It crossed my mind today that the EVN engine could do a very good Battletech: Battlespace (as in MechWarrior) game. I'd start work on it tomorrow but i've hit the brick wall of not owning a mac. anyway the main part of the idea would be to include 'mechs as weight-class bays & fighters with no jump capacity and horrible manuverability. the idea stemed from that one mission in MW2 ghost bears legacy where you have to fight on the hull of a space craft. and all weapons would fall under capital (10x dmg) or std (1x dmg) the big problem is for the mechs because they use bulk and weight limitations on loadouts. so if anyone thinks its a good idea go ahead and start on it. or if they figure out how i can prog it in windows. i'm sure places like (url="http://"http://www.sarna.net")www.sarna.net(/url) have enough battletech history to come up with a story line plot etc. email me if you'd like to start it as a joint effort (note i'm new to evn so might not be the best help for the coding half and i don't know how to model either... so i'd prettymuch just be the writer/designer nervous laugh).

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If I were you, I'd start planning and writing out missions/descriptions and creating graphics. Between those two you have probably 50% of the work in a plugin, and you don't need a Mac to do that. With the huge amount of work involved in creating a TC, I'm sure that PC editing programs will have surfaced by the time you've completed the months of writing and designing that need doing.

TCs are a lot of work.

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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)
Go get your knife.

Thanks thats a good idea and i actually though out alot today and made out a list of the source material i'm going to need. So i think i'm just going to put up ideas here so i can bounce them off the more experienced.

First question would be: can you have the player start differently based on wheither they pick male or female (ie: male = federation campagin and female = rebel campagin) also can you create more choices than just male and female.

As i mentioned i'm basing this game off of battletech, made by Fasa, so the universe has been created. i'm thinking there would be dated events such as invasions and well-documented major conflicts.

First idea: is that you would start as a fighter pilot and you would be lauched from your carrier ship into the system where your mission was. alot of missions would be to provide support fire for landing parties. but i don't know if the ai can be programed to land and set a flag off when it does, then to compleate the mission you would hail your ship/station/planet from which you launched the mission then dock (board) with it. eventually you would be promoted and allowed to use the warships and jumpships which would be the only between system traveling ships.

Second idea: you aren't going to have to fight all the time so give the player some time off to get in a shuttle and

Second idea: mechs the classic popular ground units as well as the areospace fighters would come with bays by weight class and all units would have circular upgrading meaning not nesisarily better but different and the clan omnimechs would be cheaper to upgrade (if you know battletech you know why). i'm still working out how the missions should go in my head but the way i stated above sounds somewhat difficult but also the best way to do it.

Second question: can you have your fighter dock with a ship's bay and then watch that ship do all the jumping preprogramed like or would you have to do the jumping yourself? if it can't be done i might just start the player higher up the command chain. or better yet can you board a ship and have it bring up a hypergate map and do the jumping that way and just have civilian and military 'jumpship' spobs in every stellar. or maybe use the docking idea to get out of system but have all ships with a secondary weapon of "call jumpship" so you can't get stranded easily.

Third idea: make it so you can only request assistance from the jump capable ships and have all ships have the capacity for one jump but hard to get ahold of energy to make the jumps with. and the jumpships would charge for the fuel but it would be cheaper if you had a mission active.

Third question: can you have money deducted/added at intervals to represent food and board as well as job pay so it's not just pay per misssion?

Fourth question: can you change the max number of escorts from six (down to five and four or up to multiples of 4, 5, or 6) and can it varry based on your mission. this comes from the fact that the different gov'ts have different military unit orginization.

thats all i have now, i'll post more in a week or two.

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I've not been disappointed: the advent of WinNova has indeed brought an influx of new faces to the board.

Mazca: that's damn good advice, for ANYBODY who wants to do a TC. If more people did that, they'd have alot more motivation, when they get slogged down in the boring parts of the coding process.

Sin: to answer your questions:
1. You can make the player start differently based on gender, but you need to use a crön. chärs allow different roles, but do not take into account gender. You'd need a cron that fires on the first day and checks/sets up the world for the correct gender selection, as well as a fault-checking mechanism for if the player selects an illegal char/gender combination. In short: it's a pain, and not well supported. You can, however, easily ignore the actual gender of the player, and just act as if he/she is the correct gender. (don't worry about the G tags and bits)
2. No, you can't. The player would have to control the mothership. My old, on-hold Robotech plug used the "Jumpship" idea, though. It works.
3. Yes. Sephil saga does this, kind of.
4. No. It's a game constant. You can't even assign escorts via missions to make a traditional escort. You can, however, make an invisible mission with a special ship (or 3, 4, 5, 6....) that follows you around and acts like an escort for the most part. These do NOT count towards your escort limit, though. This was a problem in Robotech- I solved it by making it impossible to hire normal escorts.

Hope that helps.

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~Charlie
Sephil Saga Homepage: (url="http://"http://www.cwssoftware.com")www.cwssoftware.com(/url)