update and sequel

I’m almost ready to post a sequel to my Ringbuilders plug-in as well as an update to the original that fixes some bugs, and is necessary for the sequel.

Although my original plug-in has been downloaded a number of times, I haven’t received any e-mails responding to my request in the read me for reports of problems, contributions of landing graphics, and help with specific problems, so I thought I’d try making the requests again on this board.

I’d greatly appreciate any help in the following areas, listed in descending order of importance:

1. Landing Graphics: If you play the plug-in, the needed graphics are obvious, and if anyone is willing to help but doesn’t want to play through the plug-in, I can e-mail you a list of needed landing graphics. I’ll give specific credit in subsequent readmes to anyone who contributes graphics.

2. Missions starting and ending on random stellars of same govt: I just can’t make these work. For example, a mission set to be available 100% of the time, after a certain mission bit is set, on the bulletin boards of stellars of a specific govt, with destinations that are set also to be any stellar of that govt, are nevertheless never available anywhere, even if the mission bit is set. On the other hand, missions from a random stellar of one government to a random stellar of a different one seem to work fine.

3. Inappropriate mission offers: I haven’t been able to figure out how to keep mission offers that would start the major and minor existing Nova storylines from being offered during the course of the plug-in’s storyline, without interfering with the player’s ability to pick up those missions when not in the midst of my new storyline. (For example, a rock band offering to hire the player for protection, while the player is in the bar of a top secret federation base)

4. Government legal status: I’ve managed to mitigate this problem to some degree, but I’ve still had some trouble when I want a mission to improve the legal standing of the player with two governments who are in classes that make an improvement with one a detriment in the other, again without damaging the integrity of the standard Nova storyline missions.

The current plug-in is available here:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/assets/modules/a....php?addon=3199

I’ll post the new one shortly. Thanks in advance!

2-Is there a reason you want missions that go random places? I would think it would be detrimental to the storyline to do this. You may have to do some re-writing of the missions, and set the missions to be available randomly, and send them to a specified place. Only you would know that the destinations are specified. You and anyone who chooses to look at your files. Or the weird guy who sits there and writes down every planet you visit and which mission you are on while visiting. I don't really know why what you are doing isn't working.

3-The most obvious way to correct number 3 is to alter all the missions you don't want available. Under the Available Test Expressions area, add the bit you choose to use, and then have one of your missions set the bit on accept. You could even have the bit removed after each mission, that way one could do anything they want between missions.

@jean-luc-picard, on Jan 15 2009, 03:05 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

2-Is there a reason you want missions that go random places? I would think it would be detrimental to the storyline to do this. You may have to do some re-writing of the missions, and set the missions to be available randomly, and send them to a specified place. Only you would know that the destinations are specified. You and anyone who chooses to look at your files. Or the weird guy who sits there and writes down every planet you visit and which mission you are on while visiting. I don't really know why what you are doing isn't working.

They are repeating missions, not integral to the main story, but intended to add depth to it. I really can't figure out why it doesn't work the way I have it, the original nova missions, like the passenger transport missions, seem to be set up the same way and work fine. If i can't figure out another way to do it, I'll do it that way, although it would be rather tedious.

@jean-luc-picard, on Jan 15 2009, 03:05 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

3-The most obvious way to correct number 3 is to alter all the missions you don't want available. Under the Available Test Expressions area, add the bit you choose to use, and then have one of your missions set the bit on accept. You could even have the bit removed after each mission, that way one could do anything they want between missions.

I'll try that. Thanks for the suggestions.

This note from the EV Nova bible may be relevant to 2:

Quote

Note:
When Nova selects a random mission destination, it attempts to ensure that the random destination is: a) more than two hyper jumps away from the system where the mission is being offered, and b) a stellar which is guaranteed to always exist throughout the course of the game, regardless of system swapping. This means that if you have multiple systems that occupy the same coordinates at different times in the game and not all of them contain stellar object X, no missions will use stellar object X as their random destination. (This is to keep the player from accepting a mission with a random destination that might cease to exist before he gets there!) A further important consequence of this restriction is that if Nova detects that a mission whose TravelStel or ReturnStel is to be randomly selected will violate this rule, it will be prevented from being offered regardless of any other availability parameters the mission might have - i.e. if you create a mission and Nova refuses to make it available, check the debug log to see if the mission couldn't find a suitable nontransient random stellar of the desired characteristics.

This post has been edited by Guy : 15 January 2009 - 04:37 PM

@guy, on Jan 15 2009, 04:35 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

This note from the EV Nova bible may be relevant to 2:

That would explain it. I guess I'll have to go with the previous suggestion. Thanks

It was quite good. You might want someone to do some graphics I would say there is enough interest in this project and with a more then half decent plugin out to get a graphics person.

@of-doom, on Jan 17 2009, 07:01 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

It was quite good. You might want someone to do some graphics I would say there is enough interest in this project and with a more then half decent plugin out to get a graphics person.

Thanks. I would love it if someone volunteered to create some original graphics. If you play through it you'll see that I wrote the story to accommodate my inability to create new ship graphics, and am fairly happy with the results, but there are some areas where original graphics would really improve it, and as I indicated above, landing graphics would really help.

@jps19, on Jan 15 2009, 04:13 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

That would explain it. I guess I'll have to go with the previous suggestion. Thanks

If by that you mean altering all of the missions you don't want to appear there, the easier solution would be to simply make a duplicate of the systems you have and just don't put the spobs in them. As long as the player can't make those systems appear, Nova should ignore them for random missions and so your problem is solved without having to find and modify tons of random missions. This would, for your point #2 however, mean that you would have to make specific, seemingly random missions that start at one specific spob and end at another, and just duplicate them, changing only the different spobs you have to travel to. This would probably still be less work than modifying all of Nova's missions.

I think you may have to put something like "b1 & !b1" in the syst's visibility, even if there are no links that could reveal it.

@gutlesswonder, on Jan 21 2009, 08:36 PM, said in Ringbuilders II:

If by that you mean altering all of the missions you don't want to appear there, the easier solution would be to simply make a duplicate of the systems you have and just don't put the spobs in them. As long as the player can't make those systems appear, Nova should ignore them for random missions and so your problem is solved without having to find and modify tons of random missions. This would, for your point #2 however, mean that you would have to make specific, seemingly random missions that start at one specific spob and end at another, and just duplicate them, changing only the different spobs you have to travel to. This would probably still be less work than modifying all of Nova's missions.

Thanks, but I'm only really concerned about the missions that are available in the bars of a specific govt, which it turns out are few enough that I can modify them, but for future reference, how would the duplicate systems impact the availability of random missions in the existing ones, given that they'd have different resource numbers?

Hi. This looks like an old post, but I'm trying to learn plug-in development and I came across it while searching around.

And I thought I should mention that I played the Ringbuilders plug-in, and quite enjoyed it. I think you did a fine job; hopefully I will manage something that interesting. Someday--!

WRT art: I am a graphic designer, but I don't really know anything about modeling programs, so unfortunately I don't know that I will ever be able to make appropriate graphics for Nova plug-ins (one reason why I have pretty humble goals as a plug-in developer).

Cheers.