From Space to Planet and Back

Luck

Howdy all.

I'm starting this thread to bounce ideas around about a method I am trying to create. This is not so much for any plug-in in particular, but rather to serve as a resource for people who wish to use something similar in their own plug-ins.

Here is the goal:
"Begin in a ship flying around a normal syst. Land on a planet. Be moved to a new syst that is set up to look like a planet's surface. Be placed into a new ship, made to look like a land vehicle (like, for example, a car). Adventure around the planet, visiting locations that can be interacted with (like, buildings or a spaceport). When finished, leave the 'planet's surface' and return to space, with the same ship and outfits present prior to landing."

Here's what I'm thinking:
1. Set aside a bunch of control bits, say 1000. The actual amount will vary depending on the number of ships and outfits in your plug-in/total conversion.
2. Map out these control bits. It needs one bit per ship, and one bit per outfit. You also need a seperate bit for each number of outfit, if you can have more than one. For example, if you can have 4 'widget shields' max per ships, you'd need a bit for one shield, a bit for two shields, a bit for three shields, and a bit for four shields, or four bits total.
3. Make the normal system, with a normal planet spob. Put the ship there.
4. Upon landing, the player sees the normal planet screen.
5. Make a mission that starts when you enter the Bar. Give the player the choice to move out onto the planet or stay in the spaceport.
6. If the player chooses to head out onto the planet, set the control bits for the player's current ship and configuration. I'm sure this isn't as easy as it sounds. It would require setting about 20 bits in one statement, is that even possible? I haven't tested yet.
7. Once the player's current ship and configuration are "saved", use the Mxxx or Nxxx operator to move the player to the "planet" syst.
8. Use the Hxxx operator to change the player's ship to the ground vehicle type ("But Uncle Owen...!").
9. Use the Txxx operator to change the ship name to something fitting.
10. Ok, creating the planet syst. Let's make a planet of islands in a blue sea. Set the background color for the syst to a pleasant blue, and the Murk value negative (this hides the starfield).
11. Make large spob graphics that look like islands. Make smaller spobs that look like buildings, and set the station flag so they show on top of the islands. Place these around the syst to create the world you want.
12. Heh, make something interesting to do there.
13. One of the buildings should be a spaceport of some kind. When the player is ready to leave, they 'land' on the spaceport. Entering the Bar, they are given a mission choice to leave.
14. If they choose yes, use Mxxx or Nxxx to move them back to the original system.
15. Check the control bits for the ship type they had, then use Hxxx to change the ship type. Use Dxxx to remove all the default items that come with the ship.
16. Check the control bits for the outfits and use Gxxx to give them to the new ship.
17. I have no idea how to set the name back to the original.

Ok, so there's my broad overview of how I thought it could be done. I'm sure some of these steps are tricky to do in practice, especially step 16. However, I don't see any show stoppers...

... so that's where you all come in. Anyone seen any thing I've said that simply are not possible? If so, are there other ways of doing it? Are there better, simpler, or less intensive ways of doing any of the steps?

The goal, as always, is to make the experience immersive to the player, and not remind them of the number-crunching going on behind the scenes.

Take it away, folks!

Peace,
Luck

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mrxak

Quote

Originally posted by Luck:
< snip>

Pretty nice. Some of your ideas I had already come up with for a solution to a completely unrelated thing, but applying them to something like this is very neat. A few thoughts:

2. You could do a (albeit a very complex) binary counting system to determine the outfit counts, which would save a few bits maybe. You could also ignore outfits completely, and just don't worry about it. It would probably take a lot of cröns to get this to work anyway.
6. Sort of related, just use the bits to count them as you buy them, and decrease as you sell them. Very complex to take care of, so it might just be better to just wink at the player and say "it's just a game, so you can have a cloaking device and torpedos on your car". I could be wrong though, and it might actually work better to count them only when you need to. I'll have to think a little more about this.
9. Don't worry about the name. The car can be called after the ship too.
17. Don't worry about it, especially if you don't worry about the car to begin with.

Kame

Not bad. Seems getting rid of the starfields is simple. Astroids would be out of the question which would be a small dissappointment but I spose some sacrifices have to be made. The biggest issue is "ships" running into and over each other. There's been a couple people working on car plugs and a TC that takes place on the ocean and I'm not sure if they figured out a way to justify these events or just chose to ignore them. Otherwise sounds like you've got a good start. Working out some of the technical aspects that really puch the engine can often be some of the most difficult hurdles. Not a small project by any means though. Will definetly be worthwhile if you can put it together. Mapping out every bit will be a chore for sure though and will probably require several missions to take everything away then put it all back again. Also, ammo quantities will be a bugger to work out. I think the only way to accurately record quantities would be to have a bit for every piece of ammo, up to the max for that weapon.

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((Ż'ˇ.¸(Ż'ˇ.¸Ť-KAME-ť¸.ˇ'´Ż)¸.ˇ'´Ż))
I used to jog but the ice kept falling out of my glass.
(url="http://"http://www.0three0.net/l-1551/")L 1551(/url) - The official site of RONIN and The Way and the ten thousand things

TheRedeemer

Quote

Originally posted by Kame:
**Not bad. Seems getting rid of the starfields is simple. Astroids would be out of the question which would be a small dissappointment but I spose some sacrifices have to be made.

**

Coulden't you make them look like clouds? But then you'd have a hard time trying to explain why clouds blew up into little clouds. Ah well, just an idea.

(This message has been edited by TheRedeemer (edited 09-05-2003).)

Masamune

A quick work around to eliminate all your weapons-while-in-car worries is to give each and every weapon a keycarried value (the same for all weapons). Now, make an invisible "can use weapons" outfit (a carried ship with no launcher that satisfies the keycarried value). When you take this outfit away, BAM! (<-As Emeril would say), no weapons. The other outfits, well, good luck, but at least you've taken care of weapons and ammo. (They'll still show up, of course, but at least they're unusuable.)

You can pull all sorts of cool tricks like this, BTW. Want to arm the car? do this in reverse. Pretty simple.

Actually, the problem as I see it with your method comes down to the limits of the engine, and namely the limits on resources. You'd need a whole crap load of crons to do it as you've laid out (stroring outfits as mission bits).

I recommend another way of doing this, which brings the crons to outfits ratio to 2:1, meaning a MAXIMUM of 256 different outfits. That's not bad, considering the Nova scenario only has 212 outfits. For every outfit, make a second, token outfit (invisible, probably). Now, set up your two crons as so (Make sure iterative entry is ON):

Outfit 1: XXX
Outfit 1 Token: YYY
Bit 0: A control bit, allowing you to land while on-planet- set it and the crons turn off.

Cron 1:
ActiveOn: OXXX & !b0
OnEntry: DXXX GYYY

Cron 2:
ActiveOn: OYYY & !b0
OnEntry: DYYY GXXX

Make sure each cron fires every day if it can.

I probably elaborated on this WAY to much, but some of the newer developers might not know how to really use the iterative entry/exit. For an example in Nova, look at the crons that control the carbon-fiber armor degrades.

Now you don't have to worry about any outfits. Only problem is getting the right ship back. For that, you'd probably need to do mission bits, and use 1 cron per ship to restore it (if you only have one generic car, or the mission sets it, you won't need more). That cuts further into your outfit count, but what the hey. 2 ships= -1 outfit.

OK. I'm done now.

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~Charlie
Sephil Saga Homepage: (url="http://"http://www.cwssoftware.com")www.cwssoftware.com(/url)

Aprosenf

How exactly would you store the ship's type? There's no control bit test expression to test for the player's ship type. I suppose you could have a bunch different copies of the mission, where the AvailShipType is set to each possible ship, and then another set of missions for going back. There's a limit of 1000 missions, so you could only have a few hundred ship types, depending on how many missions you use for other things. Another thing you'd have to take care of putting the second system on the map. You could put it on the same coordinates, but you'd have to make sure the Visiblity fields are set up right. If you do that, make sure to give the car less than 100 units of fuel, so it can't jump into the systems that previously connected to the "space" system. Good ideas, though.

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C:dos
C:dosrun
rundosrun

(This message has been edited by Aprosenf (edited 09-05-2003).)

Masamune

Actually, you wouldn't need to worry about system visibility- you could put the planet-side systems way out in the middle of nowhere- and actually build little planet-side system clusters. Then, the car could use fuel to truck around on the planets surface in big leaps. You could be really cool and put a nebula there, that looks like the planet.

But, as I think about it, the only reason it would be worth doing all this work is if you could do it on EVERY planet. So, you wouldn't be able to use many nebulas. HOWEVER, if you wanted to do another plug set in the solar system, you might have something! Hop in your ship, fly to Mars (a long-ass trip from Earth), land, and explore. Get back to your ship, fly over to Mercury or Venus, and do the same. Could be very interesting. Very different, at least.

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~Charlie
Sephil Saga Homepage: (url="http://"http://www.cwssoftware.com")www.cwssoftware.com(/url)

Azratax2

You can use the Cxxx set operator to change the player's ship, and then possibly remove a keycarried thing to keep them from firing thier weapons. Thus you only have to worry about giving them back the right ship....
-Az

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mrxak

I'd suggest start with a small-but-usable plug to play around with some of the features, and deal with one problem at a time with your working model. Don't worry about graphics, multiple ship classes, or anything like that, just get something that works mostly the way you want it, and work from there to expand it, and get everything working correctly.

Dastal

I was actually thinking of doing a plug based on the Solar system idea. Why not just do a "Earth" scenario. You could modify different groups of asteroids to be clouds, icebergs, whatever you want. You could use inertialess ships as hover vehicles. You could do an all out war. You'd have to modify the starfield into something though. Maybe have a giant "stellar" as a mountain range or a forest? Simply skip the mountains and use nebulas? I dun know.

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orcaloverbri9

Why worry about asteroids? As I recall, you can set the system to have no asteroids. This is possible in Nova, correct?

mrxak

Quote

Originally posted by orcaloverbri9:
Why worry about asteroids? As I recall, you can set the system to have no asteroids. This is possible in Nova, correct?

Yeah, I don't see much point in having asteroids either...

froggy

Quote

Originally posted by Dastal:
**I was actually thinking of doing a plug based on the Solar system idea. Why not just do a "Earth" scenario. You could modify different groups of asteroids to be clouds, icebergs, whatever you want. You could use inertialess ships as hover vehicles. You could do an all out war. You'd have to modify the starfield into something though. Maybe have a giant "stellar" as a mountain range or a forest? Simply skip the mountains and use nebulas? I dun know.

**

Or you could use inertialess ships as cars or boats or something.

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I'm president of the United States and I refuse to eat broccoli! - George H. W. Bush
But the elevator is broken in this building. So I'm gonna have to jump! - (url="http://"http://www.homestarrunner.com")Strong Bad(/url)
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TheRedeemer

Quote

Originally posted by froggy:
**Or you could use inertialess ships as cars or boats or something.

**

You'd have to really, because all cars and boats have a turning circle, it'll would look pretty stupid if it was spinning round on the spot. But if they were hovercars, you could have them flying like normal ships.

Travesty ofthe JadenBlade

NOOOOOOOO!
you've read my mind and taken half my idea. Oh well might as well give you the rest.

I'm flying along in my ship and go to the mars system. I can land on one of the moons for a standard landing but I'd much rather land on mars (a hidden wormhole or hypergate, leading to system mars capitol or mars frindge) when I enter the the city I look and see it is several spobs shaped like squid (haveing one centerbuilding and expanding lines of buildins branching out from it to give the appearance of many streets and alleys but they are too narrow to travel so all I ccould do is maybe fly over it). I go to the a landing pad land (planet with graphics of inside a building with an old man behind the desk) he offers me 'a mission' to park and travel the city. When I eccept I am given aspecial ship for the mission (either a designated escape ship that I had to begin with or a new one) shaped like a person, with secondary weapons of repulsor beams and tractor beams of armslength for the 'ship' person. I can walk through the city streets but through some method (beams or sheild emitted by either spob or character) can't climb over buildings (eccept in a few cases where a ladder represents a gap in the barrier, maybe done with a roof top spob with no barrier accecible by it's ladder side in one of the buildings spobs allys). There are some steps out infront of some buildings that you can land on, they take you to the "planet" luckys tavern, or the outfitters 'planet', or the plastic surgeon (ship yard). Each 'planet' is a picture of the inside of the bussiness maybe with a mission in it maybe not, then to get services you click the only button other then leave which will redundantly say the type of bussines. While in the city you can see other ship/people. Hail them, mug them, catch pirate people, accept missions between planet/buildings (a warehouse has some commodities that you can pick up and deliver to the tavern ect.) accept a bounty hunt. Then when you are done go back to the landing pad (accessible only the one way, so you don't find yourself in orbit without a ship) and they ask you if you are ready to leave (self terminating mission which the completes the land and walk the city mission as a success and your reward is to lose the money nessecary for docking fees). At which point you are now aboard your ship again and travel through the hole/gate back into orbit.
Oh while you are on foot you can try doing something like boarding taxis but I'm not sure how you would get out (may eject in your human body escape pod). I'm not sure you can put feilds or beams around Spobseither so shrug. But in these systems you could easily have exclusive outfits like revolvers, and swords (fixed length beam weapons, is it possible), grenades (space bombs), armored vests ect. It's just that the fact that you are makeing two universes with exclusive tech but the same number of groups can cause it to be heavy in ships, outfits, missions and characters.

There are gobs of ideas I have to go with this but they don't have to be a part of it. What do you think?

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...your amazing.
"No, I am better than that."

Dastal

Using wormholes for planets is a really good idea. Didn't think of that one. Of course, you'd have to get out somehow. maybe a designated space-coridor? You could use this for multiple ports and things like that too. Humm...I'm so using some variation on this in my plug. Once I've done some mote thinking on it, I'll explian to everyone exactly what I'm doing.

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The Vortrex

But if you can "save" your ship and it's outfits, you have some kind of "park" effect, no?

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You can run but then you die tired

Travesty ofthe JadenBlade

No I mean in mars system have one worm hole whose graphic is covered by that of another spob (like some people have done with the entire make two landing points on the same planet by overlaying themin the same spot. That way you can have a background graphic for mars maybe without landables, overlay it to hide the wormhole that you go to. The wormhole leads only to the one city which has a monorail to another fringe town on the other edge of the mars nebula (used to show you the planet in the map feature).
Maybe even a third wasteland setting in which you can travel and act as escorts for those who travel on foot between cities.

The worm hole(s) are all point to point so you enter a wormhole that's hidden under a planet and you emerge from one hidden under a building or runway. Then to leave go to the runway and end up leaveing the planet.

The other idea I had with worm holes was to tack two at either end of each planets orbit so it's hidden (change the graphic to star speckled black and maybe a bouy to mark the way) and use it to lead to the edge of a blank space where you cross to the other edge and go through two more blank spaces like this and you get to the next planet.
It give the illusion of travelling straight and removes the shortcut J-key jump (you can also do this another way incase later you want to introduce Jkey jumps as new tech).
How boring you say? Well wait there's more. Adventures can happen in these inbetween planet zones and missions can be used (again escort, scavenger ect.) and hidden black markets may hover here. But it also is cheaper then paying the hypergate tolls.

That's right each planetary system has a gate that opens straight to the hypergate tunnel system. So if you land on a gate in mercury you pay a toll and enter an orange space with four other gates allong a line that lead to venus earth and mars. at the other end of the tunnel is maybe another hidden wormhole that leads to a 'second' tunnel for the latter half of the solar system (asteroid belt to kyperbelt) with gates for all the planetary systems there. That way conflicts can happen in hyperspace and it's still quicker and safer then straight travel.

Merc, to pluto could be done like: Gate, wormhole, gate. Or worm, cross to to another worm, cross to to another worm, cross to to another worm, cross to to another worm, to venus where you cross to another worm ect. for 36 'systems' to get there (9 planest plus three spaces between each).
All the while being hounded by pirates and space monsters Mineing asteroids (near earth asteroids and comets arn't unheard of but still rarer then the belts) along they way for a little extra cargo. get missions from ships or planets along the way or join a caravan for a while.

In hyperspace you could wander from the path and get lost in the outskirts of the hyperlanes, encounter strange life form that may be after you and maybe find a hidden gate or two used by smugglers.

Vacation on the cloud city like setting of Jupiter. Walk the streets and defend yourself with your fists (punch is a three foot repulsor beam that does smallest damage possible, and grab is a tractor beam of the same size that does no damage) grab ahold of a passing hover car and escape, or pick up some trash or a rock and throw it at an opponent. (though how to get it to impact I don't know).

That's just some of the ideas I had. The may still make an appearance if I ever work up the nerve to try doing my pluin ideas. But Feel free to use them (maybe give me a mention and definately give me a post to tell me how hard/easy it was and any encouragement/advice might bring to light some still unrevealed plans) in your plugs.

"There is that better?" pulling hair back and stretching the face obscenely. MIB
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...your amazing.
"No, I am better than that."

(This message has been edited by Travesty ofthe JadenBlade (edited 09-08-2003).)

Aprosenf

Please use paragraphs and line breaks, those huge blocks of text hurt the eyes.

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C:dos
C:dosrun
rundosrun

Curufinwe_Fëanor

Quote

Originally posted by Aprosenf:
**Please use paragraphs and line breaks, those huge blocks of text hurt the eyes.

**

sheesh...

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