This is simple, probably already done before, and uses no special features as of yet undescovered.

In the char field, have it start a mission, say 100. The mission creates an invisible special ship, armor 0, with a death delay of several hundred. The goal of the mission is, of course, to destroy the ship. The onshipdone field contains A100 S100 S101. Mission 101 is autoaborting with a datepostinc of 1, and, to be fancy, Q*** in the onabord field where STR# *** is some greeting like "Good morning, captain."

The use here is clear, make it so when the player is spending ages in a system, he is really spending ages.

Im sure similar ideas have come up, I'm just going to say it out loud for anyone that hasn't figured it out on their own.

That's some sweet bit-mongery, Neb. I like!

Dave @ ATMOS

Wow, you just solved a major problem for me that stood in the way of a far more useful (IMHO) opinion feature.

I'll get back to you when I test it ;).

Wow! A compliment from pipeline, thanks.

Ah, yeah, the invisible ship should have zero turning and accell, and no fuel, or else it will jump out of spob-less systems.

So this, naturally, lets you fire crons while you are flying around. I find this a terribly useful tool, as crons are my bestest friend.

Does the ship then explode by itself?

Pace (haldora), on Mar 10 2005, 01:58 PM, said:

Does the ship then explode by itself?
View Post

Yep, Armor 0 will do that to ya.

Excellent work, NebuchadnezzaR... I don't suppose you'd be opposed to me adding this to Cool Nova Hacks?

~ SP

Yes, it will. Any ship that has 0 armor will start exploding as soon as it appears (although it needs to have a DeathDelay of at least 7-20 in order for most things to work (for example, "Observe Ships" missions)).

Also, I may as well mention this here:
If you loop one or more auto-aborting missions together (via Sxxxs in their OnAbort strings), the entire loop will iterate at about 100 missions per second, regardless of whether you are running the game at double-speed (this number may be different on different computers, however).
Also, the time it takes to run a mission increases with its PostDateInc. A mission with a PostDateInc of 1 runs instantly, while one with 32767 takes about 15 seconds, during which the game is frozen.

Im willing to bet that that last number depends on the number and complexity of the crons loaded (divided by processor speed). It has to run every cron every day, or at least check each of them.

One last thing: I dont know how to keep the ship from appearing on radar. Does it have to cloak? Normal cloaks dont hide radar, but AI ships ignore outfit fields of ship rescources, or is cloaking perhaps an exception?

If it isnt, then why is there a cloak scanner with a flag to see ships hidden from radar, or a flag in the cloaking device to make it hide you on the radar?

Actually, the default behaviour of a Nova cloaking device is to hide the ship on radar. It's just that all of the default scenario's cloaks (except Polaris 1.1) have the $0002 flag (Show on Radar) set in the cloak's ModVal.
Also, yes, cloaking devices are an exeption to the "AIs ignore ship outfits" rule.

And I suspect (no proof) that large PostDateIncs take so long to run, simply because the game has to calculate the day-of-week, day-of-month, month-of-year, etc, for each day that passes (I say this because, in the test where I got 15 seconds, there were no cröns in the data files or plug-ins folder. It may well be that the time gets even longer if you also have dröns involved.).

NebuchadnezzaR, on Mar 10 2005, 07:02 PM, said:

... but AI ships ignore outfit fields of ship rescources...
View Post

Every time I see this, I want to scream.

Edwards has it right; the A.I. does check the ships outfits to see what kind of cloak it is fitted with.

The A.I. will also check for Asteroid Scoops and Repair Systems.

Wow, awesome job on this. It looks like it'll open up possibilities for timelines the way they do in some other types of games, where events happen after a certain amount of time, as opposed to being triggered by another event.

(Edit) Just thought about it some more -- now I'm thinking you can actually change the EVN game dynamic with this, where things are now in realtime so that you could have REAL time limits... (/Edit)

This post has been edited by Firebird : 10 March 2005 - 03:42 PM

Quote

Just thought about it some more -- now I'm thinking you can actually change the EVN game dynamic with this, where things are now in realtime so that you could have REAL time limits...

My original ideas with this involved cloaked, shield-depreciating ships. This is much more elegant and easier to implement.

Ah, thanks mister Chin/Edwards. I'd always wondered that.

And thanks everyone for the positive responses. Hope it is of use to some of you developers.

Firebird and I have been discussing the implications of this. One thing that occurs to me is that we can use this for much more sophisticated behavior with reinforcement fleets in battle - imagine being rushed into a sortie against a numerically superior foe, and having to hold out until your side can scramble reinforcements.

Alternatively, the goal will be to destroy the enemy as quickly as possible, before they can get a distress signal out. This could be accomplished by using OnShipDone to abort timer missions.

-reg

Yeah, I was thinking of that. If the reinf fleet is big, then planetary dominance is a whole new ball game. You have to work as fast as possible, because every five minutes or so (or whatever you set a day to) a whole fresh reinf fleet comes in in addition to the defense fleet.

Yeah, Im still looking for all of the awesome epic battles that you can make with this.

The only bad thing is that we have the 1,000 mission limit :mad:.. So this won't work for plugins with large plots...

Not really. NebuchadnezzaR's trick here only requires one mission per timer (plus one additional mission to make time actually pass).

It was my auto-abort loop that had insane mission requirements.

Yep, it only needs two missions total, and if you move the Q operator to the first one, the second one with the datepost can be reused in other places (like if you want to make it take a day or two to load some special/large cargo or somethign, or any other time you want a datepost in the middle)

Wow, this could really.. change the way we perceive time and space. (/stupid OOooo voice)

I like the idea. Good job.

The idea of having an in-game timer has inspired me to create this. Requires Absolute Minimum.
(EDIT): Attachment removed. Updated version in later post.

The only problem is that deadly stellars seem to be too deadly. Someone prove me wrong, but it appears that the instant you touch one you die dead - escape pods/ships don't work and nor do any bit set fields like onretire.
Also, the dummy ship which is supposed to be invisible actually appears as a shuttle, even though I didn't create a shan for it.

This post has been edited by Guy : 13 March 2005 - 11:23 PM