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Is it possible to trigger any kind of mission bit if your ship's fuel reaches 0? I have a few ideas on how this would make for some interesting storylines.
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No. And I've tried real hard. There's no way to read the character's fuel tank.
On a related note, the best way to controllably empty the tank is with an invisible outfit that grants a load of negative fuel. Just so you know.
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Originally posted by Geuis: **Is it possible to trigger any kind of mission bit if your ship's fuel reaches 0? I have a few ideas on how this would make for some interesting storylines.
**
You could do it only as Masamune alluded to: as a set sort of thing. As in like at a specific point, pre-programmed by the developer. (Give the player an outfit and a mission on a certain planet, then he heads out and suddenly finds himself out of fuel, and something occurs, that sort of thing) But in terms of a random sort of occurence I'm pretty sure it would be impossible.
_bomb
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See, what I thought it would be cool to make your ship use fuel to fly around a stellar system(not hyperjumping using fuel.) The scenario would be something like you have to reach this planet that is really far away in the system and make it back to the starting planet to complete a mission. I want to make it so that if you run out of fuel before completing the mission, it pops up a little display saying something like "Tragically, you ran out of fuel and didn't complete the mission. Eventually your ship loses power and you are left to drift in the empty void of the solar system, as a cold and dead derelict." At this point you would set as killed and the game engine will return to the main screen.
If I could get this kind of thing to work, it would make for some interesting game-play that takes place in single solar system, not across the universe.
Originally posted by Geuis: **See, what I thought it would be cool to make your ship use fuel to fly around a stellar system(not hyperjumping using fuel.) The scenario would be something like you have to reach this planet that is really far away in the system and make it back to the starting planet to complete a mission. I want to make it so that if you run out of fuel before completing the mission, it pops up a little display saying something like "Tragically, you ran out of fuel and didn't complete the mission. Eventually your ship loses power and you are left to drift in the empty void of the solar system, as a cold and dead derelict." At this point you would set as killed and the game engine will return to the main screen.
That's actually one of the basic ideas behind Sephil Saga you stumbled onto, Geuis. While it not totally realistic (as in, you can operate at negative fuel production indefinately), if you jump and run out of "actual gas" (a custom, outfit-based system) your reactor shuts down, and you'll have severely impaired mobility and no energy when you jump into the system. It works pretty cool, and even with it's inconsistencies models in-solar-system mechanics fairly well.
Point: Idea's already been done.
You could do a work around by setting a mission which swaps out the ship with all its outfits for a ship with standard outfits (ie, no additional fuel stuff) on meeting a special ship, and put this special ship in a place where you are several jumps from the nearest system and no helpful ships will come along.
That way, you know in which system the ship will run out of fuel. If you have a concurrent mission running which is kicked off by the first special ship, then when the player reaches that system, you can have a text box pop up and ncbs changing to tell the player that they are out of fuel.
If you want to actually make this interesting, you can have a two invisible missions running. One will trigger when you encounter a special ship on the way back where you came from. The other will trigger when you encounter a special ship if you decide to press on into uncharted space. Both ships abort all other running missions when you meet them, so you never get to find out what would have happened if you went the other way.
This would be a nice way of introducing another element of choice into EVN. This is still a weakness in ncbs, even though they are vastly superior to missionbits, because there are no if then statements.
To make the whole thing more transparent, you could get the mission to be only available for the ship type you want to swap out.
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This idea brought back to something I did years ago in the first EV and EV:O. At the time I had thought of a ship where its thrust was 0 but it moved around by firing unguided missles with a certain amount of negative impact like how you could turn a tractor beam into a repulsor beam. This propelled the ship in the opposite direction. I actually created this concept ship in a test plug using a scout ship. At the time I couldn't figure out how to make the missle explode at a certain distance. I set a proximity of a couple thousand pixels so that any ship in a system would make the missle explode. Only problem was that those ships always thought they were being attacked, which doesn't make for a long lifetime for a scout ship.
This idea could be refined and probably made completely workable now. Couple things would need to be changed. The "fuel" (missles) would have to be made to have a limit. Run out, you're out of gas. Also, there would need to be a way to make the missles explode after a certain maximum time or to set it to trigger its proximity off the player ship. You could then set the proximity to be extremely close and no other ships would think you are attacking them.
You're welcome to use this idea Masamune in your plug if you'd like. Sadly, I lost the Mac I first developed for EV years ago, so I don't have the original files anymore. If you can figure out the small problems, lemme know. I'll use the idea in my own plug.
Thanks but no thanks, Geuis. We considered that idea- but we decided that that was simply TOO un-Nova like. I always figured the player could remap the normal thrust button to the primary trigger button, but then you lose the ability to have primary weapons. And there is still no good way to do it for turning, so it seemed a little half-baked (if you wanted to go to that level of detail).
There is, however, a pretty cool retro-thruster weapon that uses energy as fuel. The shots look like engine flares- it looks slick. And as a secondary weapon, it has great tactical uses (unlike Polycon's (no offence) which fired on the primary trigger and just helped keep you from getting too close).
Or, you could use a trick i thought of earlier. Make a mission that grants you an afterburner outfit that drops your accell and top speed to 0. Then the only way they can move is to use that afterburner wich burns fuel like theres no tommorow. Just a thought.
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Try this. The player arrives in a system where he has to make his way to the very far away point you have specified.
Unbeknownst to him a Special Ship appears in the system, and the ncbs give him a Bomb.
After some time of flying, the Bomb goes off, destroying the player. A Bomb can point to a Desc ID, and this Desc ID says that he's been running on empty for too long, and gunk in the bottom of his tank has caused his engines to detonate.
Of course, the player never realises it's a bomb - he just imagines there is something in the game engine that he didn't know about that can blow up your ship if you run out of fuel.
A good way of making the player run out of fuel is getting him to take off from a planet with lots of gravity which requires all his fuel in afterburner to escape from it - of course, he never does escape, and the bomb going off will make him think twice about ever running out of fuel again. Kind of reminiscent of the classic Blake's 7 episode Orbit in which Avon and Vila try to achieve escape velocity while unbeknownst to them their enemies have put a fraction of neutron star matter on board their shuttle.
BTW, the player can always Eject, and so escape in a life pod from a fuelless vessel, so you can't actually end the game for him in that way.