Adding a new campaign, looking for ideas

I've decided that none of the campaigns really suit me, so I'm going to mod in another one. The basis of my idea is that an eccentric billionaire (trillionaire?) started a colony to support his business in the Polaris system, and the system directly beneath it and to the lower right. These are all currently uninhabited and border all three empires. When the player starts out, this company is in fiscal ruin because of the vast maintenance required to keep the infrastructure in order. With the help of the player this corporation will grow to rival the empires' strengths.

So far the missions I've come up with start with your basic cargo runs. These places need supplies, afterall. After some growing difficulty and a gain of trust, your job becomes more political. The Feds only tolerate the corporation because it's a major consumer--otherwise it's a real bother. The Polaris ignore it because they know the Feds don't like it, and thing the Fed's don't like can't be all bad. The Aurorans absolutely hate it, finding the corporation completely unworthy of its holdings (and actively tries to take them). The Feds, Polaris and Aurorans all need a bit of "convincing" to let the corporation stay, by means of assassinations and intelligence planting. Not only this but the corporation surely must grow to survive. GLi-tech looks ripe for the buying and Aurorans would make for excellent laborers. Heck maybe even the Kane band is for sale.

Basically I'm looking for any ideas such as specific missions, personalities, winning conditions, losing conditions etc. As oppose to the Ambrosia campaigns, I'd like to fully take advantage of the tree mission structure available, that is, winning a mission leads down one path, losing leads down another. What I do not want to do is add any graphics / sounds from scratch, instead relying on those already available. Basically I want to seamlessly use many of the available game options which the original campaigns do not (How about destroying some Auroran listening posts?)

This will be a lot of work, but I'm trying to limit its scope as much as possible.

Disclaimer: I'm a newbie on the forum, but not a newbie player. I played the original and EVN, playing through every campaign except Auroran.

This post has been edited by Epistax : 24 December 2004 - 12:10 PM

One idea I've been kicking around is making it so that dying isn't the game-ender it normally is. In fact, maybe it could be storyline-necessary to die + eject at one point.

Lindley, on Dec 24 2004, 01:27 PM, said:

One idea I've been kicking around is making it so that dying isn't the game-ender it normally is. In fact, maybe it could be storyline-necessary to die + eject at one point.
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Not a bad idea. I was actually thinking about having a mission where you take out Port Kane (It's my favorite port.. :() so perhaps ejecting + being picked up by a special ship is in order. That is, you get some special nasty device that wreaks so much havoc on port kane that they abandon it (let's say from a previous mission you zap away the Fed's funds), and the corporation offers to buy the wreckage from the Feds for A Crap Load ™ of money and repairs it for their own use. You're given a special ship to fire the weapon from which must be destroyed afterwards (self-destruct even).

Aye, the possibilities.

I'm curious - if you eject while in a mission, are your current missions failed or aborted? Or do they just cease to exist? Because that would allow you to set a bit when you eject.

Also, can you do a cargo delivery mission in which the cargo to be delivered by the player is not given to the player? Say, for example, he has to mine it out of an asteroid himself?

Belthazar, on Dec 24 2004, 03:52 PM, said:

I'm curious - if you eject while in a mission, are your current missions failed or aborted? Or do they just cease to exist? Because that would allow you to set a bit when you eject.

Also, can you do a cargo delivery mission in which the cargo to be delivered by the player is not given to the player? Say, for example, he has to mine it out of an asteroid himself?
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Well I'm looking into doing some pretty complicated things as for triggers. I really need to look at what's possible. You can get the cargo from either mission start, a stellar, or a ship you board. I'm not sure what happens if you have a destination cargo but no source.

Edit: A single expression is evaluated when a mission is "failed". In my mission I want to make it so you have to do something, then die (I'll have an autoeject planted on the ship). By launching a dummy mission after the real mission is done, I can make the "failed" the success and the "success" (living a day? I'll figure something out) the failure. Now for the failure you might still get the job failed message at the bottom, (I don't know if that's mandatory) but the storyline can proceed as a success from there.

It looks like most of what I want to do can be done alright, although there's plenty of room for error. For example lets say I set the pay value of a mission to -1050000. This will subtract 1M from a pilot at the beginning of the mission. If I want to reward the person at the end of the mission, I need to have this mission set off a dummy mission which instantly succeeds and awards the player money. What's not documented is if a pay value of -1050000 will abort the mission if the player doesn't have the money to begin with. As far as the bible says, there's no booleans for evaluating someone's cash. "Buying" a mission is important to what I want to do, so if this doesn't work, I'll have to do fancy footwork with a license to allow someone to do the mission. Why oh why do I want to make a capitalist-based campaign?

This post has been edited by Epistax : 24 December 2004 - 03:51 PM

For the money mission, try to make a rough estimation on how much money the person will have (this treads the line of impossible, i know) and use an appropriate percent reduction. I get the feeling bad things will happen if you take away more than the player has.

PigDog4, on Dec 24 2004, 05:18 PM, said:

For the money mission, try to make a rough estimation on how much money the person will have (this treads the line of impossible, i know) and use an appropriate percent reduction. I get the feeling bad things will happen if you take away more than the player has.
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The idea I had was to allow a player to "borrow" a ship. That is, the player pays a deposit. A bit is set while s/he is in the ship so they cannot buy a new ship, and their crew is zero so they cannot capture. A mission fails upon destruction which sets a flag making it so they cannot complete another mission until they pay a further penalty. They can return the ship and get their money back. So far it seems doable, although I haven't fully implemented it yet. I'm doing this because I have in mind a mission where the player needs a levi, however they'll be in no position to buy one. I could just drop the beginning deposit and just have the 'splode fee. Or I could make a license.

Edit: Really, this is a random possibility. If it doesn't pan out I'll figure something else out. I'm just trying to get a few different things going.

This post has been edited by Epistax : 24 December 2004 - 04:38 PM

You know, it's amazing how often I see people come up with ideas that will already be used in SS. Anyways, I don't think there's a way to make you mine stuff from an steroid save making a ship seem like an asteroid. The question is how you would get the stuff...fighters, maybe? Yeah, that would probably work. Make the ship escape in a fighter which has no velocity or acceleration (or max velocity) but has 10 armor, then have it fire a weapon (it hates you) that hurts it by 9 to armor (set it to 10% disable). Then you can add it to your "ore bay" or whatever. Kinda kludgy, but beats always being given your cargo or having to pick it up. Wait...Nova's AI would go around the firing the weapon. Meh. Oh! Set the government to start out disabled. The escape ship should be of the same government, and should also hopefully start out disabled.

Epistax, on Dec 24 2004, 08:47 PM, said:

What's not documented is if a pay value of -1050000 will abort the mission if the player doesn't have the money to begin with. As far as the bible says, there's no booleans for evaluating someone's cash. "Buying" a mission is important to what I want to do, so if this doesn't work, I'll have to do fancy footwork with a license to allow someone to do the mission. Why oh why do I want to make a capitalist-based campaign?
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I did something similar to this when I made my 7th escort plug for the mrxak challenge. (which still hasn't been judged, but for good reasons, I gather)
What I did was (if I can remember; this is likely to be wrong) I used a mission which took credits, was shown on every land, but was autoaccepted. If it worked, it activated a mission which gave the money back. The initial mission didn't show if you didn't have the money, and I could detect this using crons and bits. I can look into this more at some point (it took me a while to figure out the first time, but now that it's done that's much easier to do), but that's the basic idea. Good luck!

Croikle, on Dec 26 2004, 02:33 AM, said:

I did something similar to this when I made my 7th escort plug for the mrxak challenge. (which still hasn't been judged, but for good reasons, I gather)
What I did was (if I can remember; this is likely to be wrong) I used a mission which took credits, was shown on every land, but was autoaccepted. If it worked, it activated a mission which gave the money back. The initial mission didn't show if you didn't have the money, and I could detect this using crons and bits. I can look into this more at some point (it took me a while to figure out the first time, but now that it's done that's much easier to do), but that's the basic idea. Good luck!
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You know, this is actually doable. I had a reason that it wouldn't work but then I convinced myself I was wrong. The only concern I have now is if taking away X credits will put someone in negative or zero. If they only go to zero then this will effectively set the player's credits at X when the money is given back. I'll have to play around with this-- thanks a bunch.,

It's kind of a bummer that the game doesn't store a player's old ship. That is, if you run a mission which forces a ship, there's apparently no way to force their old ship at the end of the mission (unless I missed something).

Epistax, on Dec 26 2004, 08:15 AM, said:

You know, this is actually doable. I had a reason that it wouldn't work but then I convinced myself I was wrong. The only concern I have now is if taking away X credits will put someone in negative or zero. If they only go to zero then this will effectively set the player's credits at X when the money is given back. I'll have to play around with this-- thanks a bunch.,

It's kind of a bummer that the game doesn't store a player's old ship. That is, if you run a mission which forces a ship, there's apparently no way to force their old ship at the end of the mission (unless I missed something).
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No you didn't miss a thing but in the ports for evc and evo for evn there's a ship hanger.

This post has been edited by Scarab : 26 December 2004 - 08:51 AM

I'm going to hit myself in the head with a hammer now.

Missions which require money simply aren't available if you don't have the cash. They don't exist to accept. The bible doesn't mention this but it's good information. This makes some of my life easier.

I'll check out that ship hanger thing. Thanks a bunch.

You're welcome.

This post has been edited by Scarab : 26 December 2004 - 09:12 AM

I don't mean to turn this into my own personal Q&A thread, but it seems awfully convenient (I'd much appreciate talk based on my initial post), but has anyone ever had problems with Available Bits not correctly evaluating?

Expression: ((b921 & b924 & b926) | (b922 & b923 & b926) | (b922 & b924 & b925)) & !b930
Set bits: b921, b924, b925.

Eval: ((1 & 1 & 0) | (0 & 0 & 0) | (0 & 1 & 1)) & 1
(0 | 0 | 0) & 1
= 1?

The bits are from the pilot log. The expression is a copy-paste from the Available field. I've tried moving around but everyplace the mission is offered, it's offered. I hope this expression isn't too complicated because it's tame compared to what I may have later.

Here's what's happening. 3 missions are offered. 921, 923, 925 are the success bits. 922, 924, 926 are the fail bits. This mission is to appear if all three of the original missions were accomplished, and exactly one was successful. Just in case someone wants to know what the heck is going on.

This post has been edited by Epistax : 26 December 2004 - 11:01 AM

So what exactly is your question.

Scarab, on Dec 26 2004, 12:08 PM, said:

So what exactly is your question.
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I'd hope (0 | 0 | 0) & 1 = 0. The mission is being offered, when given those bits, it shouldn't be.
Oh wait.. a question. Why?

I'm debugging this the only way I know how. (0 | 0 | 0) = 1. I'm going on from there...
... the third expression, (b922 & b924 & b925) is evaluating true despite the fact bit b922 is not set...
....b922 alone is not enough to set off the mission (it evaluates false)...
...(0 & 1 & 1) = 1. ((0 & 1) & 1) = 0. (0 & (1 & 1)) = 0.

Ok so the evaluator has problems with A & B & C expressions it seems. Despite the fact that no matter how it chooses to evaluate it (no matter the order), the result should be correct. The bible statement

Note that since the Nova evaluator is fairly primitive, it may do unpredictable
things if you give it an expression like b1 & b2 | b3 ... instead, use proper
parentheses to make it b1 & (b2 | b3) or (b1 & b2) | b3, as appropriate.

Doesn't begin to cover it!

This post has been edited by Epistax : 26 December 2004 - 11:50 AM

Without knowing the details of the rest of your scenario, it seems to me that you don't need 3 different 'success' bits. If for this mission you're only interested in knowing if the player succeeded on at least one, and did all 3, then:

Mission A:
On Success: Bxxx Byyy
On Fail: Bxxx

Mission B:
On Success: Bxxy Byyy
On Fail: Bxxy

Mission
On Success: Bxyy Byyy
On Fail: Bxyy

This way your Avail On field for mission D could be: ((Bxxx & Bxxy) & Bxyy) & (Byyy & !B930)

Basically, try to keep the boolean as simple as possible. I think Nova only handles two sided equations reliably. But, I'm not an expert...

slouch, on Dec 26 2004, 01:48 PM, said:

Without knowing the details of the rest of your scenario, it seems to me that you don't need 3 different 'success' bits. If for this mission you're only interested in knowing if the player succeeded on at least one, and did all 3, then:

Mission A:
On Success: Bxxx Byyy
On Fail: Bxxx

Mission B:
On Success: Bxxy Byyy
On Fail: Bxxy

Mission
On Success: Bxyy Byyy
On Fail: Bxyy

This way your Avail On field for mission D could be: ((Bxxx & Bxxy) & Bxyy) & (Byyy & !B930)

Basically, try to keep the boolean as simple as possible. I think Nova only handles two sided equations reliably. But, I'm not an expert...
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Thank you very much for the suggestion. For this particular mission, all I am interested in is if they passed at least one. However for another, I need to know if they passed two or more. The missions can be completed in any order, so there isn't much to take advantage of. I might still be able to simplify it a tad but I think this is more human readable. I have a nice table laid out for my bits.

About the money thing... I think someone figured out a way to test how much money the player had...

And now about the ship hangar thing: The best way that was discussed involved having a silent outfit for each regular outfit in the scenario, and the same for ships. And a cron or two, but that's not important. The important thing is that a ship hangar would use massive amounts of resources.