And losing a mission for it?

The good folks from Team Inferno need a little help.

What we want is to have a mission where the player has to destroy an enemy ship before it can destroy a hypergate. What we need is the how to on this. How do we get the enemy ship to fire... say, an EMP Torpedo, towards a hypergate if it isn't destroyed in time, and if the missile hits, have the hypergate explode into nothingness, and have the player lose the mission.

I'd also like the EMP torpedo to be targetable, so if the player fails to destroy the enemy ship firing it, he could turn his attention to the EMP fighter and destroy it in mid-air.

How could I go about doing this?

This sounds simple enough. Make the ship an enemy of the hypergate and tell it to attack enemy spobs. Make the missile a fighter which does a kamikaze attack on the hypergate. You would probably need to set both the fighter and the kamikaze attack to be planet-destroying weapons. In the hypergate's OnDestroy field tell it to fail the mission.

Hm I'll tell you what: in Arpia 2 there is a sort of solution. Simple, yet powerful. Hidden in the shadows (wink wink nudge nudge, say no more!).

Guy, your solution doesn't make it disappear into nothingness Arpia 2's does

Pace (haldora), on Apr 16 2005, 10:13 AM, said:

Hm I'll tell you what: in Arpia 2 there is a sort of solution. Simple, yet powerful. Hidden in the shadows (wink wink nudge nudge, say no more!).

Guy, your solution doesn't make it disappear into nothingness Arpia 2's does
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Does Arpia 2's solution by any chance involve changing VisBits in the OnDestroy field, and then Nxxxing the player into the now-visible system, which happens to be missing a hypergate?

Hold that thought- if you had the hypergate's OnDestroy field start a mission that creates a self-destructing ship, you could insert a delay so that you could watch the spectacular explosion of a dying hypergate.
The ship would have 0 armor, and a DeathDelay longer than the explosion. In the mission's OnShipDone field, you change the VisBits and Nxxx the player to the new system (the OnShipDone field only fires when the last special ship finishes blowing up). If you wanted to, you could put the VisBit swap in the hypergate's OnDestroy field. I don't think it matters, though.

Also, you'd have to come up with some way to get the ship that destroyed the hypergate to appear in the new system. Or you could put in an OnShipDone message to the effect that the attacking ship is no longer in the system (pehaps with a text selection bit for whether or not it has been destroyed?).

Anyway, even if that isn't Arpia's solution, it should work to remove the hypergate from the radar, as well as from the screen. I make no guarentees, though.

Wait and see

Pace (haldora), on Apr 16 2005, 05:13 PM, said:

Hm I'll tell you what: in Arpia 2 there is a sort of solution. Simple, yet powerful. Hidden in the shadows (wink wink nudge nudge, say no more!).

Guy, your solution doesn't make it disappear into nothingness Arpia 2's does
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So give it dead graphic with a black mask. Of course, it may remain on radar but the ship will still be there (as will all the other ships that may have been in the system - have to explain them suddenly disappearing too).

We're using visbits. We've worked out what will happen when our warhead (The EMP Torpedo was an example. No weapon in the stock scenario is capable of utterly destroying a hypergate) hits. We're going to have a spectacular explosion, but I'm not going to give anything away. How we're doing it, however, is pretty good because it maks the disappearance of the hypergate, so the player can imagine it exploding into lots of pieces.