Qaanol, on May 2 2005, 12:37 PM, said:
...doesn't mean your ship's paint won't lose color over time! What with spaceships being directly exposed to the entire electromagnetic spectrum at all times from all directions, I think hull-painting companies would have lots of business.
So, what I suggest is sort of an updated Paintstation plugin. Make the paint outfits decay after a time, much as cheap reactors do, but instead of exploding they simply become replaced by duller-colored versions of themselves. The dull versions eventually wear off as well, leaving the ship its base color.
At any time, if the player buys a new paint job, the old one is removed (that is, its wearing-out timer is eliminated), so that a freshly-painted bright red ship won't suddenly turn faded green.View Post
It would be quite possible. The only real annoyance I can see would be that paint outfits vanish after purchase, so you can't use them directly to power your cröns.
I think that I would have it set up so that, when you purchase a coat of green paint, it sets Bqqq, which stands for "Green Paint". Now, have a crön start some percent* of the time once the player has Bqqq set. After a duration of however many days, it will grant a more faded color of paint, and set Bxxx. Have another crön do the same thing, except that it requires "Bqqq & Bxxx", and it has "Bxxy !Bxxx" in its OnEnd field. Repeat until you reach the "Null Paint" stage**, which will unset Bqqq.
Note that because this is based on two sets of bits, it comes out as a nice matrix of paint colors, each defined by two NCBs (hue and fade), giving you maximum control for minimum bit usage (this does count).
When you purchase a paint outfit, it not only sets the bit that stands for its color, it also unsets every other "color" bit, as well as all of the "fade level" bits. Assuming that the maximum length of a set string is 256 characters, you can have far too many types of paint, something like 600+ (50 bit sets per string makes a 25 by 25 matrix, 25 squared= 625, and don't forget that an extra 25 for the first level paint, which is defined by a lack of a fade bit). Fortunately, you aren't required to use all of them, because there are only 175 or so outfit slots left in the default scenario. In fact, you run into the crön limit far before reaching that number...
Qaanol, on May 2 2005, 12:37 PM, said:
Also, if you put a paint job outfit as standard on a given type of ship (say, if you make all stock shuttles blue, with used shuttles faded blue) would AI ships show up colored, and, as a corollary, would the player's ship, if he or she bought or captured a ship of that type (and what about captured and hired escorts)?
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I am almost certain that AI ships ignore the paint outfit. I am not certain about what happens when you capture one, though.
Edwards
*The "some percent of the time" for the crön is to give the time periods an element of randomness. No point in being too predictable, right?
**"Null Paint could be triggered merely by the most faded "fade level" bit being set, and it would unset every "color" bit, as well as that last "fade level" bit.
This post has been edited by Edwards : 03 May 2005 - 11:13 AM
