QUOTE (Gray Shirt Ninja @ Sep 12 2010, 11:36 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Looking at Nova again, I'd like to make an expansion for the EV:C TC. That's an extremely manageable goal.

If I ever made a plug-in again (as highly unlikely as that is) this is certainly what it would be.

Well, the bottleneck for EV Firefly has been the fact that everything goes through me. It seemed reasonable at first to keep a consistent voice by vetting everything myself, but the downside is that when I lose interest for a while----and it can happen for months at a time----very little actually gets done.

A few people have stuck with me on the project longer than I've had any right to expect, but they're still held up if I'm not doing anything.

So my current focus is getting everything that's been written so far actually into the mod. Once it's in there, I think I'm going to iron out a few last storyline issues, put out a call for a small amount of polishing help from the community, and then release Firefly Part 1. It's been sitting unreleased in a pretty good state for too long.

And the nice thing about calling it Part 1 is that I can push things that are half-done now to Part 2. Who knows when that will be out, but hopefully once Part 1 is out there, I'll be able to recruit more help for the continuation and maybe structure the development process a bit better.

I'm just going to remind you guys it depends on what kind of project you're working on. Like my Airborne TC. It does make sense for the universe to be pretty big, because if the earth floods, you gotta go somewhere, right? Sure, not everyone lived, but you see what I'm saying. There has to be enough realism to make it worth playing, but realism also can make it too hard/boring.

@gray-shirt-ninja, on Sep 12 2010, 11:36 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

It's the reason why Ashen Galaxy is small and sucky compared the more ambitious projects of my peers.

I happened to really like Ashen Galaxy. It was challenging, unlike a lot of the other TC's. For some reason, I also found Colosseum hard. I wasn't used to either of the styles these TC's needed you to have. This made them stand out to me, because they were the most fun.

Having been away from the Nova community for five years, I was both surprised and ... not ... surprised at the lack of TCs completed in that time, especially given the number that were seriously in development when I last checked. ISTR many of those had full-on development teams and forums supporting them, too.

I think the OP is pretty insightful. I was thinking about the TC/plugin thing a lot since I started playing EVN again. The thing about EVC was that it was small and simple and just begging to be added to with plugins, especially with obvious launch points like the Cydonian/Lethian conflict. For example, I wrote a simple addition to the universe that bolted on a bunch of systems themed around various friends I knew living in various far-flung corners of the world, with a couple of extra ships to fill in gaps and a storyline that involved discovering and befriending the (small number of) new systems. This was purely for my own use and enjoyment and didn't affect the original scenario at all, and it was very easy to do even given that I was running EVC on Basilisk II with no direct internet access and no third party utilities.

By contrast there are a bunch of things about Nova which make that sort of thing hard. Firstly, the Novaverse is old: it's hammered into us that this is an ancient spacegoing society and that therefore most of the stuff worth knowing/discovering has already been discovered/known even if it's since been forgotten, and any genuinely new discoveries will take a looong time (e.g. Kont probe launch, ascent of humanity stories). That makes "new discovery" plugins really hard to achieve.

Secondly, the Nova political story is balanced on a knife-edge, which makes adding plausible new factions without modifying the original story almost impossible. Related to this is the way the main Nova storylines are utterly dominating and world-changing: a pilot that completed one seems to have nothing left to play for - it's hard to feel motivated to continue playing when your pilot has, for example, become an all-powerful ascended being, and it's therefore very limiting and difficult to come up with a scenario which leads on from that (rather than being free to simply bolt on something which interests you). Plus it's hard to bolt on content which isn't affected by these major storylines in some way - I think plugin authors feel the need to write big Nova-quality storylines or at least make their plugs compatible with the major story threads simply because that's the paradigm that Nova established.

Thirdly and relatedly, the Novaverse is so complex and "closed" that trying to write a plugin which doesn't interfere with it requires a lot of work. To me it's always seemed like it'd be easier to write a small TC using Nova resources than a small plugin, just because then you're not constantly tripping over someone else's work.

Fourthly and again very closely related to the above, making a decent Nova plugin isn't as simple as firing up ResEdit anymore - you really need some sort of third party tools. MissionComputer is great but only works on the Mac, and not (I believe?) on OSX. EVNEW is also great but offers comparatively bare-bones functionality, and RezEditor is not exactly user-friendly (and wasn't around back when I was last here). No matter what package you use you have to worry about converting it to the other platform. It just asks a lot more of the developer.

Nova is a fantastic little engine for telling your own story, but the stock universe makes it pretty difficult to do so without a total re-invention, which means TC, which means a whole other ballgame. When my hard disk crashed and I lost my EVN install (and my only copy of that EVC plugin ), I didn't reinstall because I knew I had reached a point where I was only going to continue enjoying the game if I started modifying it myself. And the plugin route seemed no less work than the TC route. Now that I've come back to it I'm starting to feel that way again very quickly.

...that came out sounding a bit more pessimistic than I had intended.

Also, hello again Nova community.

@cim, on Sep 28 2010, 06:38 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

MissionComputer is great but only works on the Mac, and not (I believe?) on OSX.

MC works fine on OSX and is fully Universal Binary these days.

I think most of Nova isn't written about simply because Nova does two things: focuses on a select few factions and makes you spend most of your time in Federation space if you're not a Polaris or Auroran pilot. Nova is rather Federation-centric and, consequently, while that'll get the biggest attention, it's also has the least elbow room for being creative. Five of the six storylines deals with the Bureau's corruption.

However, there are some areas that can be expanded on. Nova just isn't exactly overt on saying "write a plug-in about this!" like EVC was. The Dani/Tekel war is rather untouched, Vella even less so (who, if I remember, fight to Moash almost exlusively). Most of the corporations get very little to no spotlight and could be expanded upon with full fleshed stories. There's more room for Wild Geese mercenary work. There could also be a Free Traders storyline where you help McGowan take down Olaf and even duel the Unrelenting in the final mission. There's also possibilities of a non-Bureau Federation plotline, a non-I-am-God Polaris plotline, and possibly more. There's also a few mysteries mentioned on some worlds here and there (none of which I can recall at the moment) that could be looked into.

@joshtigerheart, on Sep 28 2010, 07:59 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

There could also be a Free Traders storyline where you help McGowan take down Olaf and even duel the Unrelenting in the final mission. There's also possibilities of a non-Bureau Federation plotline, a non-I-am-God Polaris plotline, and possibly more.

I've always thought the Pirate storyline seemed like an odd one out amongst the storylines, what with it being the only one where known space isn't radically altered by your actions - of course, that also means it might be one of the easier storylines to build on from.

@joshtigerheart, on Sep 28 2010, 02:59 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

However, there are some areas that can be expanded on.

I'd add to the list Kont (I found it hard to believe that there wasn't a major storyline based around it, and it seemed like a big loose end), Wraith/Hyperoid (maybe they hold the key to some sort of new technology?), and maybe a re-do of the Rebel storyline that has more action. Heck, why not do a storyline around Sigma Shipyards or that one weapon company in the north west (I forget their name, lol). Industrial espionage could be cool, and serve as an excuse to have a lot of experimental outfits and ships.

@cosmic_nusiance, on Oct 5 2010, 07:49 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

... Heck, why not do a storyline around Sigma Shipyards or that one weapon company in the north west (I forget their name, lol). Industrial espionage could be cool, and serve as an excuse to have a lot of experimental outfits and ships.

That would be Gli-tech, makers of the Federation version of the Wraith cannon (by way of the PC's industrial espionage), the polaron beam, the etheric wake missile, and the RAGE Gunboat. They actually do have a short mission string, though not on the scale you're thinking of.

@starsword, on Oct 5 2010, 11:10 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

That would be Gli-tech, makers of the Federation version of the Wraith cannon (by way of the PC's industrial espionage), the polaron beam, the etheric wake missile, and the RAGE Gunboat. They actually do have a short mission string, though not on the scale you're thinking of.

Yeah, them. I knew there was a hyphen in there somewhere, and that it started with a G. I need to play me some more Nova.

Yeah, I've played through the mission string a couple of times, although it's not worth the effort IMO. Polaron Beam for the lose. I was thinking of something along the lines of a partnership or rivalry with Sigma and the development of new stuff. Maybe you get caught with a prototype and word leaks out and the pirates are after the prototype and Gli-Tech is after you and the Bounty Hunters are after you for Gli-Tech's money, and Sigma's after you to steal the new tech. The possibilities are endless.

@cosmic_nusiance, on Oct 6 2010, 08:30 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

Yeah, them. I knew there was a hyphen in there somewhere, and that it started with a G. I need to play me some more Nova.

Yeah, I've played through the mission string a couple of times, although it's not worth the effort IMO. Polaron Beam for the lose.

It's arguably a bit better if one does the Federation string - the RAGE Gunboats can be useful, especially in the Raven mission.

@lordinsane, on Oct 6 2010, 04:30 PM, said in The State of the Nova TC:

It's arguably a bit better if one does the Federation string - the RAGE Gunboats can be useful, especially in the Raven mission.

True. I don't usually play the Fed string just because the ships are all useless, but the RAGE Gunboat isn't bad.