we'll probably do that

anyway, sorry I haven't posted in a long time, but would the following be possible:

• Cargo Tax, I thought this might be interesting to do with cargo contributing a bit which a subgovernment of the same name thinks of smuggling, pay the fine, but give no evilness

• Missions to go to a certain system and jettison cargo there

• A nebula which, as time goes by, has paths randomly appear through it, or to a system in it, the best way I can think of doing this is to have lots of systems whose visibility is varied by crons, but I'm not sure what this would do to missions asking you to deliver cargo to a spob in that system. I was wondering if you could get around this by putting the same spob in two systems, but I'm not sure if thats possible.

• Repairing disabled derelict ships and getting them as escorts

• A way to make someone 'dead' when they are on a planet, e.g. being discovered on undercover missions, without launching them, so it wouldn't save the game and they could load. For example, you can go on an undercover mission, and on every planet you land on there is a chance of being discovered, so you a 'killed' and you load at the last planet you started from.

also, with the slightly increase/decrease option for commodities, how much does that increase/decrease by?

and, when you said before about playing movies, firstly, would AVI be a good format?
secondly, when you say it plays once, does it come up in a screen and play it, or does it appear in the planet landscape picture? If it plays once through, does it stick on the last frame, the first, or does it go blank?

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

Cargo Tax, I thought this might be interesting to do with cargo contributing a bit which a subgovernment of the same name thinks of smuggling, pay the fine, but give no evilness

Yes, that should work. However, you'd need to add in an interceptor ship/dude for that govt, and you would have some problems with the "you have illegal cargo" string (it's the same for all govts, so yu can't have a special "tax" string and still have govts yell about illegal cargo).

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

Missions to go to a certain system and jettison cargo there

That will probably work. I don't know enough about how jettisoning cargo affects a mission to tell you exactly how, though.

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

A nebula which, as time goes by, has paths randomly appear through it, or to a system in it, the best way I can think of doing this is to have lots of systems whose visibility is varied by crons, but I'm not sure what this would do to missions asking you to deliver cargo to a spob in that system. I was wondering if you could get around this by putting the same spob in two systems, but I'm not sure if thats possible.

Yes, you can put the same spöb in two versions of a system, and this will get around the transient spöb problem as long as the same spöb occurs in all versions of the system. Also, the transient spöb checker does not care if there is always a system visible in a particular location, as long as all versions of any system that is there have the spöb.

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

Repairing disabled derelict ships and getting them as escorts

I don't think this one will work. I seem to recall finding that it isn't possible to capture ships of a derelict govt, and there was a recent thread that came to the conclusion that having përs ships turn into mission escorts when you board them simply doesn't work.

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

A way to make someone 'dead' when they are on a planet, e.g. being discovered on undercover missions, without launching them, so it wouldn't save the game and they could load. For example, you can go on an undercover mission, and on every planet you land on there is a chance of being discovered, so you a 'killed' and you load at the last planet you started from.

I'm not sure. It would be very easy to kill the player instantly after booting them off-planet, but I think that that would cause them to reload in orbit around the planet they were killed on. However, you should probably take a look at ARPIA2 when it comes out, as one of its claimed features is "planetside death".

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

also, with the slightly increase/decrease option for commodities, how much does that increase/decrease by?

Where is this option? I don't remember any "increase/decrease option for commodities" that doesn't let you give a range, except for the high/medium/low prices (which range from 66%-90% and 110%-133% of base price depending on the player's legal status).

@ed-boy, on Oct 9 2006, 11:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

secondly, when you say it plays once, does it come up in a screen and play it, or does it appear in the planet landscape picture? If it plays once through, does it stick on the last frame, the first, or does it go blank?

It blanks the screen (except for the sidebar?), plays the movie, and then goes to the planet landing screen.

Edwards

@ed-boy, on Oct 10 2006, 06:16 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

and, when you said before about playing movies, firstly, would AVI be a good format?

No, as I posted somewhere else not so long ago QuickTime doesn't support very many AVI codecs by default and I doubt your movies are using one of the ones it does. So you should really use .mov, I'm not sure what a good codec would be but the Race movies use Cinepak.

@edwards, on Oct 9 2006, 09:46 PM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

Where is this option? I don't remember any "increase/decrease option for commodities" that doesn't let you give a range, except for the high/medium/low prices (which range from 66%-90% and 110%-133% of base price depending on the player's legal status).

s'right here:

Ah. The "Tribble bit". With that flag, the amount of a jünk in your hold will increase or decrease by one ton every ten or twenty seconds (I don't know the exact number, but it's somewhere in that range- try it to find out the exact rate).

Edwards

Let me guess, over the 1-2 days you spend on a planet or the 1+ days you spend in hyperspace it increases by exactly 0 tons?

Yep.

@ed-boy, on Oct 10 2006, 10:31 AM, said in Escape Velocity: Orion:

<snip>

For some reason that picture makes me feel dirty.

Hello again, we've been thinking about several ideas and were wondering if they were: 1) possible 2) good ideas

• Having to buy a Hyperdive - we'd do this by making ships only start off with 99 fuel and the drive gives them the extra unit and things such as batteries aren't available until a bit is set

• Doing much the same thing for shields, make ships start off with none and you have to buy your own shield generator, with loads of different models available with varying weights, capacities etc.

• Actually the third idea is pretty much the same as the first two except it applies to engines

• Finally something we thought we'd incorporate is insurance, this one would be the hardest to do but we think its a good idea if you're playing strict play, what we'd probably do is have an outfit which you pay an intial sum of money for, then you are given a rank with a negative daily income, and you will get a set amount of money back when you die, although I quite like the idea i think the values might be a little hard to balance out

The second purpose of this post is to say that work on the plug will probably grind to a halt for a week or two as the new football manager is out now

FOI

!!!NO!!!

my daily reading of the forums is ruined

:huh: ?

eh, it's just a lot of other people are busy and have stopped updating for a while too...