@dr--trowel, on Oct 7 2007, 11:41 PM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

Well, I don't want to give anything much up about my scenario. OK, I'll say this much: the player is playing a space-worthy creature at this point in the plot, and needs to be able to "harvest" other creatures to replenish resources and energy.

Hmmm...
Actually, I have worked a similar idea in my "paper tc" (all the ships are hand-drawn doodles.)

All factions feature vastly different game play. But one faction uses giant living bug-like ships.

You ship grows over time, and you have to feed it or it gets sick and eventually dies.
You can feed it by giving it hormones and nutrients, or by capturing smaller ships that become food.

In addition, any weapons or accessories are implanted in a primitive state, and they grow into more powerful versions, depending on what you feed your ship.
And what you feed your ship also changes how it will grow.

I have this functionality working and it is actually pretty neat.

I mention this to wish you good luck! And to also preempt any possible arguments because of similar ideas!

I like the 6 invisible escorts idea. Do the ships given to you in a mission count as those six, or are they just totally different?

@eegras-studios, on Oct 9 2007, 01:28 AM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

Do the ships given to you in a mission count as those six, or are they just totally different?

They're totally different, unfortunately.

To go back to wondering what Quannol meant, I have a theory: when you board specific ships, you get an outfit which lowers your chance of captureing 100%, and it vanishes when you leave. Hence it is impossible to capture some ships.

EDIT:
Oh yeah, just thought of an idea. Is it possible to set up a chance variable, like when you fire a weapon, you might set a variable that gives you a lethal bomb? I think it would be interesting to have something where you have a weapon that is insanely powerfull, but you have a 5% chance of getting blown up while using it.

This post has been edited by 101181920 : 08 October 2007 - 11:34 PM

You can only grant a specific outfit on boarding a përs, not a normal ship. Hence the suggestion of replacing all uncapturable ship düdes with përs's.

Before I go spouting more ideas, I'd like a little clarification. You want two different mechanics, correct? One ship that cannot capture ships (the player's biological ship), and another that cannot be captured. Right?

If that's so, we've kind-of solved the mechanic by putting the string gxxx for a bomb outfit in the "oncapture" field for the ships that are always uncapturable. However, the mechanic of making a ship which always blows up if it captures another ship is a much dicier matter. This will require another very time- and resource-consuming bit of coding: you'd have to make two versions of every ship. One that appears when you don't own said biological ship, and the other that appears when you do (which would have the OnCapture string). So making ships that cannot capture is difficult, but making ships uncaptur able is easier. Just wanted to make sure we had that whole thing sorted out.

If only entering a negative number in the Marines outfit actually resulted in reduced chances. That would solve the whole thing. I wonder if perhaps entering -100 or greater will result in 0% chance. Nova flips out in unpredictable ways in some such cases

In response to 0101181920's question on lethal weapons: that isn't possible. However, Anathema does involve a mechanic that functions somewhat similar to that but you're not going to find out about it until chapter 3! (Unless you're in beta).

!#$%&&!@. Okay, just kidding. Sorry about the pointless suggestions, since both of them proved wrong, but thanks for the advice. (And thanks for spelling my name right!)

@dr--trowel, on Oct 8 2007, 12:49 PM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

...I tried Sxxx-ing a misn...

You did what to a mission?!

@dr--trowel, on Oct 8 2007, 12:49 PM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

We're sorry, but the Interdimensional Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Icthyoid Lifeforms (ISPCIL) deems fly capture unacceptable, as it frequently leads to fish capture.

We hope you have enjoyed the preceding corrective experience.

Have a nice day!

AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! (rofl)

@dr--trowel, on Oct 8 2007, 12:49 PM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

Further explication and/or contextualization of that text will absolutely not be forthcoming at this time.

Hurry up and finish this build so that it will be forthcoming to the faithful few.

Almost forgot: :transcendental smirk:

This post has been edited by gray_shirt_ninja : 09 October 2007 - 01:02 AM

Gray Shirt Ninja, where I come from, when someone realizes that something that someone accidentaly said was sick, the person who realized it is regarded as sick, because they were consantrating on sick things so they noticed.

Rebuttal:

Mesopotamia said:

There once was a chalkboard that flipped
And screamed out when Möbius stripped
The chalk got dissolved
Was rootbeer involved?
Now Mesopo-spacetime is ripped

@gray-shirt-ninja, on Oct 9 2007, 02:10 AM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

Rebuttal:

Quote

There once was a chalkboard that flipped
And screamed out when Möbius stripped
The chalk got dissolved
Was rootbeer involved?
Now Mesopo-spacetime is ripped

ROTFLOL.

How about this: When the player acquires a ship which is not supposed to be allowed to capture, a mission starts whose onabort will destroy the player. Every ship will Axxx this mission oncapture. If the mission isn't running, no worries, otherwise... boom!

This post has been edited by Guy : 09 October 2007 - 04:52 AM

I think you've got it Guy! Nice suggestion!

@guy, on Oct 9 2007, 05:50 AM, said in Crewless ship can capture escorts:

How about this: When the player acquires a ship which is not supposed to be allowed to capture, a mission starts whose onabort will destroy the player. Every ship will Axxx this mission oncapture. If the mission isn't running, no worries, otherwise... boom!

Excellent. Plus, by omitting the Axxx from the OnCapture of some ships, we can selectively allow capturing of certain ship types by the restricted ship.

I can use Gxxx for a bomb with this exploit (and probably would), but I wonder -- can I also do the fling-into-deadly-spob death, or will Mxxx in the OnAbort field cause EVN to crash if activated while the player is in flight, as in the other scenarios I tested earlier? I probably can't/shouldn't do any more testing for a few days....

Also, straight from the Bible:

Well, OK, I can't find it in the Bible, but I recall that capture odds ALWAYS fall between 1% and 75%, never 0 or negative or 76 or 75.1.

Yeah, I think that is true.

Also, you may need to Axxx the mission onretire of the restricted ship. With any luck the bomb will be given to the old ship and the new ship will be fine (assuming it's not restricted too), but you should probably test just to be sure.

If I get chance I'll check out that crashing bug sometime.

This post has been edited by Guy : 09 October 2007 - 03:48 PM

One last thing I just realized you'd have to do for this to work out smoothly. The current mechanic of starting a mission when you buy the ship that cannot capture ships, then making every ship abort that on capture, and setting the abort string to grant a bomb works until you buy another ship. When you do that, you have to get rid of the mission so that the player is free to capture ships again. But how do you get rid of the mission? You abort it. And what happens when you abort it? You explode.

So, the solution to this problem is to make nothing happen on abort, but rather make capturing the non-capturable ship fail the mission. Otherwise when you try to get rid of the mission when the player buys a new ship, you'll blow them up, unless you make every buyable ship in the plug a string to set a bit which starts a mission available at the main spaceport which runs dxxx on the bomb outfit. But I think the first solution is less work.

(/quote)We're sorry, but the Interdimensional Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Icthyoid Lifeforms (ISPCIL) deems fly capture unacceptable, as it frequently leads to fish capture.

We hope you have enjoyed the preceding corrective experience.

Have a nice day!(/quote)

I get it. Nice work Dr. Trowel.

Why not just set the OnCapture field to give the player a new ship of the type he had before? And if there are outfits, then you need to give him a ship that is identical but without default outfits, and transfer the outfits over.

That would be a blanket change: no matter what ship the player was flying, they would not be able to capture the ship as opposed to not being able to capture the ship when the player is flying a particular ship. Plus, IIRC, ships with 0 crew can't be boarded, so that's easy enough to implement normally.

Dr. Trowel said:

The Nova Bible shďp resource section says:
And yet the 0-crew ship I'm flying is offered the opportunity to capture the ships it boards. The odds are long -- generally I get a 1% - 4% chance -- but it isn't 0%.

Meanwhile, Zacha Pedro says:
I'm hoping that ZP is right that 0-crew ships can only use captured ships as escorts -- testing that could require capturing 40 or more ships, and that's more than I'm up for. Here's the thing, though: what I want is a set-up that will let a certain ship in my TC board ships it disables, but not have any chance of capturing them as either fly-able ships or escorts (particularly in the case of a particular target ship, though it would be fine if this were true for all targets).

I think I can come up with an exploit that would use InherentGovt, onCapture, and some extra-nasty attacking ships to insure that any captured escorts were destroyed within a few jumps of the time they were acquired, but I'd rather be able to deny the player the ability to capture them in the first place, or have them self-destruct as soon as they were captured. Remember, though, that I do want to be able to board to plunder fuel, credits, ammo, and goods.

Any ideas?

It's been a long time since I've actually made a plug, but couldn't you give the player six invisible escorts when they start the game, or in an invisible mission? I don't remember if mission escorts affect the amount of player escorts a play can have, or not. I do know that when you have 6 escorts you can't capture any more, so maybe start thinking along that path, if you don't want to allow the player the opportunity to capture a ship at all.

If mission escorts don't affect the amount of escorts a player can have, then nevermind, Guy's idea sounds good.

This post has been edited by Razzle Storm : 10 October 2007 - 06:57 AM

I just tested a mission that gave me seven escorts. It did. The escort limit can be broken with ccarried fighters and mission escorts. Up to 20 escorts will form in triangle behind the player before they pile up underneath you.

Method/Observations:
I took a mod starbridge, used a self-made outfit to give it 2000 tons of free mass, loaded it with pirate vipers (16), pirate thunderheads (6) and civ thunderheads (3), and took 6 bought escorts. I also took a self-made weapon that is a one-hit disabler (guided). First, I went into a system with only one other ship and disabled it using this weapon. I boarded it, and was not able to capture it (It was a Civvie starbridge, trader govt). Next I released one of my bought escorts, disabled a rebel fighter using that weapon, and was able to capture it. I had all my fighters deployed the entire time.

Conclusions:
You can launch as many carrried fighters as you can hold, as long as you don't trip the max ships in system limit (I believe, I only had 29 fighters, not the 64 needed to test this). You cannot have more than 6 paid and captured escorts. Mission escorts may exceed this max (see first test).

Discussion:
I'd go with the idea I quoted previously, the one about the society against cruelty to icthyoids.
Or you could just somehow force the player to buy 6 free invisible escorts (i'm not sure how you would trigger this).

Sources of possible error:
Not enough carried fighters
Did not test a combination of mission escorts and hired/captured escorts.

'nuf said.

Edit:

This post has been edited by LNSU : 10 October 2007 - 04:13 PM