No Jumping here!

FedKiller, on Jul 28 2005, 08:10 AM, said:

In the topic This sucks- Things AS can do that we can't (AS= Artificial Supidity :p) on the EVN Web Board, JoshTigerHeart mentioned that AS can jump with less than 100 fuel.View Post

Incorrect. The amount of fuel that a ship has when you board it is randomly generated, and has nothing to do with whether it can jump or use fuel-draining weapons. The same goes for refuel missions. The ships aren't actually missing any fuel, they just get disabled when you accept the mission, and take 100 fuel from you.

Remember: Real-world Logic != Game Engine.

And I can assure you from personal experience that a ship with less than 100 maximum fuel is incapable of jumping.

Edwards

Ok, maybe I was wrong :). However, my personal spell checker (also known as annoying "friend" who hangs over my shoulder and reads what I type) has just pointed out that when he shoots the "tutorial viper" in the Rautheron system, the amount of fuel it has upon boarding it decreses. It "should" (maybe that is just "usually", but I will assume it should ) have 200. However, shooting it brings down the remaining energy.

EDIT: My spell checker was wrong!

During my extensive testing, most of the time that viper had between 150 and 290 fuel. However, the one time it had 30 was a give away that even if the "energy left depends on shots taken" theory was correct, it would be impossible to accuratly test, because the effect could not be separated from the (rather large) random factor. There is also no real reason to go and test it anyways, now that we know that it will not work. However, I am (once again) giving people a huge explanaion of something that they already knew, but I did not.

One thing that I did notice was that the amount of fuel seemed to constantly decrease. I would take off, board the Viper, hit escape, and reload the pilot each time (at least each time that an enterprise did not do it for me :rolleyes:). My results were:
230
200
150
30
290
In that order.
My spell checker was getting board after that, and he seemed happy that the value was not constantly going down after increasing from 30, but it could not decrease much, could it? It is almost like it looped around to the highest value after the lowest one. That should not happen, as the pilot was being totally reloaded each time and the values should not be related to each other (they should, as they are being applied to the same ship, but they should not affect each other).

The only explanation I can think of for this was that the "random factors" involved in the game are not random. They start from 100 and are used in order (90, 80, 70, down to 10) to calculate things like money that has no random factor pre-applied. Jamming has numbers already there, but even that has "random" numbers tossed into the equation. As does capturing ships.

I am not just accepting this as a coincidence and shutting up because I have observed stuff like it before.

EDIT: They could get away with this because by the time all of the düdes and jamming (not nesesarlly fired by the player) and oütfs and shîp availibillity was calculated, the cycle would have been gone through so many times the player would notice no relation between one ship they boarded and another... but not much happened other than boarding during my testing.

This post has been edited by FedKiller : 28 July 2005 - 04:44 PM

FedKiller, on Jul 28 2005, 01:33 PM, said:

The only explanation I can think of for this was that the "random factors" involved in the game are not random. They start from 100 and are used in order (90, 80, 70, down to 10) to calculate things like money that has no random factor pre-applied. Jamming has numbers already there, but even that has "random" numbers tossed into the equation. As does capturing ships.View Post

Actually, I've seen something like that too, when I got 50000 credits just after starting a game in Override for Nova, by doing nothing but gambling. After a little while, you can spot a pattern in which tile wins, and it tends to get caught in loops.
It still has nothing to do with whether ships can jump out of the system, but it is an interesting observation. Thank you.

Edwards