I'm sure i could figure out these things by testing, but id rather see if i can't tap into the collective genius here first.

While penciling out a few ideas for a major plug im gonna do independently (thus vaporware guilt free...) I stumbled upon a few things...

1. What are all the strings and what do they refer to? I guess i could just open each of em one by one and edit them, but a collection of their uses would be nice. Its mentioned in the bible only in passing.

2)Is there a max to the number of crons you can have in a plug? I noticed that crons have the unique property of never being referred to, only being activated by msn bits, so it would make sense for the ID to be irrelevant and unlimited... so the only limitation is that every time a mission bit is set/a day passes all the crons get tested? This probably takes relatively no time... so whats a reasonable ceiling?

3. Keycarried ships... I was thinking of one of my larger ships main weapon being a forward firing beam, but the beam is also mounted on an independant platform, so you could split it off and run around seperately. id use the "only fires when keycarried ship aboard" flag in the weap to implement it, but how would it look? when you fire off fighters, they shoot out of the front properly, but when they return they just sorta pop in... is there no way to force the ship to match velocities and sorta back in th eway it came out (or something similar)?

4. Another graphics based game engine question... 64 ships is sorta limiting for 'epic' battles, so i was thinking of workarounds. One was to make a ship that was actually a small squad of fighters, say a pack of 6 ships. When this ship is destroyed, it fires an escape ship similar but of only ~4 fighters together, etc... Has anyone gotten anything reasonably decent out of an implementation like this? You could use clever animation and banking frames to have the subships move relative to eachother in a very cool looking way, or perhaps even use the 'folding' frames for attack run formation. I could see that working out nicely, just the problem of the single reading of shields. I guess thats a reasonable price to pay for saving 5 valuble slots in a system. One problem i only just realised is that this wouldnt work for fighters at all... since the bay would be for the 6 at once ship. Hmm..

5. Syst exchange still isnt working out for me. Ive set up a ring of 7 systems each with 4 different versions for different govs. The visibilty is all set by perfectly mutually exclusive mission bits, and the hyper jumps are all set up only for the first governments systems connecting to their own. Shouldnt it still work out if, say, sytem 200 was linked to system 201, then i negate the visibiity for 200 and add in 400 in the same place (is same name neccessary too? the bible is inconsistent) and do the same for 201->601? Would 400 be linked to 601? Or am i pushing my luck... There are technically enough fields for a universe with 4 interchangeable govs for each syst and no syst with more than 3 neighbors... but thats 15 more fields i need to fill per entry. Also, the bible mentions it wont pick a random spob if it might not exist later in the game. If every spob can be subbed out, will it just default to random again? or does it choke...

(I realise the engine isnt exactly built for what im doing, but im going more for technical merit anyway. Limit pushing is most fun.)

1. Appendix III in the EVN Bible lists a number of the STR# resources. But I'd suggest you open them and find out. Their names give a vague indication of what they are but you can make a list with detailed explanations if you like.

2. How many crons are you planning to use?

3. No, that's not possible. It would require recoding that part of the engine. You couldn't even simulate it with a fancy shan.

4. I'd be interested to see how well this works. You could include an animation of the ships all moving around slightly just to make it look a little less like one ship. You could always explain that the mothership has a special fighter bay which is able to release 6 fighters simultaneously.

5. Regarding random spobs:
   "A further important consequence
   of this restriction is that if Nova detects that a mission whose
   TravelStel or ReturnStel is to be randomly selected will violate this
   rule, it will be prevented from being offered regardless of any other
   availability parameters the mission might have - i.e. if you create a
   mission and Nova refuses to make it available, check the debug log
   to see if the mission couldn't find a suitable nontransient random
   stellar of the desired characteristics."

Thanks for the input

1. Yeah, ill just dig through the strings. Its less work than I imagined it being.

2. Hmm... most likely no more than 3 digits worth, and none of them (or very few) need to be iterative. Unless i can figure out the templates well enough to have a C++ program spit out cron rescources. Entering data by hand is quite limiting. Especially if your GUI takes a full second to open each dialogue box.

3. maybe i can just suck it up and see how bad it looks the way it would be now. The mothership in question is vaguely helmet shaped, with a fancy array inside, the array possibly being a distinct subship to be launched and retrieved. Ill just mock up some silly space filler version to see how well it works.

4. The problem is asking the ships to return. If your 6-fleet dies and a 4 spawns out, then the 4 cant return to the 6-fleet bay, its a different type of ammo. I can imagine some work arounds... like changing subdivided fleets down to the least common denominator, but you cant do that on the fly (ie O260 : D260 G250 G250 G250 G250), but you would still need an invisible 4-fleet bay, or something... and you would need to change the fleet back up, later... So youd have to do ncb binary, which is a pain. Though if you could only have a small number of fighter bays, it shouldnt be that bad. I guess i have to see how escape ships behave as fighters first. It might return to the fighter bay as the original ship, so you can have your fighters die down to one each time, and keep 'refitting' them to a fleet of 6, which would be cheap. It might only work as a fleet escort thing, but still it would be pretty cool. I also remembered that there are only 4 weapon exit points... so that puts a cap on that. a 4fleet would still be fun, effectively quadrupling max ships per system. Or nearly so...

5. Doh... that means i need to write a seperate misn for each spob... 16 actually... at least you can still get the misn from any spob of a certain govt. Though I still lack resolution on how the engine automatically updates jumps....

Max crons = 512.

Actually, my experiments point to the cron limit as 256. It has been a long time, though.

4: how do you plan to make them die at different times..? Going to look weird, You could probably explain that they fly so close together because their shields are stronger then. Or to increase morale.. :p.

Hmm, ok. Even if it is as low as 256, that can be dealt with.

@modesty

I already said i would use escape ships, so when the larger collection dies it releases a smaller collection. The problem with the animations is that alt frames are overlays and dont stop during unfolding, and unfolding would look very cool to set up an attack formation. I will try some different versions to show you guys what I mean. Maybe one kind will use just banking, and another just animations, but the problem with that is the weapon exit ports... unfolding is the only workaround i can see for that.

That was me, of course.

I actually designed a ship to do just this sort of fighter cluster thing back in EVO. I'm not sure if the spin for it is still online anywhere, but I got around the firing point problem by giving the ship special unique weapons where the image of the shot was offset from the center of the shot's spin in such a way that it appeared to come from one of the individual fighters in the spin. One of these for each fighter in the cluster, and there you go.
(My cluster was three outer fighters escorting a single heavier almost gunboat like ship in the middle - so any "normal" weapons the player installed (if they got ahold of one of these) would appear to fire from the central ship, while the default guns fired from the outer fighters.)

As far as launching escape ships with lower numbers of fighters - I'd say don't do it. Just claim that the fighters fly in tight formation to allow a special shield overlap system - and bringing down this system causes catastrophic internal damage to all of the subvessels. Or maybe they fly in such tight formation that destruction of any one vessel inevitably leads to the destruction of the rest - and they fly like this to achieve maximum firepower concentration. Or something.
Here's why I'd say don't do it: In addition to the fighter recall problem, an escape ship launches with random damage on it, and that doesn't seem suitable for your plan.

Guest, on Sep 20 2004, 06:06 PM, said:

Hmm, ok. Even if it is as low as 256, that can be dealt with.

@modesty

I already said i would use escape ships, so when the larger collection dies it releases a smaller collection. The problem with the animations is that alt frames are overlays and dont stop during unfolding, and unfolding would look very cool to set up an attack formation. I will try some different versions to show you guys what I mean. Maybe one kind will use just banking, and another just animations, but the problem with that is the weapon exit ports... unfolding is the only workaround i can see for that.
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Still would not the exsplosion look weird..?

Wyvern, on Sep 20 2004, 06:21 PM, said:

I actually designed a ship to do just this sort of fighter cluster thing back in EVO. I'm not sure if the spin for it is still online anywhere, but I got around the firing point problem by giving the ship special unique weapons where the image of the shot was offset from the center of the shot's spin in such a way that it appeared to come from one of the individual fighters in the spin. One of these for each fighter in the cluster, and there you go.
(My cluster was three outer fighters escorting a single heavier almost gunboat like ship in the middle - so any "normal" weapons the player installed (if they got ahold of one of these) would appear to fire from the central ship, while the default guns fired from the outer fighters.)

As far as launching escape ships with lower numbers of fighters - I'd say don't do it. Just claim that the fighters fly in tight formation to allow a special shield overlap system - and bringing down this system causes catastrophic internal damage to all of the subvessels. Or maybe they fly in such tight formation that destruction of any one vessel inevitably leads to the destruction of the rest - and they fly like this to achieve maximum firepower concentration. Or something.
Here's why I'd say don't do it: In addition to the fighter recall problem, an escape ship launches with random damage on it, and that doesn't seem suitable for your plan.
View Post

Ah, great idea. Id not thought of that yet. The only problem i can see is that higher weapon innacuracies would cause the shot to wander around from where it should come out of, since its rotated around the center of the fleet. Oh, and I bet they had to be really big, too. Probably would bog down the epic battles i was thinking of.

And if i can get the escape ship to not eject with tremendous change in velocities, i can justify it easily enough. The shuttle bay thing is rather a non-issue, or i can make a shuttle version that has them all die at once.

The rationale ill use for the existing random damage to the ships is that they fly in formation to keep a cohesive shield bubble, thus the single reading. When the outer shield bubble is overloaded, (the fleet drops to 0) the two core ships projecting the bubble immediately collapse and undergo massive system failure, etc, but the remaining fleet can assign a new core set of fighters and attempt to reestablish the bubble to varying degrees of success (thus not at 100%, or an even 66.66 or anything, just a randomly reestablished bubble).

@modesty... You can set the explosiion to whatever you want. Ill draw a graphic of the bubble collapsing and two fighters worth of debris, then a bubble reforming,. Depending on how tightly the engine ties it all together, it will either work, or it wont. But let us wait till there is judgement to pass before we pass it.