QUOTE (Shlimazel @ Dec 14 2010, 08:34 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I had to take out my asteroid mining because it didn't make sense with the setting, and I didn't have enough room in terms of junk appearance on the trade screen.

Actually, come to think of it, asteroids only spawn within visual range of the player. Any further away and it's empty space. This also means any AI miners would follow the player around because that's where the asteroids are.

On the other hand, there is one way you could implement asteroid mining of a sort. Star off with a ship using an asteroid graphic. It should be a large one, and it should only show up if a mission tells it to, and also start disabled. Whichever company the player happens to be mining for would offer a mission in the Mission BBS, detailing a large, mineral-rich asteroid has been discovered by scouts. All the player has to do is go over to the asteroid-ship, board it to collect the materials, and return it to where they got the mission for payment. You could even make some of your 'start disabled' përs ships be these asteroids and offer mining missions when the player boards them.

Ah, of course, the asteroid ship! I was so focused on conventional asteroid mechanics I didn't even think of doing that. Good idea, DK. I'll have to see if I can find a way to use that.

I've added in-flight time passage, which increments the date by one day every 30 seconds (currently) while in flight and shows a message informing you of the fact. The implications of this are obvious; if you take too long flying to deliver cargo with a time requirement, for example, you'll fail the mission. I'm extremely excited with what can be done with this new mechanic.

I really, really hate it when EV Nova mysteriously starts crashing, and I don't have a clue what I last changed (which is, of course, the only thing that could tell me what I could have done to make it crash). Development will be stymied until I can pin this error down.

The bug appears to have been in some of the shan resources. Unless nova starts crashing again, I'd tentatively call the problem fixed.

I've got 40 different hails for the independent ship owners flying around to respond with if you hail them and Greet them, and I'm almost certainly going to add more. They have a huge variety of different things they could say, some very interesting and including some useful pieces of advice, so it's worth it to hail them and say hi just to see what they could say. Fighting is fun, because if you run out of fuel, you're screwed. The thick asteroid field means you have some cover available, and any straight shot you take will deal heavy damage so you really have to exploit that. This is a game of slow-motion dodging and weaving. Using the afterburner in combat is literally throwing away firepower potential, so you have to give some thought to how you are maneuvering.

I'm going to add some police ships that scan for illegal cargo, but I'm not completely sure how to go about it. I want to make it work like in Nova where ships would give you a message, warning you to hold position, then they'd come over and scan you and if you had something illegal they'd attack you. I'll have to investigate.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I was just browsing Onyx's shipyard. It's been a while since I last visited, but I'm still impressed by how well designed his ships are. It's a shame they're rendered so small, but even so, I'm considering borrowing a few of them as placeholder graphics. Any placeholders wouldn't make it into the final versions, though, of course.

QUOTE (Shlimazel @ Dec 15 2010, 09:44 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm going to add some police ships that scan for illegal cargo, but I'm not completely sure how to go about it. I want to make it work like in Nova where ships would give you a message, warning you to hold position, then they'd come over and scan you and if you had something illegal they'd attack you. I'll have to investigate.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I figured I'd mention it in case it's of any help: I believe that message only shows up if you're doing a mission that carries illegal cargo and that same mission has a few special ships belonging to the government that considers your cargo illegal. Otherwise, they won't ask you to hold position or anything, AFAIK. At the very least, it's a place to start.

There are illegal flags similar to the cont/req ones for various governments and cargo, but to get an effect similar to Nova's you'd either have to have a mission or a dedicated flet.

I think.

QUOTE (DarthKev @ Dec 15 2010, 07:18 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I figured I'd mention it in case it's of any help: I believe that message only shows up if you're doing a mission that carries illegal cargo and that same mission has a few special ships belonging to the government that considers your cargo illegal. Otherwise, they won't ask you to hold position or anything, AFAIK. At the very least, it's a place to start.

QUOTE (Templar98921 @ Dec 16 2010, 07:23 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There are illegal flags similar to the cont/req ones for various governments and cargo, but to get an effect similar to Nova's you'd either have to have a mission or a dedicated flet.

I think.

I honestly cannot tell at all from looking at the data files how EVN makes a ship perform cargo scans. It will take some time and some consultation of ancient wisdom to puzzle it out. I'm guessing though that you guys are right and it requires a mission to function.

I was a little bored one day, and decided to draft a model of the U-POL Gunboat. I'm not sure showing this off is the best idea, because I don't want to give the impression that I'm beginning a graphics push and because this could be (probably would be) shelved once I start on graphics for real, but it shows the drift my design processes are going in for ships, and it's cool, so what the hell.

It looks pretty freaking awesome, Shlimazel.

My only problem is with the metal textures. The light gray shading is all right, but the darker grays get too dark and repeat too often. Perhaps lighten those regions up a bit?

Thanks! I see your point about the texturing, but ultimately I want to learn UV mapping to do the final set of ships, so these tiled textures probably wouldn't make it in.

I found some references to scanning in the bible;

QUOTE

ScanFine If the player is caught carrying an illegal (and non-
mission-related) cargo or item by a ship of this govt
and he isn't yet evil enough to attack (i.e. his legal
status in the current system isn't below CrimeTol) then
he will be fined the amount in this field.

1 and up fine this amount
0 no fine, just a warning
-1 and below fine this % of the player's cash
(-5 is 5%, etc)

SmugPenalty The amount of evilness a player gains for being detected
smuggling illegal cargo (defined in a misn resource) past
this government's ships.

This seems to support the "requires missions" theory.

Have been working on governments. This is one area where having lots of planets with different governments in the same system mucks up- most of them seem to use the system standing, even the ones that aren't connected to the system's government. I'm using a rank to keep the colonies from being able to deny you landing permission, so that if you go evil you can land there. It's fascinating the kind of stuff that crops up in the scenario Project Micron is employing, because it is far from the scenarios the nova engine was designed to handle.

QUOTE (Shlimazel @ Dec 17 2010, 03:18 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Have been working on governments. This is one area where having lots of planets with different governments in the same system mucks up- most of them seem to use the system standing, even the ones that aren't connected to the system's government. I'm using a rank to keep the colonies from being able to deny you landing permission, so that if you go evil you can land there. It's fascinating the kind of stuff that crops up in the scenario Project Micron is employing, because it is far from the scenarios the nova engine was designed to handle.

There's a messy workaround to this:

Make the system government always friendly to the player.
You need one government per planet separately.
Set each government to require a certain requireBit to land.
Give the player one hidden outfit per government that grants said requirebit.
Make a set of hidden, always occuring self-aborting missions (one per government), triggered whenever the player lands. One of these missions always runs, and removes all the outfits.
These missions have to be offered when the player lands, you can't Sxxx them or the legal record to start the mission will be ignored IIRC.
Each mission has a minimum legal rating to accept the mission, for a specific gov't. If you pass the legal rating, it re-grants the outfit. If you fail, the mission doesn't run, you don't get the outfit, and don't get to land.

Using this method you can set missions which require a player to land on a certain planet to contribute the bit required for that planet, and you can change the minimum legal rating required by using multiple legal-rating-check missions and some NCBs to pick which one is allowed to run.

You could use ränks instead of require bits, and have the missions remove/add hidden ranks based on legal rating. Either one works. You still need one per set of planets.

There is an issue with this. As the remove-outfit missions only run when the player lands, the player can land once on a planet even if he would fail his legal check. You could use a run-every-day cron to fix this problem, but there is an issue that if you ever increment the date while the player is flying, the player won't be able to land anywhere.

There is a convoluted workaround to the cron method bug, which leads to an alternate solution:

Ship: 1-armor, invisible, carries following weapon

Weapon: Invisible, 1-armor damage, deals damage to firing ship, subs into itself 3 times for good measure then explodes deals 32767 blast radius.

Dude: one per government you want to check, plus one that's always player-friendly. Has one ship of above type.

Cron: runs every day, Sxxx-s mission one

Mission one: invisible, player has goal of protecting friendly düde, auxShip is düde of invisible ship belonging to the gov't you want to check legal on. If auxShip doesn't like player, it fires, destroyes self and friendly düde, mission fails, set landing/not-landing outfit or rank accordingly. Either way, Sxxx mission two

Mission two: same as mission one, pick a different gov't for the auxShip. Sxxx mission three.

And so on. These missions need to run consecutively. If they run parallel, and the player fails one, then the auxShip will cause all of them to fail and the player will be able to land nowhere.

Or you can mess around with gövt and spöb until it possibly works. No guarantees above does what I expect it to do, I haven't tested it, just thought it up now.