Another LNSU challenge

I just had an idea of how to force the player to take a specific path through space (no, its not specially-shaped deadly spobs, although that would work)

Lets say that the mission is for the player to investigate howevermany hostile stations by flying by them and "taking pictures".

Here's how it works:

The mission triggers a series of invisible missions to make this accomplishable.

There is a ship which is an escape ship that carries itself as an escape ship (recursive escape ship). This ship is given to the player.
The stations all have a gun with perfect accuracy/speed, and a short range. Damage values can be adjusted. All are hostile to the player. The gun will kill the player in two shots. Reload time is however long you want the player to hang each station for. The guns only have two pieces of ammo so that each station can only destroy the player once.

The invisible missions all fail on player destruction/ejection/whatever.

The player flies by the first station. The station kills him, forcing him to eject into a new ship, and forcing the invisible mission to fail. This sets a bit (say, b1) and triggers another invisible mission.

The player flies by the second station, The station kills him, forcing ejection, making the current invisible mission fail, thus setting b2 and starting another mission.

And so on and so forth for howevermany stations.

If the player doesn't visit all the stations, not all the bits will be there, and the visible mission won't complete.

Can the player change ships mid-flight without ejecting (mission-triggered)? If so, then the station will only disable the player, the mission will fail on disable, and make the player change into a new ship. This way the player can have a limited number of ships, which is useful if enemy ships are in the system (the player might actually fail the mission).

Hey, maybe by using the "grant pay on failure" flag, the mission can make the player's government status change, and therefore force the player to visit the stations in a specific order, if each station has its own govt.

Explore.

Can't we just put a mission ship on top of the station and have it fire a weapon at the player that kills itself?

Actually, I was considering a similiar idea around failing a mission = succeeding that you could tweak for your effect...
I was implementing a pilotting course, (to earn a liscense)

There are these "cones/sensors/whatever" (round orange ships, like orange cones a car would drive around)
armed with a short range weapon, with ammotype -999.

The players job is to either land, jump, or board a ship in a system full of these cones.
The players mission is to protect them.

Therefore, they get too close to one, they self-destruct, which makes the mission succeed.

You could make a ship over the station... with a mission to destroy it. Its cloaked and cant be targeted, with an insanely high shield recharge and capacity... (so it can't accidentally be destroyed... or planet-type could work.)
You may have to make each station a seperate mission... auto-starting on completion of the previous one... Or just make the player destroy the ships (all one mission, as in destroy the fleet...)

Hope I helped... Instead of working on my TC...

Hm, this made me think of using a required ship type to trigger a mission once the player has died (and escaped into a new ship) a certain number of times.

Spöbs get unlimited ammo...

@sp3cies, on Mar 25 2008, 02:32 PM, said in Checkpoints:

Spöbs get unlimited ammo...

But do weapon ammo maxes affect this?

Not that I know of. That's why I thought fighter bays are not good for planetary weapons... They just keep pumping them out.

Maybe if they had a really long reload time...

the long reload would help (a reload of 32767), but it would also allow the player to fly over one planet many times slowly to complete the mission.

The other option is having each spob belong to its own govt, and changing the player's rank in that govt with each mission, therefore forcing the planets to be visited in a certain order.

@sp3cies, on Mar 26 2008, 03:36 AM, said in Checkpoints:

Not that I know of. That's why I thought fighter bays are not good for planetary weapons... They just keep pumping them out.

I know this is kind of off topic, but do they fly back when they are done fighting?

You could probably just make them have a really really long burst reload, and a burst count of how many fighters you want to launch.

I think you might be able to make a pretty good planet type weapon like that. I think I'll try it. And then if I feel up to it try to work on a solution for the actual problem at hand here.

EDIT: Darn doesn't work. Planets seem I'll disposed to use fighters as weapons near as I can tell.

This post has been edited by Keldor Sarn : 12 April 2008 - 10:47 PM