proof of concept

This isn’t a new development per se , but I can’t remember if anyone’s done exactly this before. You land on a planet, accept a mission, and from then until you abort the mission your ship’s paint randomly changes color in flight every couple seconds or so. Available here: MagicPaint.zip (839bytes)
Number of downloads: 5

The attached version is pretty basic, with only three colors, but it’s pretty light on resources too, only needing one mïsn for example. I’m sure you’ll be able to see how the concept can be extended with more colors and with more missions (either in sequence or at random or simultaneously, or some combination thereof.)

An important point is that this does not require continuous time progression in flight. Also, “as-is” this runs as a plug-in for stock EV Nova. If you want to run it for a different set of data files, just copy a valid shän to ID 500.

Inspirations for this concept include Continuous Time Progression, Changing Outfits In Flight, Perfect Thirds (which was not actually utilized in this stripped-down concept plug-in), and Horse of Many Colours (which was my idea to begin with…)

Of course, this is not limited to paint. You can randomly and continuously change the player’s outfits as you see fit. For example, you can make a special “increase sensor interference” outfit, and randomly grant or remove it to simulate ion storms. You can even Qxxx a message and/or Pxxx a sound as you do so. You can make the occurrences cyclic by having two missions, one for which the effect is “on” and the other for which it is “off” with possibly unequal durations. You can make the missions invisible, you can start them through various means, and you can give them a time limit so if the player makes a hyperjump the missions (and perhaps the outfits) vanish.

So this is pretty much Changing Outfits In Flight, with the emphasis on random or timed events rather than the player choosing to activate the effect.

Pretty cool. I might utilize the sensor modification aspect for storms in Airborne.

@spartan-jai, on 13 February 2011 - 07:36 PM, said in Continuous paint progression in flight:

Pretty cool. I might utilize the sensor modification aspect for storms in Airborne.

Note that sensor mods for the player will not affect missile confusion odds. You could also use Murk modification with a series of mission that trigger in order and loop continuously, to make night and day (and twilight in between.) And by throwing in a way to check the time of day, you could even make përs ships offer different types of missions only at certain times.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 14 February 2011 - 12:40 AM

That will be something I'll mess around with for sure.

I came up with an idea on how to use this, and here is the result:

Magic Ship

Spoiler

Basically, this plug randomly changes which ship you're flying while in flight. It can be awesome and terrible at the same time. =P

Oh man. Mario Kart battle mode. Tell me somebody's making an plug-in.

@mrxak, on 16 February 2011 - 03:06 PM, said in Continuous paint progression in flight:

Oh man. Mario Kart battle mode. Tell me somebody's making an plug-in.

:rolleyes: :laugh: :hector_bird:
That would be either awesome or stupid, and totally crazy in either case.