I understand your idea. I'm just modifying it to suit my own purposes.
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I just got an interesting idea...what if you could put the countries of the main superpowers in the world in the system/planet (earth scenario)? You could have a country for each sytem, with hypergates leading to each other one...then you could make a World War II! Bomb the Japanese, watch submarines destroyed, decrypt codes...it'd be alot of work, but think of how cool it would be! Then, on DDay, have a bunch of tanks go after them through the water and make them fire little weapons that look like people (I'm going for accuracy here...)...then, finally, a bunh of planes come in and help, and at the end, the spöb blows up! I'm just not sure if you're allowed to attack spöbs (I'm not very experienced with Nova)...anyway, you could then have these post-war special ops. assignments like assasinate Hitler, or command a platoon of troops disguised as police to go after a group of spies...things like that. I think this would be pretty darn cool if done, but I'd like some input...
I had another idea...
Upon closer examination, I don't think I could make that interesting a planet contained within one syst. Plus, wouldn't it be neat to use the Map to see the planet's surface? Thus, I add these steps.
1. Create an image for the Map that looks like your planet.
2. Make it a nebula.
3. Do the same with the rest of the planet, and lay it out like you want.
4. Put the systs where ever you want on the planet, say one per island. Now each syst only has to contain one landmass, and can thus be more detailed.
5. Make a graphic that looks like a Chunnel... you know, a bullet-train that goes under the water. Use this graphic for a wormhole that the connects two islands. Viola, planets of whatever size you want.
6. I guess strictly speaking, you'd need to make invisible the rest of the universe every time you do this, so it wouldn't show up on the map... or you could just make a corner of the map the part that shows up when you are on a planet.
I know Nova doesn't allow very many nebulas, but it's something, anyway. Most planets can still probably be represented by the "one syst" model, or just make up a reason why maps are not availible for them.
EDIT: Whoops, Masamune had this idea already. Cool.
I like Masamune's outfit swap idea, but I'm not sure how it would work for multiple outfs of the same type. If I have 4 widgets, and crons go off every day, would it take 4 days to switch all of the widgets to their invisible token counterpart? Or am I missing something? I hope I am, as your idea is much more elegant and simpler than mine (which translates into less work for the plug-in maker).
A plug-in maker could use something like this to make a "ship garage" for their specific plug-in. That would be very cool. I don't really see a way of making a generic garage, tho... it's all tied up in the ships and outfs used by the particular plug.
Peace,
Luck
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(This message has been edited by Luck (edited 09-08-2003).)
That's what the iterative entry does. The cron 'loops' until the Availability (or whatever it's called) field no longer evalutates to true, removing a token and replacing it with a real outfit (or vice-versa) until no more tokens left.
Someone mentioned how to store the player's ship type, since there is no bit test for ship type. This is easy: assign a mission bit to each ship, that is set OnPurchase/Capture, but not cleared OnSell. The OnPurchase/Capture field should clear all the other ship types. Thus, when you trade to the car, bit XXX representing the ship type stays set, allowing the replacer cron to work. When the ship is given back, nothing changes. But get a new ship any other way, and things change jsut like they should.
As far as a ship garage, you could only use the system to store 1 ship, and it definately wouldn't be generic- it would be totally tyed to the particular plug. I feel sorry for anybody who will want to make a plug in for SS- to add a reactor, you need to make 2 outfits AND two crons, and they have to be just right- the mission bit tests are ridiculous. That's worst-case, but everything is like that. Tinker with one bit and you can break the whole.
This all still sounds like way to much work, IMHO.
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~Charlie
Sephil Saga Homepage: (url="http://"http://www.cwssoftware.com")www.cwssoftware.com(/url)