Coraxus, on Feb 17 2006, 03:12 PM, said:

Well, because seeing that Nova could support more additional voices, the extra voice from the downloads would fill in those extra voice slots, even though standby acknowledgements are no longer used in Nova.View Post

Uh, I still don't get it. Nova still only supports 10 voices per type per set. This is an EV plug so could have easily been included with EVO when it was first released - seeing as it wasn't I see no reason why I should add it now.

Dr. Trowel, on Feb 18 2006, 06:46 AM, said:

By the way, since there is all this talk about game speed.... Way back in 2003 there was discussion about the port making weapons too slow, and by how much. (Guy, you may have even been involved -- I don't remember.) Using ConText and quick Excel calculations, I made a never-released plug that multiplied all weapon speeds by 1.5 and all "count" fields by 0.67. Here it is:

Whether this should be official or not, I dunno. Figuring out what best brings original EVO game balance to the Nova engine is now more complicated, since, if I'm reading things correctly, it appears Guy went back to the ship speed numbers used in the original EVO game instead of the doubled ones in vers. 1.0.0 of the port. Do weapon speeds need to be halved to make them correct relative to the new ship speeds? Should that be on top of the X1.5 adjustment in my plug, or not?View Post

The problem with the original port was that ship speeds had been doubled but nothing else. To bring the rest of the game up to the same speed you would need to double ship accel, turn, shield recharge, fuel regen, outfits that modify these, cloak fuel consumption, weap speed, turn, fuel consumption, halve weap reload, count and maybe some other values I can't remember right now. I did try it like this but decided it might be a bit fast for some players and there's no way to slow it down (wheras you can always use caps to speed it up).

Edwards, on Feb 19 2006, 10:06 AM, said:

In all bars for thirty days, I believe. Anyone here played EVO recently, and can confirm this?View Post

Okay, I'll see about setting this up.

Edwards, on Feb 19 2006, 10:06 AM, said:

Huh? Hard-wired destinations (spob RID: xxx) are unaffected by considerations about transient spobs, so there should at least still be a mission to Outpost Omicron. What other "hard-wiring" were you considering?View Post

Wait, you mean Gamma? Since Gamma is always there (even though it gets replaced with a different version) then if I just leave it as it is you should get sent to both Alpha and Gamma, right?

Edwards, on Feb 19 2006, 10:06 AM, said:

Incorrect. I came up with a fairly long-winded explaination of just how Nova handles "transient spobs", and the upshot of it was that it only knows that the spob is transient if another system at the same x/y coordinates doesn't contain the spob - it doesn't care whether the spob's system's visibility can change. Therefore, offsetting works.View Post

Ah, okay. I'd like to keep things as simple as possible though, for compatibility with future plug conversion. The FE missions seem to be the only ones of real importance and if I can have the random missions go to both alpha and gamma then I may just leave it as it is. Or I could have one random mission to cover alpha and gamma then hard-wire the other two to theta and omicron, so there would always be three possible destinations.

This post has been edited by Guy : 20 February 2006 - 12:33 AM

Guy, on Feb 19 2006, 08:30 PM, said:

Wait, you mean Gamma? Since Gamma is always there (even though it gets replaced with a different version) then if I just leave it as it is you should get sent to both Alpha and Gamma, right?View Post

No, Outpost Gamma is not a valid random destination. Because spob RID 138 does not appear in every version of the system, it is considered a transient spob. Nova goes by RIDs, not names (except in the "orphaned mission" clause, where a hard-wired mission destination can be any spob with the correct name and x/y coordinates, regardless of RID).

Anyway, feel free to leave system locations as-is and just modify the missions. It does look like the UE Frontier stations are the only real problem (although it's a shame about various other systems being relegated to the same standing as Nova's Brass- if you don't include this, I'll post a fix plug with compatibility warnings).

Edwards

Nuts. Okay, so hard-wire to Alpha, Gamma and Theta? Or I could do Alpha, Gamma and Sigma, so as to always have 2 destinations?

Regarding the crons, Ship Hangar will need to be updated to work with this anyway so I don't see much harm in using the first crons. Also, if I exploit one of the cron bugs I could avoid using additional bits though at the risk of the bug being fixed in the next version.

Hmmm, I had no clue that random destination could be a pain when it comes to changing systems and spöbs with visbits. So then, the only reason only Outpost Alpha becomes the only destination for FE cargo run is because it doesn't have a changing visbit?

This post has been edited by Coraxus : 22 February 2006 - 11:04 AM

Edwards, on Feb 21 2006, 01:45 PM, said:

It does look like the UE Frontier stations are the only real problem....
View Post

Admittedly the FE missions come up much more often, but, as I mentioned earlier, isn't the Stellar Corp smuggle-to-the-Renegades misn is also now set so it can only lead to one destination? Or did I miss something?

Regarding the speed issue, I had thought that Soviet mikee (plus whoever he worked with) changed ship speed and nothing else because with Nova there was a change in the meaning of the ship speed value relative to the values of at least some of the other realtime-controlling variables. Perhaps that wasn't it, though, and he was just being arbitrary?

I'm guessing that brandy smuggling mission will probably lead you only to Freeport because it doesn't have a changing bit like the way Gorky has.

Well, the fix of mine will handle every one of those visbit problems, it's just a matter of whether it's better to have the random missions in the original game work, or to make it simple to convert plug-ins (if a plug replaces one of the fixed systems, and the plug's version doesn't have its location modified, it may cause some problems).

Edwards

Okay, I have some new data which removes bad link and enables news. Bits 1000-1011 used to prevent crons repeating (decided it was probably a bad idea to exploit bugs). Download it and tell me if it all works okay or if I've made any mistakes
Nothing done about the system/mission issue yet.

Dr. Trowel, on Feb 22 2006, 08:07 AM, said:

Regarding the speed issue, I had thought that Soviet mikee (plus whoever he worked with) changed ship speed and nothing else because with Nova there was a change in the meaning of the ship speed value relative to the values of at least some of the other realtime-controlling variables. Perhaps that wasn't it, though, and he was just being arbitrary?
View Post

That was probably acceleration - Nova's accel values need to be twice that of EVO. These are doubled in the official port but in order to match ship speed they would need to be doubled again. Values in this version are all correct, relative to each other.

This post has been edited by Guy : 24 February 2006 - 12:33 AM

The complete download has been updated to include above changes (link in sig).

Edwards, there's only 4 systems that need to be nebu-based, right? Avann, Romit and Emalghion could all be in the Stand-Alone one? Are all the stand-alone ones actually possible destinations for random missions or could I remove some of them (eg, Emalghion)?

This post has been edited by Guy : 30 January 2007 - 05:53 AM

Guy, on Feb 23 2006, 11:37 PM, said:

The complete download has been updated to include above changes (link).

Great!... But I get a "file not found" error on your update.

Guy, on Feb 23 2006, 11:37 PM, said:

Edwards, there's only 4 systems that need to be nebu-based, right? Avann, Romit and Emalghion could all be in the Stand-Alone one? Are all the stand-alone ones actually possible destinations for random missions or could I remove some of them (eg, Emalghion)?
View Post

Not that it's particularly important, but there are a bunch of cargo and passenger misns that go to any non-Voinian spob. In original EVO, I think it must have been possible to get clued in to the existence of the Emalghies via those misns.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 24 February 2006 - 10:06 AM

Guy, on Feb 23 2006, 08:37 PM, said:

Edwards, there's only 4 systems that need to be nebu-based, right? Avann, Romit and Emalghion could all be in the Stand-Alone one?View Post

If it isn't nëbu-based, it is guaranteed to have been explored before it changes. I do not know if all Stand-Alones can be random mission destinations- I'll get back to you on that.

Edwards

From the so-incredibly-minor-it's-amazing-anyone-even-brought-it-up file:

The Disco Bison's hail quote doesn't fit. It looks like removing a single carriage return would fix this.

Edwards, on Feb 25 2006, 06:35 PM, said:

If it isn't nëbu-based, it is guaranteed to have been explored before it changes.
View Post

Right, but there are only 4 systems in the nebu plug that actually use nebus. The other 3 use the mission, so could be put in the stand-alone plug instead?
I was thinking I might include it as a plug with the distribution - would you mind? If okay, how would you like to be credited?
Still not sure what the "unimportant" is all about though - how come Diudir is in there?

Dr. Trowel, on Feb 26 2006, 08:37 AM, said:

From the so-incredibly-minor-it's-amazing-anyone-even-brought-it-up file:

The Disco Bison's hail quote doesn't fit. It looks like removing a single carriage return would fix this.
View Post

Heh, yeah I'm aware of this, along a quote from some bounty hunter. Happens in the real EVO too and I think it actually requires 2 lines to be removed to show it in full, which would spoil the effect.

Oh, and the link is fixed (got "override" and "nova" round the wrong way :rolleyes:)

This post has been edited by Guy : 27 February 2006 - 01:38 AM

Guy, on Feb 26 2006, 09:33 PM, said:

Right, but there are only 4 systems in the nebu plug that actually use nebus. The other 3 use the mission, so could be put in the stand-alone plug instead?
I was thinking I might include it as a plug with the distribution - would you mind? If okay, how would you like to be credited?
Still not sure what the "unimportant" is all about though - how come Diudir is in there?View Post

Yes. The other three can be moved to "Stand-Alone". I really should have said "if it doesn't use a nebula resource, it can go in the "Stand-Alone" plug.

Feel free to include this as a plug with the standard distribution- that makes it more likely that people will notice and use it. A simple line in the Readme should do for credit.

Diudir seems to have been accidentally left in there. I must have forgotten to remove it after adding it to the nëbu-based section. Other than that, the "Unimportant" plug is simply a collection of the systems that are not guaranteed to have been explored before they are changed, that do not noticably affect random mission destinations. All two of them.
Do not include anything from "Unimportant" in the distribution- it was just meant as a reference for developers.

Edwards

Okay, updated to include Random Mission Fix. The offsetting has caused a reciprocal link warning to be thrown but that should be okay.
Everyone happy with this? Read Me okay? Can I get some people to do some thorough testing and stuff?

This post has been edited by Guy : 04 March 2006 - 11:10 PM

The systems "Sumer" and "Omm" are of govt -1 rather than one of the independent govts used everywhere else. Anyone have any idea why this might be? The planet Omm within the system uses the indpendent govt so it's odd that the system doesn't.

I don't have any truly useful information about the situation, but I'll guess that it's just a historical accident. "-1" is used for independent worlds in EV, and I know I've heard it said that the non-crescent parts of the EVO scenario were the first to be developed.

OK, so maybe I do have something slightly useful to point out. Omm is the monks, and Sumer is the most remote of all human worlds. It would make sense for legal records in the Sumer system to be decoupled from those anywhere else, and for the attitudes of the monks on Omm's surface to be decoupled from the behavior of ships in their system. Perhaps that's what Cartwright was trying to do.

Sumer is a great place to capture an Arada before leaving human space. Meria is easy to dominate, but I don't recommend doing it early on because of the bounty hunter përs. Omm is part of the lucrative Pax -> Omm -> Telnan trade route, but trading in Emalghion is quicker, especially with Emalgha Freighters hireable on the spot, and no jumps involved.

Jeeze, Mr. Dr. T, if you're going to post something irrelevant, at least make it totally irrelevant!

Minor things -

Warping out at 2x results in a much shorter warp-out-run-distance than at 1x. This may have something to do with running it on windows.

Emalgha fighters and freighters are not available for hire on Emalgha, at least as of the time that I first land there.

I think the scout ship warps out faster than the shuttle, although I need to go back and verify this. I'll do it next time I change ships, and edit the post accordingly, if nobody verifies this in the meantime, sort of thing. My memory indicates that in EVO they warped out at the same speed.

Qaanol said the Azdara isn't as awesome. That's just not cool.

Also, neutron weapons... I seem to recall that when I first played EVO 1.0.1 on my trusty 68040 (like... eight years ago) they went much further, 1.5 or 2 screen widths. The screen is wider now of course, but they just don't seem to go as far as they ought to. Is it so, or am I imagining things?

Asc, on Mar 8 2006, 06:05 AM, said:

Warping out at 2x results in a much shorter warp-out-run-distance than at 1x. This may have something to do with running it on windows.
View Post

This is because Nova actually supports jumping in x2 mode while EV/O would revert to normal speed whenever you jump.

Asc, on Mar 8 2006, 06:05 AM, said:

Emalgha fighters and freighters are not available for hire on Emalgha, at least as of the time that I first land there.
View Post

Ah, thank you, this does indeed appear to be an error. I'll fix that shortly.
(EDIT): Done.

Asc, on Mar 8 2006, 06:05 AM, said:

I think the scout ship warps out faster than the shuttle, although I need to go back and verify this. I'll do it next time I change ships, and edit the post accordingly, if nobody verifies this in the meantime, sort of thing. My memory indicates that in EVO they warped out at the same speed.
View Post

According to the original EVO data the shuttle is supposed to jump at 75% the speed of the scoutship.

Asc, on Mar 8 2006, 06:05 AM, said:

Also, neutron weapons... I seem to recall that when I first played EVO 1.0.1 on my trusty 68040 (like... eight years ago) they went much further, 1.5 or 2 screen widths. The screen is wider now of course, but they just don't seem to go as far as they ought to. Is it so, or am I imagining things?
View Post

I hope you're only imagining it. There shouldn't be anything wrong here but I'll do some tests just to be sure.

This post has been edited by Guy : 08 March 2006 - 03:47 PM