I've been working on a Total Conversion and so far things have been going rather smoothly, but I recently hit a snag involving government specific hails. After consulting my handy dandy Nova Bible, I discovered that to change a government hail I should patch the STR# resource by using the STR resource. I did this according to the instructions in the Bible, adding all the hails as necessary. The problem is twofold.

The first problem is that a përs that I had originally created no longer sends out the hail that he is supposed to. When hailed he responds correctly, but he does not send out he proper message. Instead, he hails me with either a blank message or "b511 & !b174" or something like that.

The second problem is a little bit more important. Although the government hails that I set up work, they only work sometimes. Sometimes the government ships will respond with a quote that I wrote, and sometimes they will respond with "Howdy!" or "Greetings", the standard greetings for traders.

Any advice on how to solve my little conundrum would be greatly appreciated.

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Quote

Originally posted by CaptainHector:
**I've been working on a Total Conversion and so far things have been going rather smoothly, but I recently hit a snag involving government specific hails. After consulting my handy dandy Nova Bible, I discovered that to change a government hail I should patch the STR# resource by using the STR resource. I did this according to the instructions in the Bible, adding all the hails as necessary. The problem is twofold.

The first problem is that a përs that I had originally created no longer sends out the hail that he is supposed to. When hailed he responds correctly, but he does not send out he proper message. Instead, he hails me with either a blank message or "b511 & !b174" or something like that.

The second problem is a little bit more important. Although the government hails that I set up work, they only work sometimes. Sometimes the government ships will respond with a quote that I wrote, and sometimes they will respond with "Howdy!" or "Greetings", the standard greetings for traders.

Any advice on how to solve my little conundrum would be greatly appreciated.**

'STR ' patches are only for add-on plug-ins that add or change things in Nova, not Total Conversions. (In other words, you should really be editing the data files, not making a "Plug-In".)

So while it may not fix your problem, a good place to start looking for a fix would probably be to edit the STR# resource and get rid of the 'STR ' patches.

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Hector,
You should have just asked me! Since we have replaced the data files, there is no need to do any stupid STR patching- in fact I have brand-new STR#'s already in place for the government hails.

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~Charlie

Well thank you all very much for your assistance. I ditchted the STRs and used STR#s for the hails, and now all the përs ships are behaving correctly. Unfortunately, there is still a problem with the government ships. They still respond sometimes with a government hail and sometimes with the hail of a normal trader. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

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Try checking the InfoType flags in your dude resources, and make sure the "good prices" and "disaster" info flags are not set.

-Vaumnou

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Quote

Originally posted by Vaumnou:
**Try checking the InfoType flags in your dude resources, and make sure the "good prices" and "disaster" info flags are not set.

-Vaumnou

**

The only flag that is set is the government hail flag. Also, the ships aren't responding by telling me where things are cheap, but rather with the generic trader greetings like, Greetings and Howdy.

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If you want info on where things are cheap, set the "Good Prices" flag.

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Quote

Originally posted by Andcarne:
**If you want info on where things are cheap, set the "Good Prices" flag.

**

It seems that you misinterpreted the problem. I'm not having trouble getting the ships to hail with good prices or disasters, but I'm having trouble getting government ships to use government hails 100% of the time.

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The problem seems to be "which" STRs are used. The Nova Bible claims that from 10000-12559, the first 10 is for gövt -1, the second 10 for gövt 0, so on and so forth. However, out of the second batch of 10 (10010 to 10019) only the last 5 are used (10015 to 10019). I've moved around the other 5 strings to other ID locations (i.e. 10020 to 10024) but there is still no change. I guess I'll just make STR#s then.

Is this a bug? I'm using EV Nova 1.0.6 and this old thread proves that this was found in earlier versions.

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With further investigation, I've discovered that using STR# doesn't solve this dilemma either.

So I removed my plug and went into the original Nova scenario. To my surprise, it has the same problem! I only checked the Fed hails, but they only respond using the last 1/2 of their 10 pre-made hails.

Anyway, I've resorted to using "Advice" strings to compensate for this annoyance.

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Quote

Originally posted by getcrack4me:
**With further investigation, I've discovered that using STR# doesn't solve this dilemma either.

So I removed my plug and went into the original Nova scenario. To my surprise, it has the same problem! I only checked the Fed hails, but they only respond using the last 1/2 of their 10 pre-made hails.

Anyway, I've resorted to using "Advice" strings to compensate for this annoyance.

**

Two things. The first is that this would probably be considered grave digging, which is bad. I don't really care that much and I'm not a moderator so moving onto point number two Apparently, with government hails, warships use the last five in a set of ten and freighters use the first five. So there you go. Mystery solved... kind of...

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Quote

Originally posted by CaptainHector:
**...this would probably be considered grave digging, which is bad. I don't really care that much and I'm not a moderator so moving onto point number two
**

My bad. But I rather dig up a dead thread (hey that rhymes!) then start up a new one that would waste space.

And I didn't really care if you cared. (Sorry about the bluntness.)

Quote

Originally posted by CaptainHector:
**.Apparently, with government hails, warships use the last five in a set of ten and freighters use the first five. So there you go. Mystery solved... kind of...
**

Ah. Now I know better. I guess there should have been a section in the Nova bible explaining the attributes of certain STR#s.

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Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

Quote

Originally posted by CaptainHector:
Apparently, with government hails, warships use the last five in a set of ten and freighters use the first five. So there you go. Mystery solved... kind of...

Ah, yes. Another of the undocumented features of Nova. That little tidbit was put in, I believe, after a conversation between Matt Burch and Jason Cook about giving class types within governments greater differentiation. Funny how these things happen.

all the best,

Dave @ ATMOS