Death Star Trench Run

In Nova!

I think I figured out a way to make the Death Star trench run for nova.

Have the player approach the death star. it is really 2 spobs: 1 "death star" and one "trench". When the player lands on "trench" they are given a mission to fly down the trench and destroy the exhaust port. When they accept, it moves them to another system with a stellar called "launch point" or somesuch, and gives you a special proton torpedo launcher that can destroy the exhaust port. It only gives you 1 ammo. "Launch point" is at one end of a large rectangle made out of 4 spobs. They look like the surface of the death star and are called trench edges. They are deadly, so if your ship hits them, you crash! you then must fly down the trench, avoiding the sides and the enemy ships, until you are within the short range of the launcher. The exhaust port itself is a ship with 1,000 armor and 10, 000 shields. Normal weapons can't penetrate the shields, or damage the armor. but the special torpedo does 1100 armor damage and passes through sheilds, so it willl destroy the exhaust port. (the port could also be a stellar, so weapons pass over it and the specail torp could be a stellar-destroying weapon) once you destroy the port, ou can go past it and get to a wormhole that takes you away back to home base.

Well, any thoughts or suggestions? Anyone interested in using it in a star wars tc? I won't make it myself, as school is quite demanding, but I invite anyone else to.

can AI be imune to the deadly stellar to represent the ties coming in over the lip of the trench? It would suck if the AI just dumbly crashed. Otherwise, might be neat. Though size of stellar compromises system performance.

Not AI, but specific ship types can have the "ignore deadly spobs" flag.

ok, so you'll have a big death star spob, with these deadly trench edges on the sides of the trench featured on the first spob, and then have a spob that you're supposed to kill at the end with this one weapon...

When you destroy it, what happens?
Can you have a movie pop up, and then when it goes away you're back home again?

Yeah. The onshipdone shows a desc with a QT movie, then an N*** operator.

The problem is, either the spobs would have to be huge, in which case system performance would take a big hit, or they would be small, making the trench awfly short.

I'm a little rusty at EV development, but couldn't that be midigated somewhat by having several different "Death Star Sections" and repeating them? (Analogous to the cat and mouse running past the same table
five times in a cartoon.) I realize that more than four planets is problematical, but I seem to recall the engine as having at least 16 planet slots.

Bryce, on Sep 6 2005, 08:16 AM, said:

I'm a little rusty at EV development, but couldn't that be midigated somewhat by having several different "Death Star Sections" and repeating them?View Post

No, it's the sheer amount of the screen covered by sprites that causes framerate death. For a Death Star trench run to be realistic, you would probably want to cover the entire visible screen with sprites, and in the demonstration movie I saw of that once, the game's framerate was down around 4-8 FPS.
However, you are right about the syst resource having 16 spob slots. Too bad it doesn't help.

Edwards

Isn't someone already doing something like this (not me)?

If the screen flicker doesnt bug you, theres a way to do it with the N operator and system murk to only show a tiny bit of the screen at a time. It would be kind of annoying, but its the best i can think of.

Nice.

I hope it doesn't choke my system too badly.

That is a really crazy idea, but yes, there are so many ways that it could fail. Try if you like, but don't expect glorious success (but don't give up hope!). I suggest if you really try for this, start off with a basic alpha version that has everything looking really simple, so if it ends up not working, you don't waste so much time with graphics to rub salt in the wounds.

Edwards, on Sep 6 2005, 05:54 PM, said:

No, it's the sheer amount of the screen covered by sprites that causes framerate death. For a Death Star trench run to be realistic, you would probably want to cover the entire visible screen with sprites, and in the demonstration movie I saw of that once, the game's framerate was down around 4-8 FPS.
However, you are right about the syst resource having 16 spob slots. Too bad it doesn't help.

Edwards
View Post

You wouldn't need to cover the whole screen - with nova, you can set a solid color background. Make it
gray. Stick the trench walls on and some widgets around (the widgets could be stationary ships if placement
isn't critical - by widgets I mean turrents and such) and there you go, only perhaps 15-20% of the area is
covered. I remeber writing a plug with a 640*480 sprite (with some transparent areas, since nowadays EV uses Run-length encoding this is not insignificant) and it had no significant framerate drop when encoutering that sprite. (And this was several years ago on slower hardware.)

Now, granted, the gray wouldn't be as pretty as a real fully-rendered background, but if you have enough things shooting at the player he/she might not notice too much

Also remember that hardware is getting faster all the time. What seems absurd now may not seem absurd in a couple years when a TC is finished. (This is one of the reasons I was always irritated by the static limits on the number of things you could have in EV, even if most of them are rarely encountered in practice.)

Finally, if those things don't work, you could have a death-star run against that one that the Hutts built that was just a superstructure. It should be easier on the sprite engine.

Holy crap! The Hutts had a death star? I thought the superstructure one was just that prototype they built inside that evil pile of black holes (I forget what that place was called). I seem to remember a fourth... but I didn't know the Hutts had their hands on it.

I know that I said I would not make it in my previous post, but now I might try a low-quality graphics version (with just grey blobs or something) to see if it works. If it does, I might make a better version and post it on the addons page for people to mess with.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 7 2005, 09:51 AM, said:

Holy crap! The Hutts had a death star? I thought the superstructure one was just that prototype they built inside that evil pile of black holes (I forget what that place was called). I seem to remember a fourth... but I didn't know the Hutts had their hands on it.
View Post

Yes, the Hutts built one called Darksaber (read about it in the bookof the same title by Kevin Anderson) that was just the superlaser and engines. It failed (of course) because the Hutts were too cheap to get high quality parts.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 5 2005, 08:41 PM, said:

can AI be imune to the deadly stellar to represent the ties coming in over the lip of the trench? It would suck if the AI just dumbly crashed. Otherwise, might be neat. Though size of stellar compromises system performance.
View Post

I was thinking of putting the TIEs in the trench at the start.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 6 2005, 06:55 AM, said:

Yeah. The onshipdone shows a desc with a QT movie, then an N*** operator.

The problem is, either the spobs would have to be huge, in which case system performance would take a big hit, or they would be small, making the trench awfly short.
View Post

I was thinking more of "long rectangles" than huge spobs that filll the who screen.

Bryce, on Sep 7 2005, 09:07 AM, said:

You wouldn't need to cover the whole screen - with nova, you can set a solid color background. Make it
gray. Stick the trench walls on and some widgets around (the widgets could be stationary ships if placement
isn't critical - by widgets I mean turrents and such) and there you go, only perhaps 15-20% of the area is
covered. I remeber writing a plug with a 640*480 sprite (with some transparent areas, since nowadays EV uses Run-length encoding this is not insignificant) and it had no significant framerate drop when encoutering that sprite. (And this was several years ago on slower hardware.)

Now, granted, the gray wouldn't be as pretty as a real fully-rendered background, but if you have enough things shooting at the player he/she might not notice too much

Also remember that hardware is getting faster all the time. What seems absurd now may not seem absurd in a couple years when a TC is finished. (This is one of the reasons I was always irritated by the static limits on the number of things you could have in EV, even if most of them are rarely encountered in practice.)

View Post

This is more like what I was thinking. I will try it. (also, to make the stars blink like running lights, you can have pure black (or grey if that's the system color) roids that slide across the stars. This way, it doesn't look like you're in space, but rather on the surface of a giant ship.

darth_vader, on Sep 7 2005, 04:49 PM, said:

I was thinking of putting the TIEs in the trench at the start.
I was thinking more of "long rectangles" than huge spobs that filll the who screen.
This is more like what I was thinking. I will try it. (also, to make the stars blink like running lights, you can have pure black (or grey if that's the system color) roids that slide across the stars. This way, it doesn't look like you're in space, but rather on the surface of a giant ship.
View Post

You could try making some stationary roids that look like the surface of a giant ship.

<snip>

Oops, double post.

This post has been edited by darth_vader : 08 September 2005 - 07:09 PM

I did't even know it was possible to make stationary roids. Don't they just move around randomly?

The röid resource has a SpinRate field, which sounds like it affects animation, not speed of drift. Unless setting SpinRate to 0 or -1 has an undocumented effect, I don't see how you can make stationary asteroids without using spöbs.

Perhaps someone out there knows differently, though....

Oh I see, my bad. I just assumed they had a field for speed. Well in that case you could use stationary ships - untargetable, don't show up on radar.