Later today I'll be uploading and posting the url to a utility that activates përs bits in a pilot file (discussed a bit (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/Forum9/HTML/005408.html")here(/url) and (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/Forum9/HTML/005346.html")here(/url)). While I am pleased and honored to have the ability to be able to make such a utility available, it would please me even more if such a utility were made unnecessary by changes to the game engine.
In the process of testing the utility, I found that if the parts of the pilot file recording whether a përs is alive (1) or dead (0) were all set to 1, the engine worked fine even if there were no corresponding resources for what was supposed to be alive (example, if the pilot file said that përs 700 was alive, but there was no përs with ID 700, the game functioned normally).
While it would be a hack at best, a quick solution which may allow plugin makers to use all përs resources without starting a new pilot would be to set all përsActive data to 1 as default vs 0. As përs resources were killed during play, the data would be set to 0 as normal.
Again, such a solution is not particularly elegant, but it seems it would be a small change to make which would provide quite an improvement in functionality. There may be aspects of how the engine works that I am unaware of that would not make this feasable, though.
Just a suggestion.
-STH
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"Create enigmas, not explanations." -Robert Smithson
(This message has been edited by Mazca (edited 06-07-2004).)
It seems I suggested exactly what you have. I had thought that përs data was appended to the pilot file as the përs's were encountered... But I guess that would be much more work, now that I think about it.