Like mrxak's challenge, but lamer.

For those developers out there looking to really twist and hack the Nova engine, here's some things I was thinking up today. Anyone is welcome to see if they can make these work, out of simple curiosity if nothing else.

Escorts give aid: They're your escorts. You pay to keep them around, or at least shot at them to convince them to stay. Doesn't it make sense that they should spot you a jump's worth of fuel when you run out? See if you can find a way to use mďsns, NCBs, or whatever to get your escorts to give you some fuel.

Ship Anatomy: I was pondering a Ship Engineering Degree outfit, like a certification the player could buy. This outfit could generally streamline your ship, making it faster and more fuel-efficient, among other things, and I thought it would be cool if the player's newfound knowledge of ship design allowed him to aim for vulnerable parts of other vessels, implemented simply by a boost in all of your weapons' damage. Find a way to create an outfit that boosts the power of weapons already outfitted.

Jettison Weapon: I was thinking of a fighter that carried a very large gun or missile launcher, then ejected the whole unit when the ammo was expended, resulting in a speed boost. Find some way to implement this, maybe a mission that removes the outfit when you abort it... but it'd be cool if the AI could do it too, if possible.

So give these a whirl, if you feel like it. You could even post a plug to show it off.

Escorts, as escorts, can't give you aid. Even on missions where you got escorts, they refuse to help. The closest I can get is a mission that pops up when you hail a govt-less ship (or an abort-to-refuel mission you get when you hire/capture an escort) but I don't think that's possible. This would require a major hack, though.

"Engineering Degree" is a bit redundant... Sigma outfits are already available. You could, of course, have an "engineering degree" with things in the onpurchase and onsell fields, so you can have an outfit that does more than four things.

As for increasing the weapons damage, you'd have to have to create duplicate weaps and outfs for every weapon you'd have to boost, missions to give you these better weapons, missions to remove them (provided you sold your degree), and similar.

Jettison weapon... that would have to be a weapon that is also ammo in your secondary field. You would also have to have them ordered correctly in resource id's, so you didn't fire your launcher first (or have the launcher be its own weapon, one that preferably passes over all ships). Or, you could have the "abort to remove" type of a thing. Of course, you'd only be able to use the outfit for two other things. I'd mod acceleration and turning.

The Apple Cřre, on Apr 6 2005, 10:25 PM, said:

Escorts, as escorts, can't give you aid. Even on missions where you got escorts, they refuse to help. The closest I can get is a mission that pops up when you hail a govt-less ship (or an abort-to-refuel mission you get when you hire/capture an escort) but I don't think that's possible. This would require a major hack, though.
View Post

Well, you can't limit it to a jump's worth of fuel, but other than that it's possible. Have a mission grant an escort. Then on abort, you can grant a fuel scoop outfit that will be removed by a cron the next day (ie, when the player lands or jumps), and then the mission restarts itself. Of course the escort dude would have to be limited to a single ship class.

The Apple Cřre, on Apr 6 2005, 10:25 PM, said:

"Engineering Degree" is a bit redundant... Sigma outfits are already available. You could, of course, have an "engineering degree" with things in the onpurchase and onsell fields, so you can have an outfit that does more than four things.

As for increasing the weapons damage, you'd have to have to create duplicate weaps and outfs for every weapon you'd have to boost, missions to give you these better weapons, missions to remove them (provided you sold your degree), and similar.
View Post

Or you could have a really really long OnSell field, but yeah, it still uses a lot of resources.

The Apple Cřre, on Apr 6 2005, 10:25 PM, said:

Jettison weapon... that would have to be a weapon that is also ammo in your secondary field. You would also have to have them ordered correctly in resource id's, so you didn't fire your launcher first (or have the launcher be its own weapon, one that preferably passes over all ships). Or, you could have the "abort to remove" type of a thing. Of course, you'd only be able to use the outfit for two other things. I'd mod acceleration and turning.
View Post

According to the Nova Bible, weapons and ammo don't work in the secondary fields.

On the jettison weapon thing, wouldnt you just use his idea of having a mission that when you abort, it "jettisons" the weapon that has negitive mod accelleration and turning? It would simulate it getting faster i would think.

I don't think Nova re-evaluates your acceleration while flying around. I'm not sure but I think the Genesis team might have discussed this while thinking of technology...

Requiem, on Apr 6 2005, 11:27 PM, said:

I don't think Nova re-evaluates your acceleration while flying around. I'm not sure but I think the Genesis team might have discussed this while thinking of technology...
View Post

Well, even if it doesn't (which would surprise me) you could set so that you know what kind of ship the player is flying for the given mission and transfer his control via ncb trigger to a nearly identical but slightly faster version, with his weapons payload intact.

-reg

Nova DOES reevaluate acceleration on the fly- but for the player ONLY. This was/is a problem with SS I found, which made it so that ammo couldn't have weight, or else the computer would have an unfair disadvantage- ie not getting faster as it empties it's payload like the player does.

On the jettison weapon bit, you can't have an outfit that is both a weapon and ammunition at the same time, so the "have one weapon use another weapon as ammo" solution (the obvious one) won't work. You COULD however do it for the player only as a run-time mission, such as SS' "Wait-A-Day/Week", or "Initiate High-G Maneuvers" missions. Basically, these are functions that can be used while flying, by bringing up the Current Missions dialog and Aborting the appropriate mission. It's kind of hokey but it's the best/only way to do certain things. In this case, you could manually choose "Jettison Beam Cannon", a mission with it's onAbort set to "D(Beam Cannon)". Obviously, it would only work correctly for a single weapon, unless you put in D(BC) D(BC) D(BC) etc up to the maximum number of BC's you have. Long story short, you can either have only a single BC that can be ejected, or multiple BC's, but they must ALL be ejected at once.

The Cheat, on Apr 6 2005, 07:26 PM, said:

On the jettison weapon thing, wouldnt you just use his idea of having a mission that when you abort, it "jettisons" the weapon that has negitive mod accelleration and turning? It would simulate it getting faster i would think.
View Post

I considered this, but the AI couldn't use it. Seems to be a moot point, though, since Masa says it wouldn't make them faster anyway.

On the jettison weapon thing, you could put modtype2 as being an escape pod, so you could jettison it like that while making modtypes 3 and 4 be afterburners and turn doodalahickeys. Just a thought....

zapp, on Apr 10 2005, 08:21 PM, said:

On the jettison weapon thing, you could put modtype2 as being an escape pod, so you could jettison it like that while making modtypes 3 and 4 be afterburners and turn doodalahickeys. Just a thought....
View Post

Except that you're now stuck in an escape pod.

Maybe.....................

zapp, on Apr 10 2005, 09:46 PM, said:

Maybe.....................
View Post

Like everything else, the jettison weapon would be cool the first couple of times you did it and boring afterwards.

Here's how you do it:
You set the on-buy ncb for your weapon outfit to start a mission called 'Retain SCYBEG sub-assembly' (or whatever you call it). When the player has used up his ammo (or if he just feels like it) he aborts SCYBEG retention. The weapon goes spinning off into space (if you're sad enough to create a little movie to show that) because an ncb has been set to ditch it. This also removes the hefty negative acceleration that the item outfit brought with it. I'm pretty certain that Nova does recalculate acceleration if an item is added or removed, because you can have them added or removed by missions while in space.

To make this a noticeable enough effect to be actually worth using, SCYBEG would have to be a very, very powerful weapon which you couldn't carry many of, but which had such a catastrophic effect on your acceleration that firing it would be terribly difficult. Like the Lithium Bomb in Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's 'Rockets in Ursa Major'. You'd want to use it as part of a mission sequence, because otherwise the player would probably put up with the bad acceleration in order to not have to buy the sub-assembly again.

If you insist, but if it was very powerful, that would mean it would have to weigh in the neighborhood of 75 - 100 tons! Only the big ships would be able to carry something that big, and even then, their limited manuverability would mean wou would basicly be going in a straight line (give 'er take an inch or two).

Listen, about the engineering degree, I got it! It's not much and I haven't tested it (but it's easy and should work) but the problem of getting more than 4 modvals is solved! Listen to what I did: I made an outfit called the "Ship Engineering Degree". It increases speed, turn, acceleration and shield recharge. This one's outfit ID is 452. In the On Purchase field, I put "G453", which means when you buy the first one, you get the second one, called "Ship Engineering Degree II". What it does is give you 2 more jumps, a repair system, faster armor recharge and more shield capacity. Pretty cool, huh? Here it is:(attachment=556:attachment)

Sorry to burst your bubble zapp, but more than 4 modTypes has been thought of before. I believe PlugPack uses it. Also, I think there's a bug with Gxxx in outfits, which makes it so you get outfit xxx, but you dont actually get the outfit you bought. I think. I forgot though.

zapp, on Apr 11 2005, 11:47 PM, said:

Listen, about the engineering degree, I got it! It's not much and I haven't tested it (but it's easy and should work) but the problem of getting more than 4 modvals is solved! Listen to what I did: I made an outfit called the "Ship Engineering Degree". It increases speed, turn, acceleration and shield recharge. This one's outfit ID is 452. In the On Purchase field, I put "G453", which means when you buy the first one, you get the second one, called "Ship Engineering Degree II". What it does is give you 2 more jumps, a repair system, faster armor recharge and more shield capacity. Pretty cool, huh? Here it is: attachment
View Post

Well that's a good start, but the main idea was actually to boost your weapon power. Also, as Requiem mentioned, there's a bug that requires you to make the outfit Gxxx itself onpurchase.

You're all so mean, but I accept the valueable information you have imparted... as for making a plug that increases weapon strenghth? Unless he wants to redo every single weapon in the game, theres no way (please correct me if I'm wrong). Here is a tiny adjustment on the doohickey so it WORKS. And when I was making this, I saw the "multi-jump" which reminded me I need help to figure out how to use that ingame......... Everytime I get one I can't use it!

EDIT: Sorry, I forgot the doohickey:(attachment=560:attachment)

This post has been edited by zapp : 12 April 2005 - 06:46 AM

That ejecty-weapon thing-a-ma-bobber really didn't give much of an accel increase so I had to make it an accel & speed increaser too, just go to the outfits and purchase the "Super KO Gun".(attachment=559:attachment)Enjoy!

Guy, on Apr 12 2005, 01:47 AM, said:

Well that's a good start, but the main idea was actually to boost your weapon power. Also, as Requiem mentioned, there's a bug that requires you to make the outfit Gxxx itself onpurchase.
View Post

Actually, it's ONLY if the outfit is a weapon, with Gxxx in its onpurchase. I've reported this to the beta team a few times. But the fix you mentioned is correct.

Masamune, on Apr 12 2005, 03:52 PM, said:

Actually, it's ONLY if the outfit is a weapon, with Gxxx in its onpurchase. I've reported this to the beta team a few times. But the fix you mentioned is correct.
View Post

I think its for every outfit... Makes them behave like maps. I can see how this is useful, so it isnt really a bug, plus the workaround is simple enough. Lets settle on 'undocumented feature.'