Editing variables like that would be quite excellent... Similar to the script editor in WC3/SC... Of course, there can be no executable code, or anything close to it would need to be handled very carefully... No need to give people a method to crash other people's computers...
while (playermoney == playermoney) {
}
~ SpacePirate
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Eat blazing electric death!
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I don't remember if this was mentioned or not. This might be going too far, and may likely be frowned upon, but wouldn't it be cool if you had a game that supports speech recognition?
You could easily command escorts that way. "Fighters, defend" "Warships, hold position".
I also thought about a retreat command for escorts, you can certain ships warp out while others stay with you. Later they would come back if you jump to another system, or if you land on a spob and leave. This is ideal if you want to save ships that have freighter AIs. Sorry if this was mentioned before.
Did someone mention that a player can order escort targeted ships, even other escort ships?
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Evaluate an NCB on weapon fire.
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I'd like to see multiple types of PD systems, similar to the multiple jamming types. Each ship or weapon would have a few (four?) checkboxes to indicate vulnerability to a specific PD type, and each PD system would be able to target certain categories of weapon. So a flare launcher with an auto-detection system would only drop flares when a certain type of missile was near, not a fighter.
Taking that idea even further, each ship could have invulnerability to only certain types of weapons. Individual weapons could have checkboxes indicating what damage type they were, and furthermore have flags to determine if those ships took no damage (like some sort of energy-absorbing ship), could not be attacked by that weapon (flares), or could not be attacked but took damage if hit accidentally (quad light turrets). A "take half damage instead of immunity" flag would be useful, but not an essential part of the idea. This solution would encompass the above PD system as well, and probably require a few more weapon types (maybe up to 8).
More categories of weapon hardpoints. Eight would really help.
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Unselectable spöbs. This would be so useful I can't adequately describe it in words. Background image of orbital shipyards (where there are a few you can actually land on)? Done. Enormous, rotating accreation (sp) disk surounding a black hole? Done. Debris field, gas cloud, or rings around a planet without making the selection huge? Done. I. Want. This feature.
(If this is already possible, please tell me!)
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Quote
Originally posted by geek#1:
**....(where there are a few you can actually land on)? ...
(If this is already possible, please tell me!)
**
Hmm, to me it sounds like it would be the same way as if you map out a link if you created a button for a website. An image where you edit the button by drawing out a region to be selectable. If that's what you meant. Also I'm assuming that you can have options to whether or not have the spob labelled or not on the map?
I wonder if govt should have aliases, meaning that it's like another faction but the same, only it has a different transponder and identity. (I.E. UE govt is the same as UE Frontier). But maybe it might not be necessary, I don't know. Its like a person have 2 different passports but it all refers back to the same person.
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Nosumus Fortiolis Quad Volimus
I'm the only guy in the universe that can make horses cry.
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Quote
Originally posted by Terek EBan: **\- Add a "can dock" flag to ships and give them an extra field with planet/station options. This would give the option to make flagship missions. Situation: You are a fighter pilot and have to serve on a flagship type class ship. The first day you have to fly to your new "home" (special ship is set to be in your system). You dock and outfit yourself there etc. Finally you go to the ships mission briefing room and get a mission. As you start off from the ship youre already in another system where you have to fight against enemy ships. BUT the flagship class ship is fighting and moving too. So to refuel or to get new missiles you have to fly to it and dock. (In this case I would prefer to make another flag that can be set: "auto-refuel" - If both "can dock" and "auto-refuel" are set and you try to dock on the ship a message box will appear that let you choose what you want to do: real docking (that takes a whole day like landing on planets) or simply recharge your missles/shields/etc. (thats takes just 5 seconds - after that you are launched automaticly again). That would give anotehr ability: Refilling ships for special "long-time" missions where you just able to recharge yourself (and since you checked only one flag there will be no message box where you have to choose from).**
Quote
Originally posted by Zzap212:
-Support for mobile spöbs
This would also be useful for simulating city-starships that the player can dock with. The present engine can accomplish this, but only with multiple spob resources and visbits. Thus, the city-starships can't move around at all.
Quote
Originally posted by UE_Research & Development:
- As an extension of the idea of ships acting as mobile bases one can land upon, how about ships acting as hypergates? This could open up a whole host of possibilities.
Such as having a starship that the player could dock with or hypergate through? This would require the ability for the player to state whether they want to dock with the ship or hypergate through the ship. It would also require rethinking how hypergates are defined. Do you still want such a ship to be able to act as a hypergate to specific destinations? Or perhaps add the option of the player jumping to any system within a certain number of jumps of the hypergate ship?
While I'd also like this idea, I just realized that just the conceptual part of how the game engine is going to support all this is going to get complicated. The coding and beta-testing is liable to be a nightmare.
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The American Medical Association has concluded that computer code is not responsible for influencing sexual orientation.
"If it's not on fire, it's a software problem." --Matt C. Burch
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That sounds like an idea if you wanted to make a Macross 7 TC.
I know that Nova supports special animation sprites whenever a ship fires a secondary weapon. I think it should go further, also it should support initial sound fire, the sound you hear like if a weapon is charging up to fire. I would like to see a feature that could allow Robotech TC to really come to fruition and stuff, mainly the transformation fighter mechs can do.
Oh yeah did anyone of you notice the new post icon indicator?
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Nosumus Fortiolis Quad Volimus
I'm the only guy in the universe that can make horses cry.
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(This message has been edited by Coraxus (edited 01-28-2004).)
New post indicator? What's that?
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Quote
Originally posted by UE_Research & Development:
**New post indicator? What's that?
**
New post indicator? What's that?
Whenever you go to the main menu of the board to select which thread to go to, you'll see this one egg shaped icon that indicates whether a post has been modified recently, if it had more than 30 posts, etc. They're on the left side of each thread.
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Nosumus Fortiolis Quad Volimus
I'm the only guy in the universe that can make horses cry.
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/ddstation")DryDock Station(/url), look and download stuff, and....stuff!| Remember folks, an (url="http://"http://www.apple.com")apple(/url) a day, keeps Bill Gates away!
Quote
Originally posted by geek#1:
**Unselectable spöbs. This would be so useful I can't adequately describe it in words. Background image of orbital shipyards (where there are a few you can actually land on)? Done. Enormous, rotating accreation (sp) disk surounding a black hole? Done. Debris field, gas cloud, or rings around a planet without making the selection huge? Done. I. Want. This feature.
(If this is already possible, please tell me!)
**
Can't you already do this by making a spob that can't be landed on, and then put it in a field higher than four so it can't be selected with the number keys? Is there some other way to select planets that I am not thinking of?
On the subject of Nova improvements, how about changing the system used to store game data in memory to a linked list system. I am assuming that Nova uses arrays right now, and that is why there are hardcoded limits on the number of weapons and ships that can be added. With a linked list, there would be no limits, other than memory, to the number of missions or whatever that could be added. I imagine that changing the engine in such a major way would require so much work that it would not be realistic to expect it could be done though.
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Quote
Originally posted by AnubisTTP:
Can't you already do this by making a spob that can't be landed on, and then put it in a field higher than four so it can't be selected with the number keys? Is there some other way to select planets that I am not thinking of?
You can still click on it. But usually, what you said will suffice. If the player does click on it, and hail it, they would get "no response". If they try to land, it would say something about it being inhospitable, which can also be changed.
~ SpacePirate
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Fear the SpacePirate,
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- Improved tech levels. The Techlevel field would be a rect where you can enter the tech level of four separate tech trees. E.g. You enter 7 into the 3rd box in the Techlevel field of an outfit - only spobs with 7 or higher in the 3rd box of their Techlevel field would have the outfit. This would allow you to easily create four completely different factions with completely different tech trees.
Special techs would include all outfits with that number in any of their boxes.
- Speed field for asteroids. This wouldn't be particularly useful but still kinda cool. Their speed would be +/-50% of the value given here.
- tdëf resource. This one's a bit too complicated for what it's worth but what the heck. It would eliminate the need for four guidance types and three flags from the wëap resource and allow much greater flexibilty. So here's how it works: Add a TurretDefinition field to the wëap resource which would specify the ID of a tdëf resource to use. The tdëf resource would contain four rects: From, To, and NoTarget. The From and To fields would allow you to specify up to four sectors the turret would be able to fire from while the NoTarget field would descibe four angles the turret would fire from when no target is selected (shots would cycle through these angles). For example, to create a front-quadrant turret the same as the existing guidance type you would make a tdëf with the following values.
From: 315, -1, -1, -1
To: 45, -1, -1, -1
NoTarget: 0, -1, -1, -1
Or a weapon that can only fire to the sides you would enter 90 and 270 in the NoTarget field and leave the rest at -1. Of course, you would also need a much better AI to be able to handle such a weapon.
Please tell me what you think of this idea.
- Someone mentioned having ship firing animations for only certain weapons, so here's my method. Add these flags to the shän resource: 0x0200 - Ship unfolds when firing guns (weapons of ExitType 0), 0x0400 - Ship unfolds when firing turrets, 0x0800 - Ship unfolds when firing guided weapons, 0x1000 - Ship unfolds when firing beams, 0x2000 - Ship unfolds when firing other weapons (ExitType -1). The 0x0080 flag would be "Ship unfolds when firing specific weapons" - a rect at the end of the shän resource would be used to enter the IDs of up to four specific weapons.
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"The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%." Douglas Adams
(This message has been edited by Guy (edited 01-28-2004).)
Quote
Originally posted by AnubisTTP:
**Can't you already do this by making a spob that can't be landed on, and then put it in a field higher than four so it can't be selected with the number keys? Is there some other way to select planets that I am not thinking of?
On the subject of Nova improvements, how about changing the system used to store game data in memory to a linked list system. I am assuming that Nova uses arrays right now, and that is why there are hardcoded limits on the number of weapons and ships that can be added. With a linked list, there would be no limits, other than memory, to the number of missions or whatever that could be added. I imagine that changing the engine in such a major way would require so much work that it would not be realistic to expect it could be done though.
**
I don't know your programming experience, but that would be a BAD idea. Linked lists are not the way to go for storing internal data. There are tens of megabytes of data that need to be accessed very quickly. The clear solution is just to use dynamic arrays instead of static arrays. I don't see any reason to limit the maximum number of resources of a given type, and dynamic arrays are very easy to implement, especially if you use the STL. Linked lists, on the other hand, are very slow to iterate through and find a resource of a particular ID, and they also use more memory, since you need one or two extra pointers for each resource. Random access is very important.
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There are a few things that I would like to see, they affect gameplay much more than development.
-The ability to choose which cargos to dump. If I am carrying opals and accidentally picked up water, why must I have to also dump valuble opals?
-A more realistic measurement of space. I don't find tons to be a very good measure. Couldn't a ship have large volume, but engines too weak for dense cargos? I believe mass and volume should be made part of cargo and outfit requirements.
-While it is fun, it's horribly unrealistic that a Starbridge can slaughter fleets of Fed Destroyers.
-While true 3D would be nice, it would require great changes. Instead it would be nice to be able to import 3D shapes into Nova and have them to be automatically converted into sprites. Although I suppose this could simply be done with an outside utility, having a complete 3D object in Nova would allow for more realistic explosions and sprites.
-I think it would be better for pilots to be saved on the planet, rather than after taking off. This would reduce the problem of landing on a world for a mission, then quitting and being unable to land again.
-I think the AI for escorts should be changed greatly. Just because my Manticore is a warship doesn't mean that its hundreds of tons of cargo space should be wasted. And a Armed Varient of a Levithan can hold its own against many other ships, so why do they flee when attacked by Vipers?
-Another nice thing would be the ability to turn on or off strict play.
-And for Nova4; don't make the galaxy larger, but the northern systems are all empty with almost no reason to explore them.
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Quote
Originally posted by Klepsacovic:
-A more realistic measurement of space. I don't find tons to be a very good measure. Couldn't a ship have large volume, but engines too weak for dense cargos? I believe mass and volume should be made part of cargo and outfit requirements.
What are you talking about? That's easily changed in the "misc strings" resource:
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(This message has been edited by orcaloverbri9 (edited 01-29-2004).)
Quote
Originally posted by Aprosenf:
**I don't know your programming experience, but that would be a BAD idea. Linked lists are not the way to go for storing internal data. There are tens of megabytes of data that need to be accessed very quickly. The clear solution is just to use dynamic arrays instead of static arrays. I don't see any reason to limit the maximum number of resources of a given type, and dynamic arrays are very easy to implement, especially if you use the STL. Linked lists, on the other hand, are very slow to iterate through and find a resource of a particular ID, and they also use more memory, since you need one or two extra pointers for each resource. Random access is very important.
**
My programming experience is somewhat limited, static arrays and linked lists are the only methods I have ever used to store data internally. How do dynamic arrays work?
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Quote
know that Nova supports special animation sprites whenever a ship fires a secondary weapon. I think it should go further, also it should support initial sound fire, the sound you hear like if a weapon is charging up to fire. I would like to see a feature that could allow Robotech TC to really come to fruition and stuff, mainly the transformation fighter mechs can do.
I think that this is possible with bursts... maybe.
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Quote
Originally posted by AnubisTTP:
**My programming experience is somewhat limited, static arrays and linked lists are the only methods I have ever used to store data internally. How do dynamic arrays work?
**
Just like static arrays, Anubis, except that the actual array size is not constant- the array is allocated at runtime, and can grow or shrink as it needs to. However, access time is still a constant-time operation (unlike a list), which is as fast as it gets, and, at least in C++, you still use the Array syntax for them most of the time, ie square brackets.
Conceptually, it would be very easy to replace all of Nova's static arrays with dynamic ones (and hence remove all resource limits), but it can be difficult in practise, as you have to track down all the times you relied on that array's size as being constant, which can be a huge job.
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~Charlie
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