How many missions can nova handle?

I was wondering, I know how many bits... I think I know how many misn bits there are, but how many total missions can be made in different strings?
if its important, there's 3 main strings and 5-6 smaller ones...

The Nova Bible states that the engine is limited to 1000 missions.

Ay-yi. This will be tricky.

I believe that it is possible to exceed the amount of missions Nova's limited to with clever use of mission bits and plug-ins, but I could be mistaken as I've never tried this.

Let's say that you have one continuous string that's 2000 missions long. (Highly unlikely, but I'm trying to get my idea into type here.) We'll want to split it into 2 plug-ins that contain 1000 missions each and add a message to the last mission in the first plug-in prompting the player to switch plug-ins. Simple, but kinda blocky as we'll have to use 2000 mission bits so that the player can't skip ahead 1000 missions into the storyline by accident. It's gets extremely complex when you have more than 10,000 missions, but I'll try to explain it as well as I can.

Let's say we're using the same single continuous storyline as we were before, with a giant difference; it's 10,000 missions long. We'd split it into 10 plug-ins with 1000 missions per plug-in and allocate bits 1000 through 1999 to those plug-ins. In the first mission of the first plug-in, the avail bit expression would be b1 & b1000 and the on completion expression would be !b1000 b1001. The avail bit expression for the second mission would be b1 & b1001 and the on completion expression would be !b1001 b1002. This would go on and on until we hit the last mission of the first plug-in, whose avail bit expression would be !b2 & (b1 & b1999) and on completion expression would be !b1 b2 b1000 !b1999. (Note the exclamation marks.) The first mission of the second plug-in would have b2 & b1000 in its avail bit expression. See the pattern? This method would turn off bits as the player went through the storyline, "cleaning up" the bits for the second plug-in so the player doesn't accept missions he's not supposed to take yet and make sure that if the player kept flying around with the first plug-in installed after the last mission was accepted he wouldn't be able to accept mission he has already taken.

I tried to be as detailed as possible without being confusing, but if you see an inconsistency, please let me know.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 22 December 2007 - 08:15 PM

Interesting. Though I'm not sure I'd want to play a string 2000 missions long.

It does have practical uses though. That's exactly what I'm doing with Anathema Chapter 3 because 1 and 2 used up all the available slots.

@guy, on Dec 22 2007, 08:04 PM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Interesting. Though I'm not sure I'd want to play a string 2000 missions long.

@jacabyte, on Dec 22 2007, 06:13 PM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Let's say that you have one continuous string that's 2000 missions long. ( Highly unlikely , but I'm trying to get my idea into type here.)

Emphasis mine. But that's still a good point. I'll try to address that:

Let's say you've got 10 major string missions that are all 100 missions long, and you want them to only take up 500 mission slots combined at a time. You'd make two plug-ins, one with the first 50 missions of all the strings and the other with the last 50 missions of all the strings. This way, you could call the plug-ins Part 1 and Part 2 respectively and you'd have 500 mission slots that could be used for minor strings which you'd want to be able to accept no matter where you are currently in the major strings. As for the way that mission bits are used between the 10 major mission strings, there are multiple ways to accomplish that; Reserve bits 100-199 to the first string, bits 200-299 to the second string and so on and so forth for the other strings and use b1 and b2 to differentiate between the plug-ins as I did in my last post, or use b11-b20 to differentiate between the strings and use b1000-b1099 for all the mission in the strings. The first mission of the first string would have b1 & (b11 & b1000) in its avail bit expression and the last mission in the second string would have b2 & (b12 & b1099) in its avail bit expression.

I think a system like what I just outlined would work best for Redchigh and his little "project."

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 23 December 2007 - 10:57 AM

It's because several of the 'ambiance' details of the world use missions to function.

Oh, well that's going to be tricky... As long as those "ambiance" missions don't take up more than 800 to 900 mission slots, I think you could still pull something off. It would probably require putting the first 5 or 10 missions of a major storyline into the data and, when the player gets to the cutoff point, plug-ins that replace the missions the player just played and the ones the player can no longer play because he or she has just entered a major storyline.

Ambiance? Maybe you oughta just use crons...

@joshtigerheart, on Dec 23 2007, 03:33 PM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Ambiance? Maybe you oughta just use crons...

I plan on making full use of crons.... This topic got out of control a tad- I dont think I'll need to go past 1000 missions... maybe 30 missions are ambiance, and that leaves plenty.
I have no reasion to push the mission count to such an absurd number as over 970 missions... I'd rather have fewer missions, and have them deep, interesting, and completed before I'm 30 years old.

Thanks for everyones help though!
There may be a part 2, but lets focus on part 1 for now!

@joshtigerheart, on Dec 23 2007, 09:33 PM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Ambiance? Maybe you oughta just use crons...

Unfortunately, cröns often just don't quite cut it in some cases.

@archon, on Dec 23 2007, 09:58 PM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Unfortunately, cröns often just don't quite cut it in some cases.

Pace would disagree, I'm sure.

@joshtigerheart, on Dec 24 2007, 06:46 AM, said in How many missions can nova handle?:

Pace would disagree, I'm sure.

Well, if someone shows me the crön that spawns an Arachnid and two Dragons or that gives you a couple of consecutive mission briefings, I guess I'll cede the point. Although I guess that that may or may not be defined as "ambiance."

Come to think of it, probably 95% of ambiance could be accomplished by cröns, it's just that everything I've done falls into that last 5%. Such is life I guess.