I sat down and made a utility that reads a pilot file and makes an EVO plugin with a new pers that has characteristics that the pilot file had. It places the pers in the system the player last landed in, gives them the same ship class, calculates which govt they are affiliated with, etc, etc. There are two major problems though: coward rating and weapons.

Both require a lot of calculation. Especially what weapons to carry. An actuall person might have their ship really jazzed up: ditched all the standard weapons and have 8 or so different weapons. The pers slot allows for only 4 weapons (in addition to what the shipClass has standard). So, if the pilot file says the player has more than 4 weapons, how should the program calculate which weapons to pick?

I thought of 6 criteria that would determine how good a weapon is: reload(short=better), count(longer=better), speed(faster=better), damage(higher=better), inaccuracy(lower=better), and guidance. A guidance of type 99 trumps everything an means that weapon is chose for inclusion.

Now, all that is fine, but I'm stuck. I'm looking for advice. I'm leaning toward making averages of all the weapons for each characteristic listed above (excluding guidance), and then having average values (reloadAverage, countAverage, etc). Then just do bell curves. If weapon X carried by the pilot is way above average, include it. I dunno. Frustrated.

Any thoughts?

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-STH

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Originally posted by seant:
Any thoughts?

Yeah, ye' can have mine. COOL! What did you k=make that in, ResEdit??? Did you use hexadecimal for it? Can you make one for EV? T'would sure help me with developing plugs!

Make it automatically grab 4 things. Yes, that method sucks, but every other option does to. Well, at least EVN will support 8 slots....

- The 'I will format my handle howeverthe****iwant boy.'

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There will come a time, when the/curse of the One above/will not be tolerated further/when the Lineage of Caine will be weak/and there will be no Embracing for/these Childer/for their blood will run like water/and the potence in it will wither/Then, you know in this time that/Gehenna will soon be upon you.
- The Book Of Nod

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Originally posted by Lyra Engel:
Yeah, ye' can have mine. COOL! What did you k=make that in, ResEdit??? Did you use hexadecimal for it? Can you make one for EV? T'would sure help me with developing plugs!

1.) Made it in RealBasic.
2.) Woozel wuzzle? Of course I had to mess around with hex dec conversions.
3.) In theory I could make one for EV, but this program is based a great deal on the pilot file editor I made for EVO pilots. I'd have to make some changes in how the pilot file is decrypted, and that is so low on my priority list that I can't even see it.

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-STH

coward is completely beyond me, but for the weapons i'd suggest dropping the trump thing. it'd only really matter in plugs which have small fighter bays, but that could cause some problems (i.e. someone who has a few turrets, a few missiles, and five different kinds of fighter bays, none of which do much good, would come out as an understrength carrier. rare situation, but i'm a programmer- the best programs work well on all possible inputs). i'd say at least one weapon which doesn't require ammo (if there's one in the pilot file) should be added regardless of its rank (perhaps make one major deciding factor be reload times ammo, i.e. the amount of time for which it can fire constantly. i always get annoyed when ai ships come at each other, waste all of their heavy hitting weapons at extreme range, and then spend half an hour trying to kill each other w/o any remaining secondaries), ships running out of ammo is cheap (i've got a plug in which several ships have limited ammo on all their weapons. they're allright for a few fights, but if they do any heavy fighting before they come out you they can end up completely defenseless). i like the idea, though. that'll make a nice way of coming up with well balanced perss for people who find the resedit interface less than natural

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if you find yourself in bed with a raving lunatic, don't worry: looks can be deceiving, it's probably not me

Quote

Originally posted by seant:
**There are two major problems though: coward rating and weapons.
**

Why not just use combat rating to define coward rating. Lower=higher, higher=lower.

Off subject, after you finish this i could use some help on a sytem editor for NovaBurst, could you drop me a line if your interested? (url="http://"mailto:ThorPrime@mac.com")mailto:ThorPrime@mac.com(/url)ThorPrime@mac.com

I hadn't considered the possibility of a plug having crappy little fighter bays. Standard fighter bays are so large that most ships can only have 1. And fighters come in so handy.

Your ammo thoughts paralled some notes I made, but you were further than I did. Initially I had ammoType as a critical factor, -1 type being highly ranked. I hadn't thought of combining it with reload info. Nice.

I did get something working, but am not happy with the ranking. It seemed to rank most EVO weapons as I would, if I were shopping for weapons...I guess. It gave space mines a 0.6 rating. FOrklift=0.59, DiscoMachineGun=0.51. I was frankly surprised at some results: tractor beam and repulsor beam=0.52. The phased beam turret was another surprise: 0.58

Good ideas. I'm going to rework some of my calcs and see what I get.

(This message has been edited by seant (edited 09-03-2001).)

Ok. I've played with my formulae a bit and have something I think is very close to accurately ranking weapons, but I'd like people's input on what they think. The following list are weapons ranked with highest rank at the top. Bays are excluded:

forklift, space mines, disco machine gun, phased beam turret, igadzra beam, En. Neutron turret, phase turret, neutron turret, blaze turret, neutron cannon, hunter missles, Em. cannon, Em. Turet, blaze cannon, phase cannon, rear phase cannon, swivel phase cannon, rockets, rocket turret, tractor beam, repulsor beam, phased beam, SAE, salvo rocket turret, SAD, pursuit missles, disp. rockets, needle missles, plasma siphon, defense pods

Does this ranking make sense to people? What I mean is, when you mentally classify weapons in EVO, does this list come close to your intuitive list?

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-STH

You could have more control over the pers's ship if you make a completely new ship class in your plug-in that looks and acts exactly like before except for any modifications with outfits or weapons that have been sold.

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Signed,
Brian Schack
"DOS Computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
--The New York Times, November 26, 1991 (also quoted in MacAddict 4)

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Originally posted by Ellmist:
**You could have more control over the pers's ship if you make a completely new ship class in your plug-in that looks and acts exactly like before except for any modifications with outfits or weapons that have been sold.

**

How is that going to help figure out what 4 weapons to put on the ship?

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Quote

Originally posted by Ellmist:
**You could have more control over the pers's ship if you make a completely new ship class in your plug-in that looks and acts exactly like before except for any modifications with outfits or weapons that have been sold.
**

That is very true, but as I said in an earlier thread, slots for ships are few in number when compared to pers slots (64 vs 512). In threory, some of the existing pers' in EVO can be overwritten as they are not mission related.

I'm compromising where necessary. No big deal.

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-STH