Well, I have made several plug-ins for Nova so far (none released yet 
), and several questions have cropped up over time:
1 : The theta for submunitions is really making me mad. I thought that the munitions would just sub-munition equally over the arc specified by the theta, i.e., if you gave a theta of 180, and had 3 submunitions, they would sub-munition at intervals of 60 degress. Unfortunately, that seems to not be the case, as Nova seems to treat this field in the same way it treats the inacuraccy field. Anywho, I was wondering if anyone had a cool hack with invisible submunitions or something that could get the theta field to work in a mathematically pleasing way.
2 : The ionizing field also severly bugs me. If you fire an ionizing weapon at someone, it seems whether they become "ionized" or not depends on how high the ionization max field is, and if the ship has any de-ionizing devices. I would like to know if the ionizing value for a weapon could be utilized in such a way that the target could be "painted", i.e., just enough ionization to see, but not enough to destroy the ship (if its small).
3 : Weapons that turn into two different weapons seems quite impossible. I have been unable to figure out a way to use submunitions or anything else to get a weapon, when fired, to turn into two different weapons. The closest I came was using a weapon that had a weird set of sprites that turned into two weapons when it reached a certain point. The only other way I tried was having a primary+secondary combination, but that only worked if the weapon could only be fired once. If this is completely impossible, will someone let me know? I have been banging my head on this for while...
4 : I am also trying to figure out how to make weapons look like they are floating around in space (actual space, that is), in the respect that they go up and down, not just back and forth (i.e., they have a z axis). I have had limited success with using scaling, but this seems to be a bit stupid. Is there some other way in which this could be worked?
5 : In constructing a boundry box, in which the player had to fight other ships (i.e., an arena), everything worked fine, except that the ATMOS team showed up a couple of times. This got severly annoying. How could I disable certain perss from coming to a system without replacing the perss in the original Nova data files?
6 : Gravity. Gravity really ticks me off. Why can't the AI like gravity? Lots of very cool stuff I could do with gravity... but no... the AI has to get all fubar is gravity is around...
7 : One thing that I have been trying to get to work is the fact that when a already-exploding ship is hit (with a weapon), the weap explosion shows up. While this may be physically correct, is there anyway to have just one explosion show up per ship, as if the ship was destroyed completely instantly? I have tried using extremely high impact values (e.g- 9999), but this just moves the biggest ships back a little, and the weapons still hit it. It is really annoying, as I only want one big explosion per ship.
8 : I would really like a weapon to "stick" to the ship. I made a weapon that charges up, using count fields, etc, and it matches the velocity of the ship, but this weapon:
(list=a)
(*) Does not "stick'" to the ship if the ship suddenly changes direction.
(*) Does not work for interialess ships at all, because of the reason above.
(*) If the weapon does stay with the ship (i.e., the "charging-up" weapon, if the ship turns a little bit (but does not put energy into that direction, so they are pointing one way, and going another), the weapon that is fired after they are done charging up goes the completely wrong direction.
(/list=a)
9 : One small problem, which may or may not be a bug, is that occasionaly (it seems to happen randomly), a submunitioning weapon, instead of sub-munitioning at the point where the first weapon explodes, sub-munitions in the center of the system. I only noticed this a couple of times after I was hit in the back by my own weapon after I fired it forwards. Since then, I have seen it happen on numerous occasions. Occasionaly, the weapon doesn't even submunition; the explosion just shows up at the center of the system. This is very obvious if there is a planet at the center (i.e.-Sol), but the explosion doesn't seem to affect any ships at the center.
-- Well, I hope you can answer some of the questions posed above... and I also hope that none of the questions has been asked before, or is completely stupid 
-- hal22 -- hal22@mac.com