you might be able to use this...

So here's the deal...

I'm working on a plug-in that will allow you to customize the jump drive on your ship. What I wanted was for there to be different types of jump drives available. A class 1 jump drive allows to to travel from system to system in 1 day, a class 2 jump drive allows you to travel from system to system in 2 days, and so on, up to a the slowest drive, a class 4 jump drive, which allows you to travel from system to system in a sluggish 4 days. It sounds simple enough in concept, but it was very difficult for me to impliment.

Since EVN, by default, lets every ship jump from system to system at a preset number of days, the first thing I did was standardize each ship to take 4 days in order to jump from system to system. I did this by creating an outfit that 'increased jump days mod' by '-1'. Then I made each ship start with this outfit in the appropriate quantity in order to make it take four days to jump from system to system. The problem is, this outfit would show up in your 'extras' field during play, and I didn't want that. So I just blanked out the name field for it, and the 'extras' field showed 'no extras'.

The next thing I had to do was prevent ships from jumping that didn't have a jump drive at all, so I set each ships' fuel level to zero.

Next I created a jumpdrive outfit and a fuel tank outfit. There was a require on the fuel tank outfit that required you to first have a jump drive in order to purchase fuel. This way you had to buy the jump drive before you could jump from system to system. The problem was, someone could sell the jumpdrive, and still jump from system to system. Amneth, who has been very helpful for me, suggested I simply not allow the jumpdrive to be sold, but since I decided I wanted different versions of the jump drive, this would not work. I had to make the game force you to sell all of your fuel in order to sell your jump drive. Here comes the innovative part.

I made the jump drives into fighter bays, and the fuel tanks into fighters! First I created a junk ship that I called UNUSED. Then I made a 'class 4 jump drive' outfit that was essentially a fighter bay, and a 'fuel tank' outfit that was essentially the UNUSED fighter. In order to make sure you couldn't launch, or even see the junk fighters I made the launcher be a primary weapon (so it wouldn't show up in the secondary weapon menu field) and I set the bit 'cannot fire unless key ship something or other' so you couldn't actually fire your fuel tanks (which might be a cool addition later on). In addition to being weapon: UNUSED, I set each Fuel Tank (fighter) to also be 'added fuel: 100'. I also set each class of jump drive, in addition to being a figher bay for UNUSED, to jump days mod: -1, or 2 or whatever, so that the class 1 jump drive was -3, and would reduce the number of days for a system jump from the default 4 that every ship has, to 1 day. Now each time you upgraded your jump drive you would first have to sell off your fuel tanks. It works perfectly!

The result is I now have 4 jump drives, all mutually exclusive by putting !Oxxx in the availability fields of each one, excluding the other types of jump drives. Each jump drive is uniform for all ships, and controls the number of days each ship takes to jump. Pretty cool, huh?

Weather or not I'd use this, I like to see creative uses of the rules...

Wow, very impressive. Is there a repository for such awesome ideas anywhere? 'Cause this one certainly would be useful.

I'm thinking there's got to be other useful things you can accomplish with this -- I especially like the whole primary weapon thing -- and having these things still be weapons. There has to be some other way you can take advantage of this...

Hm...well, the only idea I can think of now is, maybe you could use it to age your ship as you get involved in combat -- since you generally have to fire primaries in close combat -- and over time if you fire a lot some of your ship stats go down? Just a thought. There are probably better things you can accomplish...

Definitely cool.

If you made those "Unused" fighters used as ejected fuel tanks, you could give them a -99 ammo type (Self-destruct type) weapon with a blast radius.

Detonate Fuel-Tanks.

Eugene Chin, on Jan 9 2005, 08:59 PM, said:

Definitely cool.

If you made those "Unused" fighters used as ejected fuel tanks, you could give them a -99 ammo type (Self-destruct type) weapon with a blast radius.

Detonate Fuel-Tanks.
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Actually wouldn't it be better to have them be missiles? Guided fuel tanks with unlimited range seem rather silly...

Unless there is something I haven't thought of preveting this.

Edit- I suppose if you made them spherical and have a speed of 0 it would work ok, but then you'd bejust as apt to blow yourself to smithereens as anything else.

This post has been edited by Keldor Sarn : 10 January 2005 - 05:20 AM

They wouldn't activate their main weapons untill: 1. An enemy was within the blast radius. 2. They were commanded to attack.

They wouldn't have very much speed, and the player would have to lure the enemy into it. Though most wouldn't use this in day to day combat, a mission to destroy a large fleet (Stop Moash Invasion, Ice McGowan) or a single powerful target (Alien Cruiser: EVC) would justify it.

Besides, SeattleLightning specified that they be fighters, not missiles.

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 10 January 2005 - 09:45 AM

Didn't someone once mention that a self-destruct type weapon never actually gets fired?

Eugene Chin, on Jan 10 2005, 09:44 AM, said:

They wouldn't activate their main weapons untill: 1. An enemy was within the blast radius. 2. They were commanded to attack.

They wouldn't have very much speed, and the player would have to lure the enemy into it. Though most wouldn't use this in day to day combat, a mission to destroy a large fleet (Stop Moash Invasion, Ice McGowan) or a single powerful target (Alien Cruiser: EVC) would justify it.

Besides, SeattleLightning specified that they be fighters, not missiles.
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Well, let's say these are special fuel tanks. As in, whoever designed them had the idea that you could use them as mines, so you have to activate the detonators, and the detonation system also had sensors to detect if the enemy was in range...

You could even have a little beeping noise as the "speech" the fighter made. Only it'd be a little silly having the text show up at the bottom, or to have it appear in your escort menu.

Bravo SeattleLightning.

But, I think you don't necessarily have to have it be a fighter, I think it could be any ammunition. All you have to do is set the MaxAmmo field to something in the weap resource.

:blink:

Okay, so I came up with an interesting problem. Tell me what you think of this...

I'm having a problem with the capturing of enemy ships. When I go to capture an enemy ship one of two things happens...

One: the chance of capture is listed as 1%, and never works, even in cases where I have a crew of 25,000 and they have a crew of 1.

Two: the ship is captured, with the text "fighter captured", I have no option of 'use as escort' or 'use as own ship' or an option to capture fuel, credits or anything else. I just get the newly acquired ship as an escort fighter, even if I don't have a corresponding fighter bay for the ship. Maybe the game is reading that I have a figher bay/jump drive, and the escort has a fuel tank/fighter? I don't know.

Anyways, in this second option, since the fighter ship type does not have any inherent fuel (all the fuel in my patch is in the form of outfit fuel tank/fighters) it displays the message of 'dont leave me behind!' when I jump from system to system, and I invariably lose the newly captured ship.

Obviously this is not desired. Any suggestions or comments on how to fix this?

For prblem one, there's an overflow in the calculation, so if you have obscene numbers on your ship and they have like 1 crew, then it resets to 1%.

I dunno about two.

I'm fairly good at math (I have a bachelor's degree actually), do you know what the exact equation that Nova uses to determine the percent chance for capture?

Would you be willing to post this plug-in or e-mail it to specific requesters?
Would there be any problem with combining the drive and fuel tanks into one outfit? Also, are the AI ships affected by this? I suppose it wouldn't matter except for escorts which jump more slowly (Leviathans). Are escorts affected but not normal AI ships?

I find it a bit hard to believe that EVN would have an overflow in its equation for capturing odds (unless you wasted several hours adding zeros to the right of values). Perhaps you have hit the upper limit for crew. When I've gone over a limit (shields and the like), I've noticed that the value is just made into a random negative, effectively zero. I know that there is a minimum capture odd of 1%, no matter what the crew values are.
Ah, ha.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/sho...lay=date&page;=2

This post has been edited by Klepsacovic : 11 January 2005 - 06:03 PM

Actually, this overflow is fairly common in Polycon. There's a forumla for it somewhere, but I forgot where. Someone will eventually post it if they know. (hopefully)

The basic, fundamental formula for capturing is:

X = (A + B + C / 10) / (D * 10) * 100 + E + (F + G / 10 > H * 5 ? 10 : 0)
A: Crew of player's ship
B: Sum of crews added by "add crew" outfits
Sum of crews of warship escorts
Crew of enemy ship
E: Sum of percent added by "add percent" outfits.
F: Strength of player's ship
G: Sum of strengths of warship escorts
H: Strength of enemy ship
(w > x ? y : z) means "if w > x, then y; otherwise z"
Take into accont that if your ship or the enemy ship has 0 crew, or you are not allowed to have escorts, you cannot capture the enemy ship.
After this is all done, the engine randomly adds an integer from -5 to 5 to it. If it is > 75, it is a flat 75; if it is < 1, it is a flat 1.

This post has been edited by orcaloverbri9 : 11 January 2005 - 11:17 PM

I know this is an old topic but it's not too old and I'd just like to point out that there's an easier way of doing this which doesn't require turning your outfits into weapons. It's called "Increase Maximum". You wouldn't think this would work but here's how.
Say outfit A is set to increase maximum for outfit B. Outfit B's standard maximum is 5. So by default you can buy 5 of outfit B without any problem. Let's do that. If you then buy 1 of outfit A, outfit B's maximum will be multiplied by 1 to give... 5! So no change there, but the catch is that you can't sell outfit A without first selling 5 of outfit B, even though you could buy 5 of outfit B without buying any of outfit A.

Guy, on Jan 20 2005, 11:58 PM, said:

I know this is an old topic but it's not too old and I'd just like to point out that there's an easier way of doing this which doesn't require turning your outfits into weapons. It's called "Increase Maximum". You wouldn't think this would work but here's how.
Say outfit A is set to increase maximum for outfit B. Outfit B's standard maximum is 5. So by default you can buy 5 of outfit B without any problem. Let's do that. If you then buy 1 of outfit A, outfit B's maximum will be multiplied by 1 to give... 5! So no change there, but the catch is that you can't sell outfit A without first selling 5 of outfit B, even though you could buy 5 of outfit B without buying any of outfit A.
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I stumbled on that once when messing around with ammo multipliers for Hellhounds. I hadn't figured out the intricate details of how it worked, though. That works very nicely...

Maybe add a bit test expression to öutf B requiring the player to have at least one of öutf A before they can buy B?

Yeah, probably a require bit would be better. But either way it's a lot simpler than using weapons and stuff.