I was just about to start on a new plugin when I realised that there were a few things I didn't know about/how to do.

1. Ship Inherant governments: What bearing do they have on how a ship behaves? Surely it would be better to just set everything to -1 so that they'll receive the behaviour of the government it belongs to?

2. TC creation-wise, is it better to create something to go into the Plugins folder or to create a replacement for Nova Files? And if the latter, do the files need specific names (all that 'Nova Data 1...' etc).

3. I'm in the process of designing an AI-only ship that:
a ) Can't be disabled - it'll keep blasting until it blows up.
b ) It's escape ship is pretty pathetic and can be disabled, but after a period of time it'll grow back into the original ship. This timer would have to be stopped by being disabled.
Is it possible to create this?

4. Which reminds me. How do you get the AI to use escape ships? I know how you could create an escape pod replacement for the player to use, but what about AI ships?

5. Stations with multiple weapons: is it possible? I'd quite like to have some sort of battlestation in some systems with lots of weapons. Doing it as an immobile ship is possible, but I've no idea how it would be possible to have it always in the system, in the same spot every time you jump in. Plus it couldn't be destroyed, only disabled. That's why I'm leaning towards the spob angle - spobs can be 'destroyed', but they stick around and can regenerate.

This post has been edited by Chrome Falcon : 23 August 2005 - 11:31 AM

Regarding #2, my understanding is that everything in the Nove Files folder is loaded first, followed by everything in the Nova Plug-ins folder. It doesn't really matter where your TC is; the only thing is whether you remove the default Nova datafiles from consideration. You'd want to do that if you don't have more resources than they do.

File names don't really matter, with one notable exception----"Nova Music" has to be the name of the mp3 containing the intro theme.

1. There are two forms of inherant govts: the attributes govt and the combat govt. Basically, with an inherant attributes govt, the ship will acquire the attributes associated with ships of that govt, like higher shields and better combat ability (things set in the govt resource). With the inherant combat govt, the ship will fight for that govt, and the govt's enemies will attack it. You can set either of these, both, or neither, as you choose.

3. a) I'm not sure you can make the ship impossible to disable - you can make it hard to disable, by giving it high shields and low armour.

AI ships will regularly reappear on their own. I don't think you need to do anything special here, unless you had something else in mind.

5. A spob can only have a single weapon. However, you could make a ship always appear by running a silent mission with the ship in question set as a special ship with "ship start" set as "over Nav Default 1" or whatever.

1. Ships created by dudes will always use the govt defined by the dude. That really doesn't leave much else but in the case of the player's ship other ships may attack you if your inherentgovt is their enemy.

2. I'm not sure but I think Nova loads all resources it finds even if some override others so if you made it a plugin it would take longer to load. Just something to keep in mind...

3. The only way to stop it being disabled is to give it something like 1 armour. Though it'll still won't fire if it's in the middle of blowing up. I don't think it's possible to make the escape ship grow back into the original but if it was possible it would be quite tricky and could only be used as part of a mission.

4. I'm not sure about this. You can give the ship the bay and the escape ship but I'm not sure how you'd stop it from launching it as a normal fighter.

5. Easy, just stick multiple spobs in the same spot.

I cant test anything for another 18 hours. I was just wondering more about the inherent combat gov. As has been said, nearly every ship is created as per d00d, and I remember reading that Spobs decide what to fire at based upon the combat gov of the player ship. Does it also then dock the player a few imaginary legal rating when a ship is deciding if it will fire on you? I find it hard to believe the polaris will tear the crap out of an oryhara flying an auroran carrier. So does it just tip the balance occasionally?

Also, is there any way for the dude to cede precedence to the inherent gov? That would be awesomely useful for me.. but I doubt it is possible. Setting it to independant forces it independant, right? I know in most cases this would be prefered, but there are always times...

As for escape ships, there is a flag "AI don't use this". Just give them a real bay with a ship. Certain breeds of AI pirate carriers use this fine. Just remember, an escape ship is always feral (essentially, an independant wimpy trader, and it pops out with few enough shields that it automatically runs)

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. Regarding that weird regenerating ship, maybe the mission should be just about destroying its outer shell, then the next one hunts down the escape ship...
Multiple spobs on the same position - good idea. Probably not exactly the same position - have various arms with weapons branching off the main structure a la Deep Space 9.
I have another question though - while working on a rocket launcher, I realised that I didn't know what the ammo type (or whatever it is) in the weap resource does. For fuel consumption, kamikaze and infinite weapons it makes sense - but what about positive values?

Chrome Falcon, on Aug 30 2005, 04:09 PM, said:

Multiple spobs on the same position - good idea. Probably not exactly the same position - have various arms with weapons branching off the main structure a la Deep Space 9.
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Yeah, that would be cool. Then you can destroy each arm separately.

Chrome Falcon, on Aug 30 2005, 04:09 PM, said:

I have another question though - while working on a rocket launcher, I realised that I didn't know what the ammo type (or whatever it is) in the weap resource does. For fuel consumption, kamikaze and infinite weapons it makes sense - but what about positive values?
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For ammo using weapons you usually just set this to the index of it's own resource. But some weapons may want to draw ammo from other weapons, like the cloaking Polaran Torp Tube which uses ammo from the regular Polaron Torp.

Index is the ID number - 128. But this is the only weapon field that uses that and not the ID number, and I have no idea why. Weap 131 would use ammo type 3, you would put 131 in the modval of both the outfit that granted the weapon and the outfit that counts as ammo.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 30 August 2005 - 06:40 PM

New problems coming up.
First one - is it possible to have a weapon that hits both spobs and ships? I know that you can set a weapon to be planet type, but that suggests that it won't hit ships if you do that. One solution I thought of was to have an outfit that gave you two weapons, with identical stats, but one of them was planet type. Trouble with that is that when the bolt hits, the one of the other type will carry on. Any ideas?

Second - does anyone out there use Blender3D? If so, could you please tell me how on earth I can convert the models into sprites? Plus (at the risk of sounding too lazy to download the tutorial whatsit), how do you get the colours to be more specific (if I want insignias etc.)?

Can I just finish off by saying a big 'thank you' to all of you helpful people willing to help a developer in difficulties. Thanks, guys!

Enough of the big, complex questions for a moment. What's the point of masks? I know that you need both rled and rle8s to get a graphic to work (if you base your knowledge in Nova Files (like me)), but surely the mask doesn't add anything to the finished product.
And on the subject of ships (or rather ship graphics), I don't understand all those controls for moving weapon exit points - how does multiplying (as the tooltip in EVNEW seems to indicate) do anything?

Chrome Falcon said:

Ship Inherant governments: What bearing do they have on how a ship behaves? Surely it would be better to just set everything to -1 so that they'll receive the behaviour of the government it belongs to?

Inherent governments mainly influence the player's ship and escorts. The inherent combat government affects who attacks you; if you're flying an Auroran ship (InherentGovt = 129), the Federation will attack you even if you haven't committed crimes against them, because they'll think your an Auroran.

The inherent attributes govt affects various other functions; if you have Firebird escorts, for example, they'll respond to you with the Auroran voices because their attributes government is the Aurorans.

Chrome Falcon said:

TC creation-wise, is it better to create something to go into the Plugins folder or to create a replacement for Nova Files? And if the latter, do the files need specific names (all that 'Nova Data 1...' etc).

If you're replacing most of the original scenario, you should create replacement data files; apart from the memory-use and speed improvements (which aren't as relevant now as they were in the days of the original Escape Velocity ), it saves you having to make sure you override every original resource.

The file names don't matter.

Chrome Falcon said:

a ) Can't be disabled - it'll keep blasting until it blows up.
b ) It's escape ship is pretty pathetic and can be disabled, but after a period of time it'll grow back into the original ship. This timer would have to be stopped by being disabled.

As for (a), if you create a ship with no armour, it will never be disabled; that's how the alien ships in the original Escape Velocity worked. For (, however, the game doesn't really support anything like you're asking for.

Chrome Falcon said:

is it possible to have a weapon that hits both spobs and ships?

I don't believe so.

Chrome Falcon said:

What's the point of masks? I know that you need both rled and rle8s to get a graphic to work (if you base your knowledge in Nova Files (like me)), but surely the mask doesn't add anything to the finished product.

Masks are what decide which parts of your ship are transparent; without them, every ship would be surrounded by a black square that would blot out everything it flew over. It's the same principle as is used in icon editors.

An RLE resource contains both the sprite and the mask, so you need both a sprite PICT and a mask PICT in order to generate the RLE, but once you've done so, you don't need to include either PICT in your actual plug-in.

This post has been edited by David Arthur : 06 September 2005 - 12:42 PM

For the multiplying (or compression) of exit points you should really read up on the shan resource in the bible. Basically they allow you to compensate for sprites being rendered at an angle rather than top-down. If your sprites aren't rendered in perspective then you can actually get the exit points lined up perfectly for every frame.

David Arthur, on Sep 6 2005, 05:40 PM, said:

As for (a), if you create a ship with no armour, it will never be disabled; that's how the alien ships in the original Escape Velocity worked.
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This will cause the ship to self-destruct as soon as it's created.

David Arthur, on Sep 6 2005, 05:40 PM, said:

An RLE resource contains both the sprite and the mask, so you need both a sprite PICT and a mask PICT in order to generate the RLE, but once you've done so, you don't need to include either PICT in your actual plug-in.
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Just to expand on that, this means that the value you put in the Mask field doesn't really matter, though usually people set this to 1 greater than the sprite ID.

Guy, on Sep 7 2005, 09:44 AM, said:

For the multiplying (or compression) of exit points you should really read up on the shan resource in the bible. Basically they allow you to compensate for sprites being rendered at an angle rather than top-down. If your sprites aren't rendered in perspective then you can actually get the exit points lined up perfectly for every frame.

This will cause the ship to self-destruct as soon as it's created.

Just to expand on that, this means that the value you put in the Mask field doesn't really matter, though usually people set this to 1 greater than the sprite ID.
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I'll check how they do it for the aliens in the EVC conversion for EVN - thanks, due to never having finished EVC's storyline, I didn't know that Aliens couldn't be disabled.

And thanks for explaining about the masks. But this doesn't help a great deal with the main problem - which is that until someone explains to me how to convert my Blender images into something that Nova can use, all graphics discussion is a moot point. Come on, surely Someone out there uses Blender? Help? Please?