How I maintain sanity

Plug-ins can be a real nuisance. So I am attempting to devise a classification system for keeping plug-ins in some kind of order and easily identifiable. So far, I am renaming them with a short rank prefix of my design.

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Rank 0: Offers no REAL changes. Does not affect balance. Graphical changes, grammatical fixes, etc.

Rank 1: Slight changes to game. Balanced non-cheating outfits, conveniences such as Paint Station Prime, very small damage/price modification, balanced ships/systs/misns

Rank 2-4: Beginning cheats. Moving wormholes closer, repairing Hypergate networks, purchase of access or rank cards for hefty prices, other conveniences of dubious fairness

Rank 5-10: CHEATER! Highly unbalanced ships, weapons, prices, mass, ranks, etc. Not for daily consumption unless you are a loser or just plain bad at EVN, or looking for something new
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So, yay or nay? Do you guys have any suggestions or your own bits of organizing that you would incorporate into my style?

And quasi-TCs or total-TCs?

I keep dated backups going back some time.. I actually have somewhere the final version of my plug before it became a TC..

purple1, on May 10 2005, 12:51 AM, said:

Rank 5-10: CHEATER! Highly unbalanced ships, weapons, prices, mass, ranks, etc. Not for daily consumption unless you are a loser or just plain bad at EVN, or looking for something new

Then there are those plugs that have Cheats built into them. For example, there is one file classified as a plug, but it has a Starbridge with like 8 100mm Railguns, when the normal ship shouldn't be able to hold that many.

I imagine those are just cheat ships left in for testing, but still...

How do you classify a plug when it is both a cheat AND a plugin?

A plug-in that contains available cheats - even if you have to work to get them, (such as an invulnerable Starbridge with a 500 million credit price tag) is still ranked as a major cheat.

My 3 TCs are each stored as a Nova Files folder with an added name, e.g. Nova Files Override, with their own Nova Plug-ins folder, e.g. Nova Plug-ins Override. Expansion-type TC's (Polycon, for one) is its own Nova Plug-ins Polycon folder. When I exchange a folder, each one gets a suffix to denote which set it belongs to. Nova Files becomes Nova Files Nova when I switch to playing Nova Override. Pilot files are kept in separate folders based on TC or set.

Ranking a plug-in sometimes can be difficult, because a lot of balanced plug-ins can be considered cheating. For example, the Universal Map plug-in grants an entire universe-wide map for a paltry 100,000 credits. I would rank it about 3. Other cheats, like one to minimize the price of LuxGds on Europa to standard Low is only a 2 because it doesn't GIVE you tons of cargo space or money, but it cuts the number of Europa-Earth runs by about 68%. Not a fast, highly unfair cheat. It still takes 20-30 trips to make a fortune.

What about plugs with major changes? With everything balanced and not a cheat in any way.

I dunno. Maybe a 1 or a 2. But it has to be balanced when compared to the original Nova scenario. TCs and thinks like Polycon don't need a rank because they have their own sets of plug-ins with ranks. Maybe I should reserve rank 2 for major changes and then leave 3-5 for minor cheats, 6-10 for major. A bunck of the ranks that aren't rigidly defined are set by my judgement on how the plug changes the balance of the game and increases the player's odds. But a plug that makes the game more difficult should be called a rank -1. It affects the balance, but not in a cowardly cheater way. More like a test-of-skill way.

As far as I can tell, unless you just make some arbitrary designations and pigeon-hole plugins into them, this sort of logical classification system will require at least two dimensions.

The first dimension I would call Change, and it would be a scale from 0 to 10, where zero changes absolutely nothing, and 10 is a total conversion. The second dimension I would call Fairness, and it too would be a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is an total cheat and 10 is perfect balance.

Those two scales are sufficient to classify any and all plugins. PaintStation Prime, for example, might get the rating of (2, 10), while Arpia might be (7, 7).

Then, if you felt particularly ambitious, you could add as a third dimension the plugin's average rating on the download page, or your own impression of how well made the plug is. In that instance, the default scenario might score (10, 8, 10). Or, on the other hand, it might get (0, 8, 10), depending on how you look at it.

well, if we want to keep a library of all the classified TC's, I think the EVDC wiki would be a good place to keep it if you wanted to.

http://devring.net:16080/evdcwiki/

purple1, on May 9 2005, 10:58 PM, said:

My 3 TCs are each stored as a Nova Files folder with an added name, e.g. Nova Files Override, with their own Nova Plug-ins folder, e.g. Nova Plug-ins Override. Expansion-type TC's (Polycon, for one) is its own Nova Plug-ins Polycon folder. When I exchange a folder, each one gets a suffix to denote which set it belongs to. Nova Files becomes Nova Files Nova when I switch to playing Nova Override. Pilot files are kept in separate folders based on TC or set.
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Funny, I do the exact same thing, except I just keep all my pilots in one folder, but with suffixes, e.g. Pilotname-EVC would be one of my pilots for the Classic port, or Pilotname-Pyn would be one of my pilots for Polycon.

Whenever I download a plug, I put the original copy (including readmes) in a folder called "unused plugs", then I make a duplicate of just the plugin folder in my actual plugins folder.

I have a file called Unused Nova Plugs too, where I put all the unused Nova plugs. Duh. There are about twenty files in there (most made by me). Very good idea. As for the topic idea: not too bad. However, what plugs change nothing? Kindof a stupid idea....

Rank 0 plugins are ALMOST doing nothing. I have one that makes Licences appear as Ranks instead of Extras in the ship info. It is really a cosmetic difference. Same with the Cold Fusion for Override. And any dësc fixes that people make. It is safe for common use because it cannot unbalance the game (unless it is made poorly). I guess my ranks are based on balance changes.

Qaanol, on May 10 2005, 08:50 PM, said:

The first dimension I would call Change, and it would be a scale from 0 to 10, where zero changes absolutely nothing, and 10 is a total conversion. The second dimension I would call Fairness, and it too would be a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is an total cheat and 10 is perfect balance.

Those two scales are sufficient to classify any and all plugins. PaintStation Prime, for example, might get the rating of (2, 10), while Arpia might be (7, 7).
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I love the idea, and thank you for such high ranking

(oh, and Arpia 2 would then be between (8, and (9, 10) :D)

why would 0-5 be normal stuff and 5-10 be cheats? Cheats are such a less important aspect of the game.

I like the two dimensional ranking idea, thats a decent way.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a strict plugin upload system on the internet where the resource IDs are added to a database and plugins could be sorted by compatibility based on resources? I would kill for that.

Another nice thing would be a reworked resource loader. Each resource would have a one-bit tag for either new (1) or replacement (0). If the resource was a replacement, it would override the existing resources like it normally does now. If it was new, Nova would assign it a new resource ID ON TE FLY so that nobody would have to watch out for compatibility (the id value assigned wouldn't be save to the file). Resource IDs would only matter if you were replacing an existing one. Think about it.

Kinda off on a tangent, but I just wanted to say this. I can dream, right?

Well... uh... then how would you handle stuff like referencing dude id xxx when the dude itself is assigned a new value as to avoid conflict? Would you also, for example, reset the IDs in the misn rescource and stuff in accordance with the govt/ship/dude/syst etc?

Plus, there are so few rescources in nova as it is, this would only be doable with a small number of plugins. I could see it possible to create a utility that took two plugins (plus a flag to includ default files) and rewrote one so it wouldnt interfere with the other, but beyond that, it would be not only not possible, but not really useful.