(TC on the drawing board here...)

Okay, Im playing around with this idea for a (slightly realistic) full TC... It'll be huge, lots of govts, republicans, democrats, terrorists, hackers, companies like BMW and Boeing and Motorola still around... etc...

Anyway, are these outfits even possible?

For hacker faction

Entanglement Net
A net... (a fighter) that just drifts behind the ship... Acts like a mine's movement. Has a powerful tractor beam, the idea is it's a shielding net that deals tiny amounts of damage (The damage is only there so the fighter will fire it. I know a AI ship will not fire a weapon with 0 damage.) but completely immobolises a ship until the net is destroyed.
My Thoughts:
A Fighter with the net as it's sprite. An invisible Tractor beam turret with very low range.

An EMP Cannon
A Weapon that sends a wave of EMP in all directions around a ship, dealing small amounts of damage to all ships in range.
My Thoughts:
A Beam turret, with random accuracy and invisible sprite???

For terrorist Faction

A kamikaze fighter...
A fighter with low shields but high shield regen that rams into enemy ships.
My Thoughts:
The fighter has a single weapon... Lots of damage with a blast radius sure to engulf the fighter and destroy it.

Okay, the difficult part.
I want this plug to work in EVO if at all possible.

Also, if any people good with creativity are around... AIM me... Duodeadlypeace

I could use some help with details on the races and stuff.
I'll be sure to post some more things here when I find my notebook...

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 09:30 AM, said:

A kamikaze fighter...
A fighter with low shields but high shield regen that rams into enemy ships.
My Thoughts:
The fighter has a single weapon... Lots of damage with a blast radius sure to engulf the fighter and destroy it.
View Post

I thought of something that might be like this. You would set your weapon to reverse recoil, and high impact. Then maybe a bomb outfit...

Another thing.
I know fuel can be converted to ammo...

Could fuel be converted into ammo for a fighter bay? A ship with a shipyard?

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 06:30 AM, said:

Entanglement Net
A net... (a fighter) that just drifts behind the ship... Acts like a mine's movement. Has a powerful tractor beam, the idea is it's a shielding net that deals tiny amounts of damage (The damage is only there so the fighter will fire it. I know a AI ship will not fire a weapon with 0 damage.) but completely immobolises a ship until the net is destroyed.
My Thoughts:
A Fighter with the net as it's sprite. An invisible Tractor beam turret with very low range.View Post

That should work- note that you will need to calibrate the fighter's acceleration, as that controls the strength of it tractor beam.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 06:30 AM, said:

An EMP Cannon
A Weapon that sends a wave of EMP in all directions around a ship, dealing small amounts of damage to all ships in range.
My Thoughts:
A Beam turret, with random accuracy and invisible sprite???

Try a simple unguided weapon, lifespan of one frame, explodes at end of life, with a wide blast radius, that doesn't hurt the firing ship. More likely to hit everything in the area than a beam.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 06:30 AM, said:

A kamikaze fighter...
A fighter with low shields but high shield regen that rams into enemy ships.
My Thoughts:
The fighter has a single weapon... Lots of damage with a blast radius sure to engulf the fighter and destroy it.

You'll need to try that out to be sure, but it should work. You might also want to look at KamikazeDrone, a plug for EVO that adds some kamikaze fighters.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 06:30 AM, said:

Okay, the difficult part.
I want this plug to work in EVO if at all possible.

That shouldn't be a problem. So far, two out of three of your outfit ideas have already been done for EVO, to some extent, and the third looks like it should be fairly simple. Just watch out for people yelling at you for "developing on an obsolete platform", "creating a plug that will never have an audience", and whatever else came up the last time someone mentioned that they were planning a plug for EVO. Basically, EVN has more features, a larger audience, and runs on recent computer systems, but EVO is simpler to write plug-ins for, doesn't have the same "my plug-in/TC must be bigger and better than Nova" effect on designers, and if you want to, EVO plugs can be converted to work with Nova.

For anyone who wishes to discuss the merits of creating plug-ins for the various EV engines, please do so politely in a seperate thread. This thread is the most recent discussion of the subjec, containing most of the arguements on both sides, and this thread has a rather vehement arguement about the subject, that eventually degenerated into name-calling.

Edwards

Hmm, interesting ideas, Red.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 04:18 PM, said:

Could fuel be converted into ammo for a fighter bay? A ship with a shipyard?
View Post

Hmm...i dont get exactly what your saying here, specify please?

I think he means using the 'use fuel as ammo' flag on a figheter-bay wëap. Not sure it would work, considering the ammo reference is what connects the fighter to the weapon.

So, in reality, the interceptor ship from the bay is made from fuel? You got the idea what I mean?

Yea, the idea, is the ship for the bay can't be bought... The mother ship uses fuel to produce them.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 28 2006, 02:04 PM, said:

Yea, the idea, is the ship for the bay can't be bought... The mother ship uses fuel to produce them.
View Post

I think you could require the mother ship to expend so much fuel in launching fighters, but I'm pretty sure you'd still have to have actual 'fighter' ammo for the bay.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 10:30 AM, said:

Entanglement Net
A net... (a fighter) that just drifts behind the ship... Acts like a mine's movement. Has a powerful tractor beam, the idea is it's a shielding net that deals tiny amounts of damage (The damage is only there so the fighter will fire it. I know a AI ship will not fire a weapon with 0 damage.) but completely immobolises a ship until the net is destroyed.
My Thoughts:
A Fighter with the net as it's sprite. An invisible Tractor beam turret with very low range.
View Post

Rather than a tractor beam, why not a highly ionizing weapon? Should have a similar effect.

You might be able to do it with a mission. It would sit in your mission info window and when you abort it could start a second auto-aborting mission to take away 100 fuel, grant you a fighter and then start itself again. Though I'm not sure how you would prevent it from working if the player had less than 100 fuel or how to set a cap on the number of fighters. And it wouldn't work for the AI.

You'd have to do that in Nova guy, and -REDCHIGH- wants to do this all in EVO. However, if he did do it in Nova he could make it work for the AI by giving it a second type of ship that looks the same, but it can't be boarded, and has an absurdly high number of fighters stored within the ship (perhaps it could use another fighter bay that fires more slowly but uses the same fighter ammunition?)

Well, I've come to a difficult decision.
The plug will be for Nova.

1, A lot of the things I want to be able to do in the plug are only really possible (Or are a LOT easier) in Nova...

and
2. I'm on a PC... and I wont to actually work on the plug. I figure when I get my mac up, I can take the time to convert it to EVO... It would lose a degree of cool-ness, but the storyline would be intact and I could actually play it. (Since Nova isn't registered. No point, when I don't have a steady computer. I go to a lab.)

Then again, if anyone wants to buy me a key for Nova when my mac becomes operational, feel free.

-REDCHIGH-, on Mar 2 2006, 11:47 PM, said:

I figure when I get my mac up, I can take the time to convert it to EVO... It would lose a degree of cool-ness, but the storyline would be intact and I could actually play it.
View Post

I can't actually see that working, simply because any narrative you create in Nova which relies on the N engine will need to be rewritten. You may well end up telling a very different story, simply because you can't recreate just one pivotal feature.

Porting from Nova to EVC/O is achievable, you just have to bare in mind the inherent limitations in the respective engines while you're building the original.

-REDCHIGH-, on Feb 27 2006, 02:30 PM, said:

An EMP Cannon
A Weapon that sends a wave of EMP in all directions around a ship, dealing small amounts of damage to all ships in range.
View Post

Here is my solution for the EMP weapon.
It was included as a bonus weapon in a plug demonstrating swaping fighters.
Fighter Loadouts v3.2 (581 KB)
Edit: Updated for EVN 1.0.9

Land at the starting planet, and buy the EMP weapon. It also happens to have a manual/auto switch in the active mission dialogue, but that's probably not relavant here.

One of the things that makes this soultion interesting, is that it will hit both missiles and ships alike.
Here is a description of how it works:

The pulse weapon consists of an PD turret (or a a non-PD unguided projectile for manual operation) that submunitions after 1 frame into 36 parts with theta -10 so it makes a nice even radial spread. Now this submunition is also designated as PD so it will connect with missiles. I've found that it doesn't matter how a PD weap is launched (automatic or subbed) if it is of guidance PD, it will hit missiles. Interestingly, subbed PD doesn't hit fighters in some conditions. And PD weapons won't hit ships that are immune to PD.
So in order for the PD to take out any ship, I added a proximity trigger that will sub into a non-pd weapon that CAN hit ships. The missiles won't trigger the prox, but ships will. (any ship triggers prox flagged, and detonate

The prox and blast distance is the same as the distance a shot travels in 1 frame. So as soon as the pulse gets close to a ship, it subs next frame, where it hits the ship. The parts that don't trigger prox, don't sub. (subs fail when shot expires flagged)

That's the basic idea, though it works better with a reload of 1 and burst count of 2 with a longer burst reload. This gives 2 rings of fire so that 1 missile doesn't knock out a whole section of the ring for the rest of its travel.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 12 March 2006 - 07:06 PM

Oh yeah, there's an example of a kamikaze fighter in the above link too. Rather than raming the target, it simulates getting close and triggering a carried nuke (self-destruct). You could probably adjust it so it needs to get closer and look like it's ramming the target.

You have to buy the Main Fighter Bay, then buy a a Viper (Total Viper Space outfit - gives you a stock Viper), then buy the Fighter Remote Control Deck upgrade, then buy a Nuke, then convert your Viper to a Viper (Nuke Drone)

It's only that complicated because the plug is showcasing some different concepts possible with the fighter bay system.
Really, the fighter just fires a special weapon that has a large damaging blast radius and self-destructs the ship. The weapon has a prox radius 10 greater than its range. (range = 40 pixels over 4 frames, prox = 50) If you set the thing to detonate after 1 frame, the fighter won't fire it until it is practically on top of the target - probably better for your usage.

Also, it's important to note that the AI won't normaly react correctly to a kamikaze ship. Since the ship isn't shooting at the target (until it explodes) the AI won't react as if the kamikaze ship is a threat (which it clearly is)
So, to fix that problem, the kamikaze ship also fires a fast, invisible, slow reload, homing weapon that does 1 damage. This will alert the target that there is a hostile threat (ship on collision course)

Oh, darn.
It appears that 1.0.9 has borked the graphics.
The mechanics still work. I'm not sure how to fix the graphics yet. Working on it.

Idly, another trick that you can pull with kamikaze ships is to make them very massive (completely out of proportion to their sprite size). Oreste back in EVC did this with the "Nuke Bay"; Nukes were escort ships that flew slowly at the enemy, firing a weak laser to "ping" them. When shot, the nuke would detonate, and because of its massive, well, mass, would deal heavy damage to everything in range.

A neater way to do this would be to have the ship fire a weapon that explodes after one frame, dealing enough damage to the carrier to destroy it. Then you let the mass do its thing.

I don't know if this differs in any meaningful way from the method posted above. Well, aside from the fact that your little kamikaze drone will show up as a big dot on the radar...

big dot being a good thing because it indicates a serious threat.