I'm probably not the only person who has ever wanted to make a plugin similar to the Wing Commander games. In such a plugin, you would begin and end each mission launching from a mothership of some sort. However, unless the "mothership" is really a spöb (and thus boring and not a ship), this can't be done.

UNTIL NOW! (dramatic music)

Ladies and gentlemen, upon reflection I have concocted the following solution to this scenario. I don't personally have the time to make any plugs that use this system, but the possibilites are many. A TC that uses this would be interesting, but what about in the standard game? A plugin that adds military service as a fighter pilot in the Federation or Auroran Empire would be interesting and certainly novel. If you do decide to use this system, mention my name somewhere in the credits, please.

The trick is to do the following:

Once the goals of a mission has been completed, use the Axxx set expression to abort the mission and the Sxxx to begin a secondary, hidden mission with the same name. This mission will have the special ship goal to be board the mothership after hailing it. On the completion of this mission's ship goal, use the Mxxx set expression to move the player to a special system, which has a (preferably animated) spöb with the graphics of the base ship. Refueling, rearming, and selecting a new mission would take place on the "mothership" spob. Once a new mission is accepted, use the Mxxx set expression to move the player to the site of the new mission.

This could be combined with making "systems" that include a number of s˙st resosurces and are connected by wormholes. Only ships with a hyperdrive outfit can use the wormholes, so intrasystem travel is possible but not intersystem travel.

------------------
To quote a pillar of American society: D'OH!

sounds great

the wormhole thing isnt too realistic, wormholes (if they exist) are the black hole's "pipeline", connecting at the end with a white hole, thus being million of light years away

------------------
(url="http://"http://www.IFDM.tk")IFDM Shipyards, planet graphics, Infini-D Tutorials (aka curufinwe studios)(/url) Play that funky music white boy!
4000 hungry children leave us per hour, while billions are spent on bombs! ****** bush!**

I always like a good workaround... I think this would work best with some kind of massive style ship, like a base ship (Super Star Destroyer style of thing) that is huge, and can be expected not to move around. The only problem would be how to get it to fight like a ship... Surely the only fighter it would put out would be you? Or would you have them already in the system... ah I see now. Could be cool, but probably not good just for a carrier though.

Thanks for sharing.

~A~

------------------
"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

No no no, Adzara!

I said that the end of a mission, you can now hail the mothership, which will become boardable like in the "gimme fuel" mission. Once that happens, you are transported to a s˙st that holds the carrier spöb. I.E. final docking manuvers.

As for the wormholes, they would NOT be ACTUAL wormholes. They would just use the wormhole effect to simulate a hyperspace jump point or some such thing.

------------------
To quote a pillar of American society: D'OH!

Hey, that's really cool. Rock on, Mazer.

Instead of moving you to a new syst where the whole ship is a spob, what about moving to a hanger bay syst? That would keep the ship a "ship", so you wouldn't spoil good old suspension of disbelief by having the ship act like a spob some of the time. You would have one big spob be the inside of the hanger bay (the "background), and have everything sit on top of it.

Now, the player shouldn't be able to fly through the walls of the hanger bay, so I may have a solution to that. Put spobs in this pattern around the hanger bay (each "." is a spob):

xx.xx.xx.xx
.ooooooooo.
.ooooooooo.
xx.xx.xx.xx

(EDIT: The o's and x's have to be there to keep the formatting right. Stupid formating. Anyway, the o's are the inside of the bay, and the part the player can fly around in.)

Give each spob a repulsor beam weapon with a good range, and make them hate the player. That way, whenever the player gets near the wall they'll be pushed away. Sort of like the safety net they raise on present day aircraft carriers if the landing plane has damage.

So with a max of 16 spobs,
-1 for the background,
-10 for the "safety net"
leaves 5 for interesting locations in the bay. Maybe a officer's lounge spob, a maintenence spob, a catapult spob (for when you are ready to leave the carrier), etc.

Peace,
Luck

------------------

(This message has been edited by Luck (edited 09-08-2003).)

Cool, that's a great idea, also the one from lucky. But lucky, how would the PICTs of the safety net spobs look like? Maybe like a wall or something? So that they kind of look like it's a wall? But then you still have the problem that you can look "beyond" the walls, and the hangar "floor" would look like stars.

------------------
You can run but then you die tired

It's like the Matrix... there is no Y. Just Luck.

I mentioned there should be an underlying spob that forms the "background" of the bay. Now that I think about it more, there's no reason the repulsor beam spobs should have to look like anything... they could even fire an invisible (transparent) repulsor beam, so that to the player it just seemed as you were gently getting pushed away from the wall.

If you ever want the stars off, you just set the Murk value to a negative number. Presto, no starfield.

Peace,
Luck

------------------

Id really like to see this idea implemented......I hope no one gets mad at me for bumping....

------------------
TROGDOR! burninating the
countryside!
www.homestarrunner.com

Spob's can't fire beam weapons.

You could, however, use a high-reload, short range weapon that does no damage (Or, it could do damage... Crashing into the walls is bad. ) and high impact.

You would also need to make sure that the impact isn't too high, or your player will wind up doing nothing but bouncing off of the walls.

------------------
"Trust me, this'll work..." - Me.
"WARPCORE BREACH IN 10 SECONDS." - Computer.
"... Of course, I could be wrong..." - Me.

Quote

You would also need to make sure that the impact isn't too high, or your player will wind up doing nothing but bouncing off of the walls.

... which might be kinda cool, but for a different type of plug-in. :+D

Peace,
Luck

------------------

Yeah, I can see it now: Nova Pinball, the new game of Ambrosia, buy it now, only $30

------------------
You can run but then you die tired