Quote

Originally posted by Dr. Trowel:
**Here's a very minor gripe: even though it normally played no role in EVO unless you activated an easter egg, I'd like to see the resources for the Forklift put into the EVN conversion so that plugs that used them could work as they did before.

**

Yea, I'll put that back in.

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"...The said Constitution never be construed ... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping and bearing their own arms" - Samuel Adams, 1788

Thanks for the return of the forklift, Soviet mikee! What about Guy's inquiry re. bounty hunters?

I've noticed that Martin Turner is numbering the issues that come up in the "Undocumented EVO to EVN differences" topic in order to make things easier for future users. Guy and I did something similar at the start of this thread. I thought it was a good idea. Here are numbers for two issues that didn't get 'em; if people don't find this useful, you're free to ignore the system.

10. no armor regeneration.
11. no forklift.

And here are two more issues I haven't seen mentioned before:

12. Easy: To match their appearance in Override, beam weapons should have the needed flag set so they fire under firing ships' sprites instead of on top of them.

13. Harder: Lots of ships need to have "HireRandom" set to 0. Or at least I think that will resolve the problem.... In the conversion, there are quite a number of ships that show up in the escort hiring screen without descriptions. All of these are ones which only become accessible in shipyards as rewards for mission completions; in most (all?) cases, they are government military vessels. None of these ships have hiring descs in either the original Override files (in the 21xx range) or in the Nova port files (in the 14xxx range).

Part of my hesitance here is because I'm less than 100% sure that I understand what is going on in original EVO. My limited play-test investigation (I don't have a good stable of old pilots at hand) suggests that these ships never show up for hire in EVO. Looking at the files, though, I don't see why this is so. Is it simply the case that the engine dictates that no ship can be hired if it has a shipyard availability test, even if the test bit is set? I guess my inexperience is showing.

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(url="http://"http://home.comcast.net/~drtrowel/")Dr. Trowel's E.S.W.P.(/url)
Om Noppo Noppo Om!

Quote

Originally posted by Dr. Trowel:
**My limited play-test investigation (I don't have a good stable of old pilots at hand) suggests that these ships never show up for hire in EVO. Looking at the files, though, I don't see why this is so. Is it simply the case that the engine dictates that no ship can be hired if it has a shipyard availability test, even if the test bit is set? I guess my inexperience is showing.

**

That is correct. The EV and EVO engines do not allow ships to be available for hire if they have an availability bit. In some cases, I guess it makes it sense. A government wouldn't really be hiring out their military ships - they'd be putting them all to use elsewhere.

With the forklift, you could probably make a little plug that adds it back in as an easter egg. Not like in the original but something like if you land on some obscure uninhabited planet 5 times in a row then it gives you the weapon and if you land again it removes it. Or something like that...

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"The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%." — Douglas Adams

3. My port of the Cold Fusion graphical upgrade plug re-activates the gun placements from Override. For the most part I copied the X and Y offset numbers straight from the original Override ship resources to the new Nova shans. If I remember right, I took liberties only with one ship (the human freighter).

I plug my plug here not only in the hopes that somebody will play my port of Captain Skyblade's art, but also because it could save work for someone who wants to have weapon placements work with the sprites in the official Override port. Some sprite sizes in Cold Fusion are different from those for the original Override sprites, but I think Nova Tools will correct this automatically if you put the CFN shans and the Override RLEs in the same file and then just open and close each of the shans. Tell me if that doesn't work....

CFN's "Turrets is Turrets" component contains weap resources for the turrets that needed to be have ExitType changed for the gun placements to work. CFN doesn't make any of the other weap changes that have been discussed in this thread -- I made the plug before I knew about those issues, but am just now releasing it because now I've got the OK to do so from the original creator of Cold Fusion. I doubt I'll be able to update it soon -- my next 3 weeks, at the least, are going to be pretty busy.

Anyway, CFN is pretty nice eye candy, in my biased opinion. Get it at the E.S.W.P. (link in my sig).

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(url="http://"http://home.comcast.net/~drtrowel/")Dr. Trowel's E.S.W.P.(/url)
Om Noppo Noppo Om!