I can beat this. I once made a fully-functional hangman game in 435 bytes of memory. With all the pretty printing removed, it took up 180 bytes.

I should note that the figure given is both code size and executable in memory.

pipeline, on Jan 6 2006, 10:53 PM, said:

I can beat this. I once made a fully-functional hangman game in 435 bytes of memory. With all the pretty printing removed, it took up 180 bytes.

I should note that the figure given is both code size and executable in memory.

View Post

Hm. I think someone might be able to implement something like hangman in EVN. You'd start to build the plug by making an outf for each letter of the alphabet and associating a bit with each one....

pipeline, on Jan 6 2006, 07:53 PM, said:

I can beat this. I once made a fully-functional hangman game in 435 bytes of memory. With all the pretty printing removed, it took up 180 bytes.

I should note that the figure given is both code size and executable in memory.View Post

Now that's the sort of thing all these new-fangled games should be aiming for. None of this "sure, you can install it, as long as you have a couple dozen terabytes of hard drive and a gigabyte or two of memory" nonsense.

Still, I was quite impressed at how little Nova actually needed in order to load, and which elements it could create from scratch (and the exceptions- it absolutely must have a multi-frame title to flicker on the main screen, even if it doesn't have any other main screen graphics).

Edwards

Dr. Trowel, on Jan 7 2006, 01:14 AM, said:

Hm. I think someone might be able to implement something like hangman in EVN. You'd start to build the plug by making an outf for each letter of the alphabet and associating a bit with each one....

I once did something similar to this. I was trying to make a ship renaming station plug-in where you would buy outfits for letters, numbers, and symbols, and it would append them to your ship name. Unofrtunately, that would mean you'd have to clear the ship name, and as it turns out, Nova ignores blank strings for renaming rather than completely erasing the ship name.

No one else thinks that "Peter Craddock" best suits the space cadet theme? Meh, it's the name of every one of my pilots. Didn't really know who it was, just saw it, used it and stuck. I guess my ARPIA2 karma is 1, then?

Edwards, I've been meaning to ask you of the intended method of beating the plug. I know that landing and taking off from the planet works, and gambling can be used if you're insanely lucky, but what's the route you created specifically? Tell me if this is wrong, but I first dominated the planet (by the way, 999 cannons max?), released it, and bribed my way in. Goods now sell for around 430, if I remember correctly. Buy as much as you can carry, dominate again, then sell for about 630 for each ton. Rinse and repeat. If you buy Goods not directly after you release the planet, the price is average (around 550 or so), though bribing is a major expenditure earlier on (averages out to about 4,000 credits each bribe). The profit gets higher with each run, and you can eventually make hundreds of thousands of credits.

Also, one more note: Escorts don't seem to expand your cargo space. Maybe setting the InherentAI to 2 would be better? Or are escorts not designed to be used at all in the game?

pipeline, on Jan 6 2006, 10:53 PM, said:

I can beat this. I once made a fully-functional hangman game in 435 bytes of memory. With all the pretty printing removed, it took up 180 bytes.

I should note that the figure given is both code size and executable in memory.

View Post

I seem to remember that my EV clone for Commodore 64 took up something like 18 blocks on disk, with each block being up to 256 bytes, so something like 4 k or so, written entirely in assembly except for the loader. This was for the engine, which basically let you fly around the screen and land on planets. There was shooting but no damage, and no color. This is not counting scenereo data which I never wrote or fancy graphics. 'Spobs' were 2124 sprites and ships were a sequence of 4 custom 88 custom character graphics (one for up, down, left and right, and things were different colors but not multicolor- ship 1 was red, ship 2 was green, etc). Scenereo data was handled sort of like a plugin for EV, with each section of the galaxy having it's own file (named after it's place in the galaxy, like 12-14,12-15, etc). The data accomidated one 'spob' by it's coordinates on the screen (incidentally due to a limitation of my data structure a spob could not appear in the fourth quarter of the screen (the VIC (graphics) chip used a byte in a separate (8-bit!) register to define the MSB to be tacked on the horizontal position register for a sprite)) because the first two bytes of the file were the position (0-255 for each) of the planet, the next ten were it's name, the next ten were ships that could appear in the section of space and the rest was the 'landing desc' and I totally left out a free bit for that annoying MSB for the horizontal placement, but by the time I noticed this I could of cared less. There were no roids and ships sometimes forgot themselves and although they still existed onscreen you could fly through them and bullets went through them. I never finished it and I imagine that it is sitting in my attic in a box of antiquated 5.25 floppy disks. Irony, my C=64 is sitting on the desk beside me Honestly if I ever take a certain someone's advice and write my own engine to suit my scenereo's needs I'd use the ideas from this one (fly a certain distance in a system and end up in the next system, walking around on planets (that never was implemented in practice but in theory it was to be just another 'system' except bounded that you entered when you landed on a planet), etc).

I stopped working on this in 2002.

{Edit: Math and grammar}

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 07 January 2006 - 10:33 AM

Finally get a chance to play this - awesome plug, Edwards.
Method 3: Disable, capture, and sell other ships. (note I haven't actually done this but it certainly seems possible)
You could eliminate the gambling option by modifying the gambling dialog.

Great TC! Check out these pics:

Fantastic.
From the design of the intro menu screen onwards,
a wonderous pearl of minimalism.

domu, on Jan 6 2006, 10:49 PM, said:

Tell me if this is wrong, but I first dominated the planet (by the way, 999 cannons max?), released it, and bribed my way in...View Post

Unless a debug feature sneaked in that I didn't put there, you left out the step where you blew up enough ships to get the needed combat rating. I personally recommend starting out by alternating between blowing up the inspector and blowing up civilians to toggle the price of goods, but domination gives you a better profit later on.

domu, on Jan 6 2006, 10:49 PM, said:

Also, one more note: Escorts don't seem to expand your cargo space. Maybe setting the InherentAI to 2 would be better? Or are escorts not designed to be used at all in the game?

On this and the 999 cannons issues, thank you for pointing them out. I'll try giving the ship an AI type of 2, and I'll adjust the cannon maximum (and give it a real description- it was never meant to be available, I just forgot to change its TechLevel).

@Guy: That would work, but I'd say that not having a button, and then being confronted with a blank screen should be enough to discourage most people (assuming they installed the TC properly). And even if they do try gambling, they won't have the feedback of which ship won, unless it's the one they clicked on- no way of getting a feel for the random number generator.

(EDIT) I am going to be unable to access the internet for an indeterminate period of time. I hope to be back in a week or two, but I can't guarentee anything. I have added a revised version of the TC to my first post in this thread, which changes the problems noted above. In case there is some horrible flaw in it, I am also leaving the original up there, as I will be unable to update it for quite a while.

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 09 January 2006 - 02:08 AM

The gambling bets are fixed at 1,000 and 5,000 each, right? So then couldn't you just scale down the starting cash and the prices of everything so that the goal is to get, say 530 credits? Then no one would ever have enough money to gamble, at least not before winning. Indeed, if you really wanted to, you could even implement gambling as a "feature" that only winners can use, by making the goal of the game be to reach 1,000 credits.

The only "problem" I can think of with this method is one that shouldn't crop up in your scenario: Energy costs a fixed price of 1 credit per unit, so then hyperjumping would be horribly expensive relative to everything else, and fuel-using weapons would too.

Anyway, I haven't yet had an opportunity to put this TC on my zip disk and bring it home, but I have a feeling that when I do I'll find it to be my cup of tea. Great work, Edwards.

Qaanol, on Jan 9 2006, 09:01 AM, said:

The gambling bets are fixed at 1,000 and 5,000 each, right?
View Post

Wrong! I think you need my MultiBuy plug
That was how it was in EV/O. In Nova the standard bet is 1000 but option-clicking will let you bet however much you like.
(EDIT): Er, only up to 10,000.

This post has been edited by Guy : 09 January 2006 - 05:59 PM

Edwards, on Jan 4 2006, 06:53 AM, said:

As you may remember, Martin Turner came up with a challenge to create the "smallest possible TC". He may not have meant it as a challenge, but that's how I chose to interpret it.

So, without further ado, I present to you Teacup TC, probably the smallest total conversion ever to be released for any Escape Velocity game.

The challenge of the plug is fairly simple. You need to make a profit. However, as there is only one planet in the universe, and only one commodity, this simple-seeming requirement becomes a bit harder. You will know when you have won.

However, more interesting than the scenario is that fact that I have managed to create a total conversion small enough to attach to a post. Four times over. Its total size when uncompressed is 350 kilobytes, outdoing even a large number of standard plug-ins, and from some tests I've done, it looks like you could add a decently-sized scenario to the basic underpinnings without pushing it over the 100K compressed mark.

Now, I have not done very extensive testing of this plug, but it does run on both Mac and WinNova, and I have beaten it on MacNova (WinNova running at 11fps is not condusive to long test sessions). There are a few graphical errors on WinNova, but they do not affect gameplay.

So, any comments?

Edwards

(EDIT) New install instructions:
To install, rename your current "Nova Files" folder to "Nova Files Original". Then move the Teacup TC folder into your Nova folder, and rename it "Nova Files". Also remove any plug-ins from your plug-ins folder. If you are on Windows, you will need to convert the plug.

(EDIT) New version!
I have added a new version of the TC to this post, so you should now download the first attached file (TCTC_Version_2). I am keeping the previous version attached because there may be some critical error in it, and I will be unable to provide support for the next week or two. If you experience problems with the new version, download the old version.
View Post

**Absolutely brilliant. It's fascinating to see the cool things talented people can conjur up with the engine, keep up the good work.:)

_bomb

**

Guy, on Jan 9 2006, 05:56 PM, said:

Wrong! I think you need my MultiBuy plug
That was how it was in EV/O. In Nova the standard bet is 1000 but option-clicking will let you bet however much you like.
(EDIT): Er, only up to 10,000.
View Post

Oh, thank you. I never gamble. I guess that rules that out.

Qaanol, on Jan 9 2006, 02:01 PM, said:

The only "problem" I can think of with this method is one that shouldn't crop up in your scenario: Energy costs a fixed price of 1 credit per unit, so then hyperjumping would be horribly expensive relative to everything else, and fuel-using weapons would too.View Post

hehehe, there is no hyperjumping, or fuel-using weapons.

This post has been edited by Edwin_again : 10 January 2006 - 07:08 PM

There's this thing called an afterburner...

Yes, and I cannot figure out how to recharge... key command at the main spaceport, maybe?

To get the mission, you have to hit escape and reload your pilot, and then the mission will show up.

It's not working for me.

I put the two data files in a Nova Files folder in my Nova folder, making sure the stock data files were elsewhere.

It starts fine, shows the "Loading" bar and everything. Even draws the menu screen properly, black with those circles in the middle. When I move the cursor over one of the buttons it makes text describing it show up in the very center, so no problems there.

What happens, though, is then when I click on any of the buttons, nothing happens. Keyboard shortcuts for the buttons don't work either. I move the cursor to the top of the screen and the menu bar shows up, but when I click, nothing changes. No menus come down. Command-Q doesn't do anything.

To exit I had to force quit with Command-Option-Escape. It wasn't an application crash, I'm sure of that. It happens every time I load Tea Cup TC, and only when I run Nova with those data files.

I haven't done any testing to see exactly what resource—or lack of resource—is causing this behavior. I'm running EV Nova version 1.0.8 on Mac OS 9.

I did look through the data files though, and it looks very cool. I especially like how you made the mission only trigger when the pilot has a certain amount of money. I already have an idea for implementing a set of missions into stock Nova that make giant pirate fleets attack you when you're rich. And you won't lose your money either.

Good work, Edwards. Overall, the conversion looks very nice, with only one minor flaw. Namely, that it doesn't work for me. Additionally, I'm disappointed in your Read Me file.

~Qaanol

FedKiller, there is a Recharge button in the Levion spacedock, right above the planet dësc. I know, I missed this for my first few minutes also.

Okay, I got it to work. Sort of. I had to import the stock main menu though. Including buttons and animations. I'm pretty sure the game was freeze on account of your TC not having animated sliding buttons.

And I think I might've messed something else up, because the weapon shots are invisible. Unless they were meant to be. But I don't think so. Not that it matters, since the AI can't hit me when I'm moving.