyperspace than that dinky shuttle. So the Fed Carrier technically has more energy that the shuttle (beacuse each jump contains more energy in a carrier) even though they can jump the same amount of times. So an afterburner uses the same percent of the energy regardless of which ship it is on (5 units of fuel or something) but since a Carrier packs more energy into each unit, it is actually using more energy.

What? I said it would be roundabout!

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)
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ZPhyrstar, on Dec 18 2004, 10:50 PM, said:

Set the fuel to 99!?
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Will not work!

In the topic This sucks- Things AS can do that we can't (AS= Artificial Supidity :p) on the EVN Web Board, JoshTigerHeart mentioned that AS can jump with less than 100 fuel.

Here's how we know that:

JoshTigerHeart said:

-Enter hyperspace with less then 100 units of fuel (ever disable a ship as it was turning to enter hyper jump, board it, and find it had 47 units of fuel?)

I have noticed that too. Also see the Broken Refuel Trader mission that has got an answer, but I don't think that is what happened. I bet if I boarded that ship, he would not have 100 energy...