Dude/Syst probability fields

Regarding the Nova engine...

Is it necessary to have probability totals of 100 in the probability fields of düde/syst resources anymore? I think it was necessary in EV/O, but I have no idea about Nova.

Dividing 100 units of probability over 16 shiptypes might be a bit hard in some cases, so I hope it isn't necessary anymore...

Amnenth, on Jan 2 2005, 12:43 AM, said:

Is it necessary to have probability totals of 100 in the probability fields of düde/syst resources anymore? I think it was necessary in EV/O, but I have no idea about Nova.

Dividing 100 units of probability over 16 shiptypes might be a bit hard in some cases, so I hope it isn't necessary anymore...
View Post

From the Nova Bible

Unlike previous versions of the EV engine, Nova can handle dude resources that
are not completely filled - so, while the dude resource can handle references to
as many as 16 different ship types, not all fields have to be used. If you do
this, remember to set the corresponding ShipType fields to 0 or -1 to indicate
that they're unused.

I hope that helps.

Edit: Re-reading your question, I see I didn't supply the answer your were looking for at all. Looking through the data files, I see all the s˙sts I saw have a 100% total chance of düde appearance, and all of the düdes also have 100% total ship appearance. But for it being hard, get creative. You aren't going to notice the difference between 8% appearance and 5% appearance, so there are work-arounds.

This post has been edited by PigDog4 : 02 January 2005 - 11:44 AM

No, the dude probabilities do not need to add up to 100%, at least I have put it up to 120 or 160% in one system and there was no ill effects. *Note, i am using EVNEW

The fact that you're using EVNEW has nothing to do with it, I don't think it corrects the percents for you. I think that, if the sum is not 100, the engine will normalise the probs, i.e. the probability of the first ship will be prob°1/sum_of_probs. However, it's better for you to keep the sum to 100, so that a ship you've set to 50 indeed has 50% probability of appearing and not more or less.

Zacha Pedro, on Jan 3 2005, 03:14 AM, said:

The fact that you're using EVNEW has nothing to do with it, I don't think it corrects the percents for you. I think that, if the sum is not 100, the engine will normalise the probs, i.e. the probability of the first ship will be prob°1/sum_of_probs. However, it's better for you to keep the sum to 100, so that a ship you've set to 50 indeed has 50% probability of appearing and not more or less.
View Post

A normalized system like that would actually suit me better, methinks. That way, it'd be easier to state that there shall be one ship of variant X for every Y ships of variant Z. Without recalculating percentages for every other ship in the düde.

Well, a simple test would be to put a couple ships or dudes at 100% and see if both of them can appear.

If normalization does occur, then I guess you might as well just put something like 9, 3, 3, 1 if you wanted dudes to appear in that proportion, instead of their corresponding approximate percentages. That wouldn't be a bad thing to be able to do.

Indeed, if the engine really does do probability/sum, You can simply put them in proportion however necessary; so instead of 35, 20, 5, 10, 5, 20, 5, you caqn just put 7, 4, 1, 2, 4, 1. That is awesome. It also allows you to do ratios that don't add up to 100, such as the example of equal 1/16 chances - 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. 🙂