EV:N Battle Arena

It was posted to the Add-ons page a few days ago, and so far seems to be getting good responses (albeit limited). Since there were many here that were interested in seeing smaller plugs, I'm crossposting the topic...kind of.

As it stands, it's a "minor string" plug, something to kill a few hours. I tried to make it as "complete" as I could, and do some interesting work with it.

Here's the link to the topic on the Nova boards:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php...st=0&p;=1462347&

Some features (since this is the Dev board):

Uses outfits to start missions. (with the obvious step for a sequel to a battle arena plug therefore becoming using ships :))

Each mission appears as a rank, and replaying the missions gives a different text after the first time (so it won't seem like the first time again and again).

Creative use of a tractor beam weapon to make a ship appear feral, sort of. (well it's what I was going for)

A storyline to help tie things together.

Has special texts for dominating the station. (something not used very much in Nova as it stands)

Hopefully those of you who wanted a small plug to play around in without an extensive story and/or extensive file-size will enjoy it. If not, well, I tried, and it's been released.

I have a question...in the readme, you state that it requires a new pilot, or some honesty on the player's part. Exactly what do you mean by this?

orcaloverbri9, on Aug 12 2005, 11:38 PM, said:

I have a question...in the readme, you state that it requires a new pilot, or some honesty on the player's part. Exactly what do you mean by this?
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Oh, that. That was because I included a special reward for dominating the planet, but I didn't want to give it away. A surprise, if you will. Without starting a new pilot, however, it would require the player to dominate, release, and then attempt to redominate the planet to reset the defense fleet. Hence the "honesty" part.

Ah. I'm sure there's a reason for that, although I'm too lazy to be bothered trying to figure it out.

By the way, this desc looks familiar. Where's my thanks?

Apropos descs, (Bug Report) Sirrusa in Archenar has the same desc like USC Station.

Sounds cool. Will download.

Frequency 245, on Aug 13 2005, 12:13 PM, said:

Apropos descs, (Bug Report) Sirrusa in Archenar has the same desc like USC Station.
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No, for me, the UESC station picture uses the same resource (10035) as Sirrusa.

Oh, I also meant picture, sorry! And Harbor, too.

...and Spacedock VI. Really, just any station of that type.

Does the different arena ships should also have pictures if you hail them? I only see white if I do it.

Well, I've started a new pilot, now I have to dominate something. I think I will cheat to get it, I'd rather just get to playing the plug-in myself.

You don't really have to start a new pilot.

I've fixed the pict bug. Silly me, I didn't realize that the graphics for the landing picts would be in the titles files. But, that's what I get for not being familiar with all of the data files before doing a plug.

I'm very happy at all of the positive responses, thank you all.

I'm looking into the hailing picts issue. To the best of my knowledge it should automatically reference the shipyard pict...which in this case may not exist now that I think about it...it shouldn't add to the filesize too much to throw something in there for all of the arena opponents...I'll look into doing that, thanks for bringing it up.

Edit: Now I see what's going on. Since the ships don't appear in the shipyard, I used 1x1 white pixels for the ship images to greatly reduce the filesize for the plug. I'll be looking into reintroducing simple picts that hopefully won't make the size get back up towards 10 megabytes (pre-compression). Thanks again!

And a big thank you to everyone who's enjoying it. I'm glad you like it.

Edit2: With a big thanks to Edwards, I've found and activated the flag that prevents the player from being able to hail ships. This fixes the problem without adding extra weight to the plug. I'll still be looking into adding simple picts that hopefully won't increase the size too much, but it will take some experimentation.

This post has been edited by GutlessWonder : 15 August 2005 - 08:48 PM