Crön Mastery

Masamune

This is related to my question about dates, but it's different enough I thought it merited a new topic.

What I am doing, is making a "safety certificate" system. Every time the player makes a major modification to his ship, he has to get recertified, and then every year after that. The system works fine with one hitch: the 1 year holdoff cron, once activated, doesn't reset ever when the player re-certifies.

Right now, it is activated by a mission bit, and has a pre-holdoff time of 1 year. When it actually activates, it replaces your current certificate with a (highly illegal) expired certificate. During that one year, if that mission bit is cleared, I want to de-activate the cron. Anybody know how to do this, or am I just going to have to suck it up and hope nobody notices/cares?

Maybe a second cron, that activates the real cron, which only works if the holdoff timer bit is set AND the "needs to re-certify" bit is set- but I still need to deactivate it, or have a bunch of "backup" crons- that would be a mess.

So the essence of the question is, can you de-activate a cron on the fly?

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~Charlie

Bomb

Quote

Originally posted by Masamune:
**This is related to my question about dates, but it's different enough I thought it merited a new topic.

What I am doing, is making a "safety certificate" system. Every time the player makes a major modification to his ship, he has to get recertified, and then every year after that. The system works fine with one hitch: the 1 year holdoff cron, once activated, doesn't reset ever when the player re-certifies.

Right now, it is activated by a mission bit, and has a pre-holdoff time of 1 year. When it actually activates, it replaces your current certificate with a (highly illegal) expired certificate. During that one year, if that mission bit is cleared, I want to de-activate the cron. Anybody know how to do this, or am I just going to have to suck it up and hope nobody notices/cares?

Maybe a second cron, that activates the real cron, which only works if the holdoff timer bit is set AND the "needs to re-certify" bit is set- but I still need to deactivate it, or have a bunch of "backup" crons- that would be a mess.

So the essence of the question is, can you de-activate a cron on the fly?

**

Hmm.. that's a tough one. I'd have to give a more in-depth look at the cron system, and see if there's anyway to construct a little loop system of crons (as you suggested before) but there would have to be some sort of generic system of evaluating the outfit/weapon changes, or else you'd have to have about a million and a half crons to cover everything.

_bomb

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"I want to tell you about a time I almost died...."

Pan Sola

(Edit so I actually say something)

Grr, not sure what happened...

Anyways, I don't think cron can be deactivated on the fly. However, I have an alternate proposal to implement your idea:

As opposed to using cron, when you get certified, you start a mission "Get Recertified Within A Year". This mission will fail in 365 days (or however many days there are in a EVNova year). If you lose the certificate (if you can get uncertified), the misn aborts. If you renew your certificate, the mission aborts itself and starts over again.

When the mission fails, it'll replace your certificate with the illegal one.

Let me know whether this method works or not, and if not, I'll think about how to modify it (I think the general idea should work)

(This message has been edited by Pan Sola (edited 02-27-2003).)

P-Psycho

Um, Pan Sola? You didn't say anything.

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Not all who wander are lost.

Bomb

Quote

Originally posted by P-Psycho:
**Um, Pan Sola? You didn't say anything.

**

Well, this way, he could be sure he wasn't wrong..

_bomb

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"I want to tell you about a time I almost died...."

Masamune

Pan Sola, your idea would indeed work, and quite well. The only reason I didn't want to do it that way originally is to cut down on the number of active missions- for this plug, 16 is actually seeming like a depressingly low number. We have at least two missions already that are always active and with you, and many of my (envisioned) storylines will require several missions at a time to implement, so keeping our static count down seems like a good thing right now. Thanks for the idea though!

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~Charlie

Bomb

Quote

Originally posted by Masamune:
**Pan Sola, your idea would indeed work, and quite well. The only reason I didn't want to do it that way originally is to cut down on the number of active missions- for this plug, 16 is actually seeming like a depressingly low number. We have at least two missions already that are always active and with you, and many of my (envisioned) storylines will require several missions at a time to implement, so keeping our static count down seems like a good thing right now. Thanks for the idea though!

**

16 active missions is low..? Cripes, that's gonna be one involved scenario.

In EVO/N 4 or 5 at once is quite a bunch..

_bomb

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"I want to tell you about a time I almost died...."

Mazca

Quote

Originally posted by Bomb:
**16 active missions is low..? Cripes, that's gonna be one involved scenario.

In EVO/N 4 or 5 at once is quite a bunch..

_bomb

**

Most of those missions will probably not be ones that require direct activity by the player- they will be to provide background effects, crön timers etc.

I would hope that would be the case, anyway... I wouldn't want to wrestle with 16 missions requiring me to do stuff at once.

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(url="http://"http://www.mazca.com/")Mazca(/url) , Moderator, (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number;=9&SUBMIT;=Go&urgaylol;=yes")EV Developer's Corner(/url)
"I expect you'd like to know about frogmen?"

Masamune

Mazca, you're perfectly correct. We are putting a huge amount of detail into this plug, and it takes missions to do it. On at least one mission I have planned, in the middle of a big battle will be a few extra special ships, that branch to other storylines or change the outcome of the battle depending on what you do to them, if you even notice them, that is. I doubt you'll ever have more really "active" missions than you get it Nova. Actually, our plotline is so branching and complex, the 1000 mission limit is more worrysome than the 16 active missions. This is not meant to be a "Hey, look how big my plug is" plug-in- but the details take a lot of work to do right, and right now it's hard to say how much we'll actually need.

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~Charlie

Pan Sola

Quote

Originally posted by Masamune:
**Mazca, you're perfectly correct. We are putting a huge amount of detail into this plug, and it takes missions to do it. On at least one mission I have planned, in the middle of a big battle will be a few extra special ships, that branch to other storylines or change the outcome of the battle depending on what you do to them, if you even notice them, that is. I doubt you'll ever have more really "active" missions than you get it Nova. Actually, our plotline is so branching and complex, the 1000 mission limit is more worrysome than the 16 active missions. This is not meant to be a "Hey, look how big my plug is" plug-in- but the details take a lot of work to do right, and right now it's hard to say how much we'll actually need.

**

Hehe, I'm looking forward to your plug in.

If you run into the 1000 mission problem, there is one scheme to handle it. Here's the general gist: Back in the days when hard drive isn't common on computers, people boot their comps with floppies. For games, especially good/complex games, the amount of data a floppy can contain is really limiting. So what do game developers do? They split the game into different floppies! Some games might put the dungeons in one floppy and the world map on another, so you need to swap them when you move in/out of dungeons. Some games divid the game chronologically, so after a certain point in the game, you "advance" to the next floppy. There are many ways to divide it.

Now, think of the 1000 mission limit like the limitation of how much a floppy can hold... Just use some bits keep track of which plug the player should be using (and warn players to backup their pilot before changing plugs, just in case they got the plug wrong).

At least that's what I plan to do with my TC if I ever run against the limit of any resources... (-:

I even have a scheme in the situation that you run out of mission bits d-:

Pan Sola, Eater of Snacks

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Please send all contributions via paypal to panguim@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Making a TC based on J.R.R. Tolkein's works. (url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=935")http://www.ev-nova.n...topic.php?t=935(/url)

mrxak

I like that idea. But some additional things you may not have thought of...

You could break the whole thing into several plugs. One plug houses the main data: shďps, wëaps, etc, as well as basic missions. Anything that remains the same or is needed should be put in it. Then you have other plugs housing different episodes. Each could include everything from altered spöbs, to mďsns, to new technology (shďps, wëaps, oütfs), to gövts.

Then you simply use global ncbs to identify every object that belongs in a particular episode (use it for the availabilty field in everything). This prevents the player from using the wrong plug and do or use anything but basic things in the main plug-in. Everything else needed for only one episode is ncb-protected within the episode, and unavailable unless the player should be there.

A major advantage I can see is for when a government needs to change dramatically (switch alliances, for instance), and it is easier to simply replace a gövt, than have altered copies of many düdes, s˙sts, and spöbs. If the düdes, s˙sts, and spöbs are in the main plug, and the gövt is controlled by an episode plug, simply swap episodes, and the government's behavior can change as you like.

Masamune

All excellent ideas, indeed. If it seems we are going to run short of resources, we won't have to panic. The plug as planned is very time-involved- we could divide it along the lines of the first 10 years and the next 10 years, etc, if we have to. Again, it is simply quite possible that I'm worried for no reason- 1000 missions is a hell of a lot, even with a bunch of "easy" to do invisible missions. I'm still experimenting on wether or not we'll need a different "Deliver Cargo/Passengers" mission for every planet, as there are approximately 0 static systems in the plug. The planets are relatively static- but to make them orbit around the sun, well... If Nova can't do a normal random destination setting, then our mission count is going to be quite high just for generic missions. Hard to test, so far- takes SO LONG to map the systems- lots of work!

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~Charlie

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