@lord-rama, on Mar 25 2006, 06:50 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

I just made a weapon with invisible shots. Just give it a negative falloff value. (I used negative 10, not sure if varying values has any effect.)

Giving a non-beam weapon a negative Falloff value will cause it to fade in over the course of the first thirty frames of its life. The fade-in rate is proportional to the number you put into the Falloff field, with -1 being an even fade-in over the full thirty frames, and anything lower than about -16 suddenly blinking into existance at the end of the thirty frames.

This behaviour is the inverse of what happens when you put a positive number in the Falloff field of a non-beam weapon. In those cases, the weapon fades out of visibility during the last thirty frames of its life.

The positive Falloff trick is used in the default scenario for such weapons as the Railguns and Fusion Pulse Cannon. Negative Falloff is unused, but can lead to interesting Fire-While-Cloaked weapons. Unfortunately, negative Falloff has its effect whether or not you are cloaked, so using it with FWC weapons would require either fancy work to make sure that you can't fire it while not cloaked, or careful writing to explain why the shots are always fired cloaked, even while your ship is not, and yet de-cloak after being fired.

Edwards

@edwards, on Mar 25 2006, 07:13 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

Giving a non-beam weapon a negative Falloff value will cause it to fade in over the course of the first thirty frames of its life. The fade-in rate is proportional to the number you put into the Falloff field, with -1 being an even fade-in over the full thirty frames, and anything lower than about -16 suddenly blinking into existance at the end of the thirty frames.

This behaviour is the inverse of what happens when you put a positive number in the Falloff field of a non-beam weapon. In those cases, the weapon fades out of visibility during the last thirty frames of its life.

The positive Falloff trick is used in the default scenario for such weapons as the Railguns and Fusion Pulse Cannon. Negative Falloff is unused, but can lead to interesting Fire-While-Cloaked weapons. Unfortunately, negative Falloff has its effect whether or not you are cloaked, so using it with FWC weapons would require either fancy work to make sure that you can't fire it while not cloaked, or careful writing to explain why the shots are always fired cloaked, even while your ship is not, and yet de-cloak after being fired.

Edwards

Really? The shot is completely invisible to me, and it hits stuff when I point it at something. The resource I'm using for the weapon is the enormous blaster, except for the negative falloff setting. Maybe my copy of Nova is just a fluke? Here, I'll attach it.

Attached File(s)

• Invisible_Shots.zip (581bytes)
  Number of downloads: 49

This post has been edited by The CrimpMaster : 25 March 2006 - 11:27 PM

After even more testing, I can't seem to replicate the effect that you say should happen. I did my testing with the following falloff values for a non-beam weapon: -1, -2, -5, and -10.

Hmm. Now that you've pointed that out, I have a caveat to add for negative Falloff:
It does not work for weapons that have the "translucent shots" flag set (positive Falloff, however, does work for those weapons). If a weapon with that flag has a negative Falloff, its shots will never be visible, although they can still interact with the universe.
Also, it seems that the fade-in takes abs(30/Falloff) frames, starting from frame 0. The same seems to be true of positive Falloff, although that starts from frame LifeCount-30.

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 26 March 2006 - 06:51 PM

@edwards, on Mar 25 2006, 11:13 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

fancy work to make sure that you can't fire it while not cloaked

Umm...as far as I know, it's impossible to check whether or not the player is cloaked. Well, I suppose you could pull it off with something involving an enemy that fired a harmless weapon, but I really doubt even that would work very well.

@orcaloverbri9, on Mar 26 2006, 11:26 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

Umm...as far as I know, it's impossible to check whether or not the player is cloaked. Well, I suppose you could pull it off with something involving an enemy that fired a harmless weapon, but I really doubt even that would work very well.

Well, if you controled the cloaking by using abortable missions in the active mission box, you could do it... but that would be quite cumbersome indeed

@desprez, on Mar 26 2006, 04:48 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

Well, if you controled the cloaking by using abortable missions in the active mission box, you could do it... but that would be quite cumbersome indeed

I was thinking something more along the lines of a pair of weapons. The first would be non-FWC, and have the "exclusive" flag checked. It would not have the fancy "fire-from-cloaked" effect. The second weapon would be FWC, have the graphical effect, and would be non-exclusive. Assuming everything works properly, when the player is not cloaked, the first weapon will fire, blocking the second one. When the player is cloaked, the first weapon will be unable to fire, leaving the second weapon free.
Unfortunately, this would require setting both weapons to be primary, and would prevent the player from using any other primary weapons. It might be useful for a special-purpose ship, but not for general use.

@orca: You were forgetting that weapons themselves check to see if the player is "not-cloaked". Given that, all you need to do is "not" it, and you have the check you need.

Edwards

I think not having other primary weapons fire while cloaked sounds reasonable.

@darth_vader, on Mar 27 2006, 10:24 AM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

I think not having other primary weapons fire while cloaked sounds reasonable.

No, I meant that the ship can't have any other primary weapons at all. The non-FWC version of the weapon would block everything, not just the FWC weapon. Even secondary weapons would not work when the primary weapon was firing. It would be possible to have other primary weapons when the ship is cloaked, but that wouldn't fit very well with the way the ship would need to be explained in-game. Perhaps the FWC half of the weapon should also be exclusive, assuming that that doesn't mess up anything while the ship isn't cloaked.

Edwards

I wonder, has this been mentioned before?

In using the rotating turret idea, this could also be applied to have weapons themselves inherit gun flashes. If you play the EVO-EVN facelift for Guy's EVO port, you'll notice that Emalgha fighters will have gun flashes when firing the gun. I was thinking that when you apply the attributes you would make for creating a rotating turret, the flash itself could be the first frame, then submunition out as regular bullets. Whent his happens, that means that any ship you fly in, can have these gun flashes when you buy those weapons.

@coraxus, on May 9 2006, 10:20 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

I wonder, has this been mentioned before?

In using the rotating turret idea, this could also be applied to have weapons themselves inherit gun flashes. If you play the EVO-EVN facelift for Guy's EVO port, you'll notice that Emalgha fighters will have gun flashes when firing the gun. I was thinking that when you apply the attributes you would make for creating a rotating turret, the flash itself could be the first frame, then submunition out as regular bullets. Whent his happens, that means that any ship you fly in, can have these gun flashes when you buy those weapons.

Not to my knowledge, but i did bring up somethign similar not to long ago. It was about have an outward thrust when a rocket takes off. Sort of like when you fire a rocket launcher and the force comes out the back of hte launcher for a second and then the rocket appears. So i was having the particle explosion come out the back and hte missle be a submunition. I never did create the plugin, so if anyone wants to do it, feel free to go ahead.

Don't know if this has been mentioned before, but I just thought of it.

If you need a single mission to have some random factor in it (such as one of several specialized cargos) and don't want to make several mutually exclusive missions, use the <SN> tag instead. Define an invisible, untargetable ship and place it in the destination system, with an "observe" goal. Then, the normal functionality for choosing a ship name can be used for any old variable you like.

Great idea, Lindley. Only problem: it doesn't affect the cargo STR# resource, so coherence is only maximal if you have a really generic cargo name like "cargo" or something else that works for all of them

Missions with multiple (or even arbitrarily many) ending points.

Let's say you're carrying some cargo, and the buyer backs out of the deal. You still want to sell it, but you have no one in particular lined up, so you're just looking around for an interested party.

How to handle that? Make a first mission which gives you the cargo and sets an NCB. It should probably take away some of your credits at the start when you "buy" the cargo. Then, have a second mission available from howevermany planets which is only offered when that NCB is set. This second mission can abort the first one and itself, giving you the payout and showing a dialog box if you like.

That blurs the line between missions and commodity training.

As for me, I've been working on realistic economies for war torn systems. As it is now, whenever a system is war-torn, obviously the primary concern is munitions and medical supplies. Once it is considered 'captured', it needs metals and equipments to rebuild infrastructure. Once it is 'populated' or whatever, it can export metals and some equipment and arbitrary raw materials, and once it is considered 'advanced', it imports raw materials again and exports med supplies and munitions. Obviously not every planet goes through every stage, but this does lead to very interesting and dynamic trade routes, with the most profitable very often being the capital system > border system, often deadheading on the way back (except for the few wartorn planets that can export 'plundered goods'. But that just ain't cool. No self respecting player would profit off the deaths of mill... oh wait.)

Anyway. I wonder if oops's stack (like +30 and +100 on the same commodity).

@lindley, on Sep 9 2006, 08:28 AM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

Missions with multiple (or even arbitrarily many) ending points.

Let's say you're carrying some cargo, and the buyer backs out of the deal. You still want to sell it, but you have no one in particular lined up, so you're just looking around for an interested party.

How to handle that? Make a first mission which gives you the cargo and sets an NCB. It should probably take away some of your credits at the start when you "buy" the cargo. Then, have a second mission available from howevermany planets which is only offered when that NCB is set. This second mission can abort the first one and itself, giving you the payout and showing a dialog box if you like.

i've had similar houghts, only instead of selling mission cargo anywhere, it would be nice if you could sell extra cargo of th same type at the mission endpoint for higher prices than normal. Say you have a mission to deliver emergency medical supplies, and you happen to take it on a planet where meds sell low, so you would buy a hold full of meds after taking the mission, and when you got to the dropoff point, meds would be running at very high instead of their usual value for that planet, but only until you left.

But see, theres a distinction here. When you are comissioned to carry 10 tons of medical supplies, its not ANY 10 tons of medical supplies that will do, its a specific scanner/cancer treatment thingy/whatever that a specific company paid good money to have couriered. Syringes and med kits might be widely available (med prices low on target planet), but this company specifically needs said devices. So commodity trading doesn't need to match mission destinations per se, and 'type of cargo' does not mean the mission cargo itself is the anonymous and interchangeable cargo you can buy just anywhere.

True, but if a whole planet is in the middle of a plague, they need all the meds they can get, not only for treating plague victims, but violent crimes will rise as the plague breaks down the government's ability to maintain law and order.

Ok, well, a planet scale epidemic is somewhat of an exception. But a good plugin author would sync the availability of said mission with an öops rescource that actually did shoot the med prices way up.

@shrout1, on Jan 26 2006, 11:07 AM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:

Been trying to get this effect since EV:O but never could...

1: A weapon that explodes so violently it instantly slams its target halfway across the system

2: A black hole weapon that tractors in anything near it.

3: Repulsor beam of such intensity that it also instantly slams a target halfway across the system.

Uh...lets see.
For #1, I have made it before to some extent. The weapon exploded violently and sent the ship flying across the galaxy, the only thing was that the ship exploded before it got very far. Woops lol

For #2, yep, created it. You can find it on the plugins page, or by using this handy-dandy thing called a link :p....Here It works quite nicely I must say.