I was getting a chocolate mouse from the fridge when I had an interesting idea for EVN ;). I soon realized that it would be far too late to implement, but still an interesting idea, that's why I'm posting it here instead of on the Nova board.
What if for each dude, there was a simple string that controlled the objective behavior of the ship by using a sort a sort of alogorythem, For instance, for a dude with four types of ships, you would have a string file with the entry:
ship1( ),ship2( ),ship3( ),ship4()
And in each set of brackets, you would type certain parameters that the ships followed. For example, if you wanted the first ship to attack the player if he was in ship ID 136, have the second ship to patrol the area, and the third and forth ships to act normally, the code could be:
ship1((b)if(/b) player (b)in(/b) ship 136 > (b)then(/b) attack (b)and(/b) destroy),ship2(patrol wary = 3),ship3(),ship4()
There could a large range of alogorythmes, controlling everything from what message it broadcast after what event (ie. ship firing, ship being destroyed, ship entering system etc), to how a ship attacked a target (ie, destroy, disable, leave when ship at 10% etc). As it would only be a simple scripting langauge, everybody would be able to learn it quickly, as they would only need to know a few obvious words, and what order to put them in. 
Not too bad fro someone who was midly wrecked when he though it up. Typin all that sobered me up though. :rolleyes:
(This message has been edited by the Necromicon (edited 02-10-2001).)