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Originally posted by Guy: **- Someone mentioned having ship firing animations for only certain weapons, so here's my method. Add these flags to the shän resource: 0x0200 - Ship unfolds when firing guns (weapons of ExitType 0), 0x0400 - Ship unfolds when firing turrets, 0x0800 - Ship unfolds when firing guided weapons, 0x1000 - Ship unfolds when firing beams, 0x2000 - Ship unfolds when firing other weapons (ExitType -1). The 0x0080 flag would be "Ship unfolds when firing specific weapons" - a rect at the end of the shän resource would be used to enter the IDs of up to four specific weapons. **
As an addition to this, weapon glows would allow multiple sets within the sprite and the shän would include a SetCount field along with the rest of the weapon glow stuff. This would allow for small animations when weapons are fired. There would be some flags to allow you to play the whole animation with each shot or to just show one frame and cycle through them shot by shot. If we also include a Delay field in the wëap resource you could have an animation for a weapon charging up to fire.
- phën resource. A phenomenon resource would allow you to create strange objects within systems with special properties without wasting spöb resources - things like this have been mentioned a number of times before and this is just my explanation. The phën resource would allow you to pick a sprite and animation options much the same as a spöb would. It would have fields such as gravity (or mass as somone suggested) and damage (these fields could then be removed from the spöb resource). The damage would occur when you fly over the phenomenon; a value of -1 would make it lethal. There would be a field allowing you to specify where it lies within the parallax scrolling starfield - positive values to appear somewhere in the depths of the starfield scrolling slowly, 0 to keep it in line with spöbs, or negative values to make it appear above everything else scrolling faster than things below it. It would also include a flag to have it targetable as a stellar or not - you could create some kind of entity living in space which you could hail and talk to :).
- EnginePower. Instead of an Acceleration field in shďp resources have an EnginePower field. The ship's acceleration would be calculated by taking into account the ship's mass including any outfits and cargo currently onboard. This would also make tractor beams work better if it was used instead of mass - you would no longer find destroyers with powerful engines being dragged along by a bulk freighter with wimpy engines. Or even better, convert the engine power and current heading of the two ships into vectors and add them together to find the resultant speed and direction. This way, two ships could pull in opposite directions and find themselves going slowly the way of the ship with the greater engine power, rather than going the full speed of the one with the greater mass.
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(This message has been edited by Guy (edited 01-29-2004).)
Originally posted by Guy: - Someone mentioned having ship firing animations for only certain weapons, so here's my method. Add these flags to the shn resource: 0x0200 - Ship unfolds when firing guns (weapons of ExitType 0), 0x0400 - Ship unfolds when firing turrets, 0x0800 - Ship unfolds when firing guided weapons, 0x1000 - Ship unfolds when firing beams, 0x2000 - Ship unfolds when firing other weapons (ExitType -1). The 0x0080 flag would be "Ship unfolds when firing specific weapons" - a rect at the end of the shn resource would be used to enter the IDs of up to four specific weapons.
Those, while they may be a bitch to do, are already possible. You can also have as many specific weapons as you want. If you use the "ship unfolds to fire" flag in conjunction with the "use weapon sprite" flag.
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IMHO, phën resource would be unecessary, Just add a parallax field to spöbs.
------------------
Originally posted by orcaloverbri9: **Those, while they may be a bitch to do, are already possible. You can also have as many specific weapons as you want. If you use the "ship unfolds to fire" flag in conjunction with the "use weapon sprite" flag. **
Yes, but then it will use the animation for every weapon which has that flag. It doesn't work if you want a ship to have an animation for only one specific weapon (while other ships may have animations for other weapons).
Originally posted by geek#1: **IMHO, phën resource would be unecessary, Just add a parallax field to spöbs. **
S'pose so, I just thought having a new resource would save a bit of space (creating something like that with a spöb resource would leave a lot of blank fields). In that case, the System field in the spöb resource would have to be stuck back in to allow you to have more than 16 items in a system. spöbs should also include more flags such as Selectable, Shows up on radar, and Ignored by AI. Oh, and they should have a Transparency field for spöbs that are placed above everything else (using the Parallax field). And all 16 NavDefs should be selectable via the F-keys (Apple bluetooth keyboards seem to have 16 F-keys).
Oh, after talking to Az a bit, two more easy features: 1. A "Kill Cron" NCB, Wxxx or something, that will stop a cron in it's tracks. 2. A money check NCB, $xxxxxxx, which returns true if the player has that much money
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Originally posted by Guy: Yes, but then it will use the animation for every weapon which has that flag. It doesn't work if you want a ship to have an animation for only one specific weapon (while other ships may have animations for other weapons).
Not if you pull some tricks with ncb's.
Originally posted by orcaloverbri9: **Not if you pull some tricks with ncb's. **
Eh? You saying that you can have a ship that fires a weapon which has the flag checked to use the ship's weapon glow but the ship won't actually use it? Also, the unfolding flag works for all weapons regardless of their own flags, does it not?
Originally posted by Guy: **
Eh? You saying that you can have a ship that fires a weapon which has the flag checked to use the ship's weapon glow but the ship won't actually use it? Also, the unfolding flag works for all weapons regardless of their own flags, does it not?**
No. I am saying that you can simulate it with multiple outfits.
And no, you can get it to do it for certain weapons but not others. As far as I know, that flag is the only thing necessary.
"IMHO, phën resource would be unecessary, Just add a parallax field to spöbs."
Actually, a phën (phenomonon) or a spëv (spatial eventmy word for it) resource would be terrificly useful.
Currently, flying in Nova is boring. You always know that you can fly around.
Well, what if all the sudden, a blue haze began to appear in the area your ship is in, and then you see blue lightning bolts fly inside this "cloud". Uh-oh, your ship is caught in an ion storm.
Or, you're flying and suddenly, a womrhole opens up in front of your and transports you to the far side of the galaxy?
It's incredibly useful, effective, random and just has a huge "coolness" factor to it. For example, you could make special missions where tons of ion storms block your path, you must avoid black holes and such.
Even an on-screen nebula. You fly into it (t'would be cool if graphics were advanced enough to make a "puncture" mark in the side) and your enemy looses you. You fly out (once again, cool if you leave a faint trail of nebula gas) and the enemy tracks you again.
There is an endless use for this type of resource. Much more than eye candy with embedded spobs in the paralax.
It adds a nice sense of reality and would open up whole new possibilities with missions and such.
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Ooh...it doesn't look like I'll be compiling my list anytime soon. Two weeks and this topic is still alive and near the top of the list to boot...
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What I meant is that all of the features (OK, the two features) suggested for the phën could be tacked onto the spöb resource, probably more easily and definitely more flexibly,
The ion storm and wormhole "phëns" sound a bit complicated. Why not do them with existing resources? An ion storm could be a ship, or multiple ship types. A spontaeous wormhole could be done with existing commands.
As I've been developing, I've been noticing a few problems with the engine and such. But there's three BIG ommisions that seem to stand out in my mind:
1. OSX compatible development tools. Launching into Classic for ResEdit is a pain. And using a resource format that's no longer supported brings up more and more problems as APple continues releasing OSs.
2. The ability to add background music. Music and ambient sound is a big portion of games today. Just beause there's no sound in space doesn't mean a pilot wouldn't have a jukebox in his cockpit. In fact, ideally, I'd love a "jukebox" feature that works with iTunes - something where you listen to your iTunes library in-game, and bind buttons to the appropriate controls. All cars nowadays are sold with at least basic audio systems - wouldn't the same trend continue in spaceships in the future?
3. An interface builder. The ability to move dialogue boxes around without having to step through the horrid ResEdit DLOG resources. The ability to put buttons where you want them on an image, and not have to make a 1 pixel wide image to stretch across all of a button. With this requests comes another - alpha chanel support for dialogue boxes at the least, everything at the most. This makes things like a HUD much more feasible.
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Originally posted by orcaloverbri9: **No. I am saying that you can simulate it with multiple outfits.
And no, you can get it to do it for certain weapons but not others. As far as I know, that flag is the only thing necessary. **
That may be possible but it's far too complicated. There is currently no easy way to do it.
I've just thought of the simplest solution to mobile spöbs and dockable ships: Add a Spob field to the shďp resource. When you land/dock on the ship it would come up with the landing screen of the spöb specified in this field. You could add some flags such as "Can only dock when ship is disabled" and "Allow on-the-go refuelling and reloading" - this second flag would let you refuel and reload without actually docking so you could get straight back into the battle when you're done.
Has this been mentioned? Support for mission triggers set by when a players captures a particular ship and uses it as an escort.
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I know this sin't in the scope of EVC -> EVO, but make it based on Sprite Animation Toolkit!
Way too many of us have found issues with rlës. Recently, SAT went to OS X. It's still in alpha, but I figure by the time Matt starts EV4 (if he does, that is), it will probably be finalized. I would love to see it go back to easy PICTs. No more EnRle/DeRle trouble!
Originally posted by orcaloverbri9: **I know this sin't in the scope of EVC - > EVO, but make it based on Sprite Animation Toolkit!
Way too many of us have found issues with rlës. Recently, SAT went to OS X. It's still in alpha, but I figure by the time Matt starts EV4 (if he does, that is), it will probably be finalized. I would love to see it go back to easy PICTs. No more EnRle/DeRle trouble! **
PICTs are still supported by Nova. That's why there are fields in the shän resource to specify a mask. The point of rles was that they were smaller than PICTs (I think).
- Heatseeker guidance type. This type of missile would not require a target to be selected but would just home in on a ship in front of it. And bring back flares - they would be really effective against this type of weapon.
How could I forget those two: -Standard outfits that come with a ship work with AI ships, at least for some outfit types. Why? Because of engine upgrades: whenever a faction uses a variant of a normal ship, it's pretty much souped up to the max to have max speed, acceleration and turning. So, should the player capture one, not only does he have a fast and maneuverable ship, but h can upgrade it even more! The workaround to that is to make buyable ships contribute to a bit that is needed to acquire engine upgrades, and AI-only variants do not contribute that bit, but it is one less contribute/require available, and would allow more things altogether.
-quite major one, I admit, not on the scope of the original idea (EV->EVO update), but it "OMG Wud be cuwl 2 hav Ship chnage w/te weaps u hav!!!": for the player to beleive it's actually quite a miracle all those weapons/outfits and ships are compatible (see all the computer bugs with a new peripheral...) make either a ship hangar where you can see your ship, modified and/or have it look differently in space depending the weapons you have. I know it's likely to be hard and complicated.
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Allow for düdes to have string names so that you don't need a përs file for each unique ship you want. This would allow for that Terrapin over there to be the "Jack Daniels" and that Shuttle over their to be the "Swiftsure", without requiring separate programing for each.
Originally posted by Guy: )PICTs are still supported by Nova. That's why there are fields in the shän resource to specify a mask. The point of rles was that they were smaller than PICTs (I think).
Hardly. It does not like PICTs at all. You are bound to come across some problem with PICTs.
And the point of rlës was that it was based on SpriteWorld, which comes with an RLE# format. rlë8/D are identical aside from names.
PICTs are uncompressed, a major waste of space.
Here are a few more:
An ammoReload field in the weapon resources. This would be a count of the number of frames it would take to recover one shot. If, for example, you have a gun with a burstCount of 15 shots, in the current engine, if you shoot 14 shots, your next shot, regardless of the amount of time that has passed since the last shot, would activate the burstreload. This new field would allow you to reload additional shots as time passes, or can simulate overheating by having too many shots evoke the burst reload (overheating), yet if you manage your shots, you can avoid overheating the weapon.
3D support would be nice, but hard to implement in the current resource format. The game should still be at 3/4ths, but this would allow things like banking and perhaps ship break-up during explosions to be calculated on the fly. Additionally, a free resource format would need to be used that can be exported from other programs. (Like 3DMF, but... not. :p)
This may be kind of implied, but a complete re-write of the resource system is definitely necessary. There are so many fields that are not exactly necessary, or that could be put to better use.
I'm sure there is more stuff I've forgotten, but hey.
~ SpacePirate
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