silly artifacts of hacking the game...
How does everyone here handle renaming the 'abort' button in the mission dialogue, or even the mission dialogue itself?
For my plugin, the standard mode of communication is the Telegram. Just in name, you know. It was what PMs were called in Astronest, my inspiration.
So my mission BBS is renamed "Telegram", and the accept field is renamed "Reply." I don't know what the menu should be called for the mission dialogue (Status? Objectives? Information?), but "Abort" is relabled "Reply" there aswell. The game assumes what sort of reply the player would make in a given situation. The player catches on pretty fast that the only thing to say to most missions is "I quit". This is explicit at first, but then I just assumes he either knows what is going on, or never will. There will be certain instances where the quickbrief will clearly state that 'reply' will do something else. For example, if the mission is 'status report from engine room', then reply would be asking for more speed/whatever.
Also, I figured out a way to do a nearly ipod like menu system: Even though it takes a day to have effect, it fits in RP wise. The mission BBS would look somthing like this:
Tier 1 Missions:
Delivery to Utapau
Pick up cargo somewhere
get parcels
Tier 2 Missions:
Rush delivery
Explore area
Tier 3 Missions:
Corporate espianoge (but spelt correctly)
Weapons testing
Telegram Status
et cetera. Each Tier is roughly a factor of 10 above the previous. Level one goes up to 10,000, Two up to 100,000, three up to 1,000,000. All the way to level 5, which is everything above 10mill, averaging often at 100mill. The mission info for each of the category missions would read something like this:
"Tier 1 Missions: These are publically available missions sent to you via an agency service. Anyone with the proper license is permitted to accept these missions, and there is no penalty for cancelation.
Missions issued under the Tier 1 agency permit have a maximum pay of 10,000 gold.(I'm a stickler for fidelity to source material) If you are not interested in missions of this level, please reply to this posting with a Telegram titled "Unsubscribe Tier 1" with the full body of this message intact.
DMW04JVNSDHLDN947SJFMGBKS03RJKD10<<<<<"
When you accept this mission, the briefing is:
"Thank you for your response. It may take us up to 24 hours to properly respond to your request. After that time, we will block every mission with Tier 1 ranking. If at any time you wish to unblock any agency messages, please respond to "Telegram Status".
Your patronage is very much appreciated"
Naturally, when you accept the above mission, it sets a bit such that Tier 1 missions are no longer available. This bit also changes the text of the "Telegram Status" mission.
"Telegram status" is full of mutable strings, all as short as possible, that indicate slight hints as to what the player might want to do next, or bits of information that may have been forgotten. This info is all storyline relevant, length will be at a minimum. If I run out, I can always abort it and make a new one. At the bottom, it will indicate what telegrams are blocked, with a note that, if you want to unblock missions, just reply to this. At that point, when the player accepts the mission, it unblocks everything previously blocked, and therefore lets the chapter headings for each Teir reapear (so you can reblock teir 1 if you only wanted to unblock nubmer 2).
This system looks to work out great and minimise clutter (like who cares about delivery missions once you've already saved the universe once?), and I feel that my scale factors are more appropriate than the payment in NOVA. For my plugin, you are a commander, and in the original game commanders were hired for vast sums of money. Therefore it is appropriate that the player really gets bid up as he progresses. If only they didn't call the money 'gold'~ Well, atleast I can abbreviate it Au, which is neat since it isn't actually elemental gold they are talking about.
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I'm still trying to decide how to rename Shipyard and Outfitter. With clever bit usage, you can obviously by ships in one or outfits in the other, so there should be some better distinction.
The last thing I have to change is how ship mass/cargo and such works. The biggest problem that I've run into so far is that outfits that grant cargo space can be sold regardless of resulting negatives. That, and it doesn't show cargo in the outfitter section. If these were different, I would just make everything take up the same kind of space and have mass be something else.
I've already decied that Turrets are going to be renamed device ports 
Thats right, you only have 4 slots in which to put things. Things that people take for granted... Like IFF, or Grav scanner, and most weapons require a certain combination of devices (luckily IFF is required for half of them, so you can get that without a problem).
I still don't know what to do with the gun slot though... I want weapons limited only by space (with clever ways to keep 250 beams off of a mothership). And the fact that something is only either zero or one guns makes it impossible to do something like energy requirements.
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Anyway, I was just wondering what you guys are doing in this renaming sort of direction. I know if you guys are making a TC, you might not want to spoil the surprise, but for everyone else (like me) who has an unfinished pet, I am interested in what you guys have done with these default naming things. Heh.. this post was a bit longer than I meant it to be, I hope someone likes my ideas 
This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 16 November 2005 - 04:40 PM
Whole areas of the map are restricted. Some ships are incapable of entering hyperspace at all (and with an average of at least two spobs per inhabited system this is not as limiting as one may think).