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This is pure Conjecture as I really can't see it being implemented but any way.
Does any body know if there is a way that the EV engine Could support Non player cloaking? I've been thinking about this a lot and I can't see it working. Ares does have cloaking ships but that doesn't count for much.
I was wondering if anybody had any ideas about how this could be possible considering the EV engine or wether there is a way to do somthing to this effect using the editable resources?
Also Does anybody know a valid E-mail or website address for the creators of the plug in 'Star wars a New Alliance'?? The ones in the read me don't work. I remember seeing a website for a sequal or revamp which actually looked quite good(unlike the original Plug) but they sem to dissapeared without trace. And there is somthing I need to contact them about. there names are Ian Beach and Mark Melaccio.
Also I noticed somthing strange in the Read-me file of the original EV babylon-5 plug in- it said "this Plug is not Stormbringer compliant??? any ideas?
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"'Stormbringer!' he cried and then the hellsword struck his chest he felt the icy touch of the blade against his heart,felt his body constrict,felt it sucking his soul from the very depths of his being, felt his whole body being drawn into the RuneSword." <A HREF="mailto:jr.watkins@virgin. net">jr.watkins@virgin. net</A>
(This message has been edited by Stormbringer (edited 03-16-2000).)
GRRRR! I mistyped my password and this #(*$& PC wouldn't keep the post I typed when I hit back! hmph.
Anyway. Stormbringer was a way of organizing resources, possibly to make plugins compatible with each other, or maybe just a way of organizing them. I heard about it in a file that came with the plugin Astex, the one with the Astex Hulk (a ship). Needless to say, it died, if you can say it ever was alive.
Stupid PCs at the library, I'm there with my English class to research a project.
why was it called Stormbringer?
------------------ 'Stormbringer!' he cried and then the hellsword struck his chest. H e felt the icy touch of the blade against his heart,felt his body constrict,felt it sucking his soul from the very depths of his being,felt his whole personality being drawn into the Runesword. [mailto:jr.watkins@virgin. net](http://mailto:jr.watkins@virgin.<br /> net)jr.watkins@virgin. net
To answer your first original question:
No.
You could do it, sorta, by having a small black square for a ship, but you could still hit it and it could shoot at you.
------------------ "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." -Gen. Jack Ripper, Dr. Strangelove
The idea of a cloaking shield is that opposing ships can't see you, not can't hurt you. You would still be there, just effectivly invisible.
------------------ Umm...Yeah...ok.
But you couldn't uncloak could you, I wonder if you could do it using a weapon resource??
:frown: Clicked the dang submit button too early!!
It would make a for better cloaking shield if actually made the ship slightly unique and if it was military only. Also to make it look better use very dark colors and rerender the ship so it almost looks like the background but not quite. Also it would be pointless to be able to select it so you wouldn't be able to do it too easily. I managed to get a similar idea working kinda good (but not good very good) by making the selection pic say no target like it does when you really don't have a target selected.
Currently you can't. But if Matt Burch decides to add a little something to the code in the next version of EVO....
Which I can almost garuantee he won't. :frown:
Stormbringer was (and is) a system for organising plug-ins in terms of which IDs certain kinds of missions, ships and upgrades could have. Most of the big early EV plug-ins used Stormbringer to some extent. It was in many ways superseded by Plugchecker and the EV formula calcs, which impose their own discipline on plug-in making.
Cloaking was also a problem solved in some of the great early plugins. One used an almost black ship, which was pretty effective if it was moving fast. Another (to my mind much more effective) was Angels of Vengeance, which gave Stealth ships the shape of an asteroid. You could be destroyed by them a great many times before you realised what hit you, particularly as the target screen gave you no clues.
However, if you think about cloaking, there is no reason to actually use a live ship at all. If you just tell the player that they have to stop a ship by a certain time, and then allow the mission to fail gracefully, when they land on the planet you can then tell them that the ship had a cloaking device and they missed it, which would have been the effect of the player's cloaked ship on the AI ships.
You may notice we used invisible ships for Plague in the Frozen Heart. Again, because the target screen was something different, most players never figured out there was a ship there.
M A R T I N • T U R N E R
Does any body know where I can get stormbringer? id like to know where the name came from. and whether it has anyhing to do with a certain Black Runesword!
I've had another thought about the cloaking device you could maybe create a weapon with a very large reload count that fired as freefall rocket and had a large black sprite which the enemy ship could hide under, I severly doubt this would work what with impacts etc and would probably look very messy,Besides AI's would probably not use it like they don't Use tractor beams or freeflight Bombs. Any one know what it is that decides what weapons AI use in different circumstances? is it to do with power, speed etc. why don't they use Freeflight bombs? I wonder if this will change in 1.0.2?
Do you think cloaking could be implemented by introducing a new Weapon type to the Engine? like the new Marines Outfit.
Also I know someone who's on the Hera (Ares Editor) Beta team, i'll ask them about how the cloaking in Ares works it might be helpful. I'm just imagining those cloaked Catheran ships In EV, theyd be so Cool! How are the people working on the Ares EVO plug-in going to deal with this?
I have several ideas about cloaking, involving the interaction between the sprites and mask of a ship. One possibility is to have a ship that is invisible, but which can be hit by weapons. In this case, you have to merely replace the ship's sprite with black, leaving the mask intact. Of course the target pic would say "No Target", or "Unable to scan" or something.
Another possibility is to make the other way around: remove a mask, leaving the sprite or making it very dark. Thus the ship is visible, but you can't hit it (ideally). Same as above for the target pic.
Furthermore, you could replace the sprites AND masks with black, leaving just a square. And finally, you could replace some of the orientations of the ship in sprites and masks with black. This would create the effect of the ship appearing and disappearing as it turned.
Come to think of, I think I'll make a plugin and try all that.
------------------ We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill...
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Obormot wrote: ** Another possibility is to make the other way around: remove a mask, leaving the sprite or making it very dark. Thus the ship is visible, but you can't hit it (ideally). Same as above for the target pic. **
That would work except for the fact that the idea of a cloaking shield is to render the ship invisible, not to make it impossible to hit. But you could try to create the effect that your ships scanners are being screwed up by the cloaking device by making the mask only one dot. It's a lot harder to hit a single pixel than it is to hit a lot of pixels all clumped together.
------------------ "I was under the influence of medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes."
Richard Nixon
Email -- SmashMaster18@hotmail.com AIM -- JolJvik
That would work except for the fact that the idea of a cloaking shield is to render the ship invisible, not to make it impossible to hit.
Possibly that would give the effect of a phase-shifted ship.
Stormbringer wrote: "...I'm just imagining those cloaked Catheran ships In EV, theyd be so Cool! How are the people working on the Ares EVO plug-in going to deal with this?"
So far, you have to have a spinned weap sprite which overlays the ship's pict. I've worked out more specifics on how to do it (including a Star Trek shield), but as much as I can see the ideas as being exremely simple and easy to make... I don't want to let out the surprise of it until people actually play the Ares EVO plug-in.
Frankly, I was kinda hoping this topic would die before it got this far. Oh well. I geuss freethinkers are the joints of advancing success.
Zeta
P.S. Stormbringer: were you talking about Admiral Sargatnus when you mentioned the hera beta tester? If so, he's on the Ares EVO team.
------------------ Manager: Someone who makes nonsense sound reasonable.
hmmmm i thougt something like that would work have you actualy tested it my only doubt about somthing like that is the problem of actually getting AI to use such weapons as they don't seem to use tractor beams or freeflight bombs. How do AI calculate what weapon to use? I was thinking it must be somthing to do with power versus speed and the distance to the nearest hostile target but it may just be random,any body know for sure?? also it must be hard to get AI ships to use cloaking in anything resembeling an Intelligent way but i suppose you can't expect that much from the EV engine.
How is the Ares plug going? thats definately something i'll look foreward to.
I was talking about Boba Fett as i was working with him on a Star Wars ares plug alongside my EV plug but i haven't been in contact with him for ages and i'm not sure if he's following throught with it.
You could also remove target boxes from the game. I think they are just a bunch of cicn resources. That way you could have an black ship with a normal mask, no target for it's target pict, and no target box... That way, even if you had the ship targeted, you wouldn't have a clue if it passed across the screen. Though this has the drawback of no ship having target boxes.
kberg wrote: **You could also remove target boxes from the game. I think they are just a bunch of cicn resources. That way you could have an black ship with a normal mask, no target for it's target pict, and no target box... That way, even if you had the ship targeted, you wouldn't have a clue if it passed across the screen. Though this has the drawback of no ship having target boxes.:)
**
Thats not really that big of a deal. If you dont know exactly where whatever your trying to attack is, then just use missiles or a turret and they will lead you right to it.
Stormbringer wrote: ** hmmmm i thougt something like that would work have you actualy tested it my only doubt about somthing like that is the problem of actually getting AI to use such weapons as they don't seem to use tractor beams or freeflight bombs.
They won't use free-flight bombs, but they will use tractor beams. Generally AIs choose their most damaging weapons — first missiles, the torpedoes, then finally just shooting at you. As tractor beams do effectively no damage, they won't choose them.
Nice idea on the ship you can't hit — kind of like the Minbari cruisers in Babylon 5. The nice touch is that a ship which had no mask would still be hittable by an area impact weapon like a mine.
Oh, BTW, if there's no mask, you can't see anything.
Martin Turner wrote: **They won't use free-flight bombs, but they will use tractor beams....... As tractor beams do effectively no damage, they won't choose them.
can they or can't they use tractor beams? Then how do you make them use tractor beams?
If you remove the mask, the missiles should pass right through the ship.
Yes, actually, you're right. EV/O only shows that area of the sprite which is "masked".